free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Art under the Venetians
in 1453 what had been a trickle became a stream. Cretan letters
began to flourish. Cretan scholars began to move westward. A hundred
years before El Greco made the journey, the route lay open from Constantinople
to Crete, from Crete to Venice, and thence throughout the
west. Crete was an essential link in the transmission of classical learning
to Italy, and thus in the flowering of humanism.
This sounds abstract. In fact this renaissance was a personal movement,
which a few teachers, copyists and scholars created by their
energy. If I mention a few names, it will show what some of these individuals
were doing. 1
First a refugee from Byzantium: Michael Apostolis, an assiduous
copyist of ancient manuscripts. When the Turks sacked Constantinople,
priceless manuscripts had gone up in flames, including some of Euripides’s
plays which are lost to us. Still, much was preserved in the
monasteries. Michael went back to Constantinople on collecting
expeditions, and was active in searching out rarities throughout the
east. On Crete he copied them, and trained others to do so. And from
time to time he would go to Italy to visit his patron the great Cardinal
Bessarion. When Bessarion died, he left the Venetians nearly five
hundred Greek manuscripts, of which many were copied by Michael
Apostolis.
Michael’s last surviving manuscript is dated 1474. His frustrations
were typical of the refugee and the client; it was not a happy life. He
complained repeatedly to Bessarion that he needed more money; he
was always going on about getting a job as a teacher in Italy; but worst
of all, he came to hate Crete, and became very unpopular there
because of his religious views. For he was a staunch supporter of the
Union of the Greek and Roman churches proclaimed at the Council
of Florence in 1439, and Union was never in the least acceptable to
the Cretans. Michael became more and more Latinized. He wrote to
Bessarion in 1467:
From the time I expressed my opinion of the Latins and supported the adherents
of the Roman church with words – and rejected the other [Greek]
church – from that time, whenever I am in the city [Candia] they call out to
me: ‘Look, the devil got him, too. Look at the accursed one, behold the wretch! ’
And these men, who would have killed me long ago had they not feared the
authorities, drew my students away from me. So now I live miserably by my
pen. . . . 2
There must have been many refugees in similar difficulties. Apostolis is
not a very attractive figure, with his whining; but he believed in what
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