ABSTRACT
This book is about Byzantine art and the European Renaissance. The final phase of the long artistic tradition of the Byzantine Empire and the early stages of what is called post-Byzantine art (Greek Orthodox art produced after the fall of Constantinople in 1453) coincide chronologically with the period of western art history known as the Renaissance. In the sixteenth century Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors, and architects (first edition 1550, second 1568), defined the Renaissance as a revival of the art of classical antiquity that took place in Italy between the late thirteenth and the middle of the sixteenth centuries.1 In particular, he set this revival against the background of the maniera greca of medieval art – a supposed degeneration of the art of antiquity which Italian artists sought to break away from.2 Art historians have questioned or even contradicted many points of Vasari’s description, but his condemnation of the ‘Greek manner’ still casts a spell over our interpretation of this historical era. Similarly, historians of Byzantine art have claimed that until the fall of Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox community was largely hostile towards Latin Christianity and rejected western artistic influences even on the island of Crete, which had passed from Byzantium to Venice shortly after the Fourth Crusade (1204) and was a region where Latin and Greek Orthodox populations were in close contact for a long period of time.3 Hence, late and post-Byzantine art and western Renaissance art have largely been studied as two separate phenomena with hardly any effect on one another.
