ABSTRACT

National styles are readily discernible in works of art and may obscure the appropriation of foreign conventions by local artists. The repetition of certain motifs in figuration, composition, and expression cast the image (be it an ancient Greek statue or a Byzantine icon) as an extension of an immutable human and natural morphology, a recognizable Greek genotype. This Romantic notion appealed to Greek nationalists like Perikles Yiannopoulos (1869–1910) and was later adopted by modernists like Nikos Chatzikiriakos-Gikas (1906–94). "Greekness," however, is not a fixed, invariable quality. Ethnicity, Greek or otherwise, and locality is something that an image negotiates in its immediate environment and milieu and often across state boundaries and traditions, as artists borrow from the vernaculars accessible to them at any given time. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Greek art was characterized by a wide variety of styles and creative encounters with European schools and movements.