ABSTRACT
In 1962, in his fundamental book on the icons of San Giorgio dei Greci and of the Istituto Ellenico in Venice entitled Icônes de Saint-Georges des Grecs et de la collection de l’Institut Hellénique de Venise, Manolis Chatzidakis first expressed the view that the Constantinopolitan painters who were documented to have settled in Crete in the early fifteenth century must have played a decisive role in shaping fifteenth-century Cretan painting.1 He believed, in other words, that these Constantinopolitan artists brought from the capital of Byzantium to the capital of Crete certain iconographic and stylistic norms which became fundamental in shaping and developing Cretan painting. Of course, in the early 1960s the evidence for the presence of Constantinopolitan artists in Crete was rather limited. In fact, only the names of Alexios Apokafkos and Nikolaos Philanthropenos were known to Chatzidakis, and no information concerning their artistic activity, if any, was available to him at that time.2
