The Peloponnesian town of Mistra, center of a flourishing but isolated Byzantine province, by this period surrounded by Frankish territory, provides another “gallery” of church art in the new late style of Byzantium (closely paralleled in the wonderful Late Byzantine churches of Constantinople such as the Chora monastery, Color Plate 18.3b). Fantastic colors and expressionist composition join with emotional humanity to create a last flowering of independent Byzantine art in the final centuries of the fragmented and besieged Empire, especially in the fourteenth-century churches of the Aphentiko and Peribleptos. Also exceptional is the art in a series of churches in the empire’s second city Thessaloniki, founded by the city’s ecclesiastical hierarchy rather than the imperial family and regional aristocracy, reflecting the town’s more socially diverse commercial culture (Rautman 1989).
This Late Byzantine humanist style was clearly the basis for the earliest art of the Italian Renaissance, where Duccio and Giotto elaborated their masterpieces from a thorough grounding in the “Greek
Style” (maniera greca). Yet here is a difference: whereas the Byzantine anonymous masters still strove to present realistic images of eternal figures, the Italian pioneers transformed designs copied from imported icons by rooting their subjects in a precise time and place and person (Mathews 1998), commencing a very different concern with the world here-and-now, and with the individual. However, Byzantine art itself reflects the mutual entanglement between its society and that of the West, created through commerce, warfare, and the Frankish colonization of the Aegean. It can be seen to develop new aspects from this era onwards which reflect artistic trends in Italy: for example in the twelfth century some Byzantine artists sign their name (Cormack 1985), something that becomes common in post-Medieval Orthodox churches.
World History
