Eleni Charchare
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
The paper examines the adoption of the Venetian ‘sacra conversazione’ type in the work of Greek painters who lived in Venice or in Venetian-ruled areas during the 16th century.
The term ‘sacra conversazione’ (It.: sacred conversation) is commonly used to describe a type of religious painting which developed in Renaissance Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries. The basic compositional scheme comprises the enthroned Virgin holding the Christ Child and flanked on either side by saints. The figures coexist in a unified space and, although the term ‘conversazione’ seems to imply a verbal communication between them, they are not depicted in an act of conversing but in a state of an internal, spiritual communion.
The formulation of the type, which began to take place in Florence from the late 1430s onwards, evident in works by painters such as Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico and Domenico Veneziano. The new composition, conforming to the Renaissance ideal of a realistic, three-dimensional space populated by naturalistic figures, was diffused throughout Italy and became the standard representation for altarpieces, replacing the compartmentalised representations of Late Gothic polyptychs. In Venice it prevailed quite later, in the 1470s, after being marked by the innovations of Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina, and was established as the main compositional formula for altarpieces and devotional paintings.
Post-Byzantine painters who lived in Venice as members of the Greek community, which was officially established in 1498, as well as in Venetian-ruled areas of the former Byzantine Empire, such as the islands of Crete and Cyprus, were directly exposed to Venetian art and they absorbed its influence at various levels. During the 16th century some of these painters, such as Ioannis Permeniatis, Donatos Bitzamanos, and other anonymous artists, adopted the Venetian ‘Sacra conversazione’ type showing varying degrees of assimilation. The paper examines characteristic examples of this adoption as a particular form of the fruitful dialogue between post-Byzantine and Renaissance Venetian art.