Mani (35 page)

After the island fell in 1669, the movement succumbed to the usual Ottoman blight; little remained, and, dispersed abroad, it died in the eighteenth century. But it was during its virile zenith in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that it affected Greece. Its finest monument in fresco—one of the few that remain—is in Mount Athos. Others survive, half-way to the sky, in the Meteora
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in Thessaly. But Cretan ikons, glowing on slabs of olive, walnut, hard pine, poplar and plane, travelled all over the archipelago and the mainland and to Venice, where dark Cretan madonnas had long adorned palazzi; and to Russia. Alongside the Macedonian school, and often painted by non-Cretan hands, the Cretan technique was the strongest strain in the iconography of occupied Greece. These fierce saints and holy heroes and haggard Christs and Panayias formed a kind of pictorial resistance movement against apathy. It is lucky such a definite and vigorous style was there to fend off the inevitable catalepsy. One by one the sources of inspiration—Asia Minor, Cyprus, the Mainland, Constantinople, Mistra, Trebizond, the Archipelago and finally Crete—had been trampled out. When
at last the stagnation of endless reproduction set in, their function became indeed that of Celestial guerrillas; at war not with a theological foe but against the occupying stranger.

There is another development or deviation which is of great sociological and historical interest, but of little relevance to the present theme: the Italianization of painting in the Ionian islands. For this western archipelago remained in Venetian hands from the crusades until the French Revolution (when after a short French interregnum, they were British for half a century) and though the inhabitants remained staunchly Orthodox—indeed, some noble families of Italian origin, and thus Catholic, like the Capodistrias of Corfu and the Romas of Zante, ended up themselves as Orthodox—the influence of Venice and the Italian studios and universities, especially Padua, was strong. To such an extent was Italian the cultural language of the bilingual élite that the Zantiot poet Ugo Foscolo wrote exclusively in Italian; so it was too, until he was well on in years, with one of Greece's greatest modern poets, his fellow-islander, Solomos.

The Ionian islands were the only part of the Greek family which entirely escaped the dead hand of the Turks. Cut off for six centuries by only a few miles of sea from the tragic doings of the mainland, they were part of Europe. Crescents and minarets rose on the Epirote shore, while, across the narrow channel, the Ionians, in Elizabethan ruffs, then powdered wigs and finally stove-pipe hats and cutaways, participated in a quiet and provincial fashion in the Renaissance and the ripening afternoon of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the early Romantic movement of the nineteenth. It is a proof of the vitality of Hellenism that the comparative mildness of the Doge's suzerainty and the absence of the mainland's ruthless challenge should have left their intrinsic Greekness so unimpaired. Without the age-old identification of Greek with Orthodoxy, perhaps they would have become Uniates at least, like the Orthodox of the Ukraine or the Banat and, finally, the Maniots
of Cargese. But they often took part in hostilities against the Turks (notably at Lepanto), under the Lion of St. Mark; and after the fall of Candia, Cretans flocked as thickly into the Ionian as they did into the Mani; and the islands were for centuries a refuge for the klephts and armatoles of the mainland. Despite the Venetian fleshpots, their sympathy and their participation in the struggle of their fellow-countrymen was entire. The first head of the resurrected Greek State—Count Capodistria—was an Ionian and the Seven Islands became a great national hearth of Greek poetry. There might have been advantages to the Ionians later on, in remaining part of the British Empire; but towards the end of our occupation the ideological outcry for reunion to the Greek State became loud and determined. Wisely, and with lasting benefit to all, Enosis was conceded.

In spite of the unwavering Hellenism of the Seven Islands, Venice inevitably left strong superficial traces culturally, socially, architecturally, and to a very slight extent, linguistically, but most considerably in the arts. It certainly influenced ikon-painting. The first detectable symptoms of deviation from the Byzantine canon is a mild softening-up that might be traced to Tiepolo. This trend was hit by Cretan influence from two sides: from Venice, where it was already established, and from Crete itself before, and especially after, the Fall. The results of this are lively and original. But slowly, with passing of time, the figures echoed in their provincial and less deft way, the metropolitan prototypes of Venice and the rest of Italy; and many of the ikons among the gilt and brass of baroque and rococo iconostases became oval or circular, which is very rare in the rest of Orthodoxy. The treatment of sacred subjects drifted further and further from the abstraction of Byzantium until the ambience is the tired, diffused and muted light of a minor Italian studio when the Counter-Reformation had spent itself. The umbered faces are all too human and unillumined and unenigmatic in their verisimilitude of smooth cheek and appealing eye and
droop of lip and fold of mantle. The supernal light is filtered through the dishcloth of chiaroscuro, the cosmetics of morbidezza are busy. I demanded, some pages back, a more comprehensible notation: I am killed with kindness here; for, in these ikons, the purpose of the concession is lost. This elegant subsidence to earth is not what I was after, which was some kind of iconographic change to enable the ethical and moral part of religion to keep pace with the tribal and magical part until the expulsion of the Turks. But this late Ionian painting is part of the general western European deflation in religious art, a slow draining away of the supernatural from pigment and stone and clay. Some of them—framed in a leafy swirl of ba-roque gilding—are very fine indeed: but they are no longer,—except geographically—Greek.
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They are part of the painting of the West, and, as such, worthy of a much more dignified place in any conspectus of European art than they have yet received, except in an admirable study by Procopiou. But they have defected completely from the line we have been following and have no relevance to it. They have, of course, apart from their merits, the great charm of historical oddity. The beautiful eighteenth-century ikon—if it can be called that; it is closer to an enlarged predella—of the Procession of St. Dionysius in the Cathedral of Zante (happily saved from the 1953 earthquake; I saw it next day in the burning wreckage of that lovely vanished town), in which the saint's catafalque is escorted by a crocodile of tricorned
nobili huomini
, might be the work of a remote septinsular cousin of Longhi or Guardi. We have floated a long, long way from St. Sophia and Ravenna and the old basilicas of Rome and Holy Luke and Torcello and Athos and Daphni and Salonika and Palermo and Cefalu and Monreale and the Chora and SS. Sergius and Bacchus and Nea Moni in Chios and Kastoria and Nerezi and Mistra and the Meteora and the
Cappadocian rock monasteries; and almost as far from the ikon-painting in progress in the klepht-haunted and bullet-echoing crags of Acroceraunia and Epirus and Acarnania just over the water....

* * *

The inscrutability of ikons has done nothing to choke off devotion; indeed, the oldest and most indistinct invite the steadiest fervour of rural iconodules. This is especially true if they have thaumaturgic acts to their credit—feats of healing, the repulsion of barbarians and infidels from a city wall or timely intervention in battle, like the vision of Pan at Marathon, or of the Gemini at Lake Regillus. Some of them have miraculous origins: they were dropped from heaven or dug out of the earth after their location had been revealed in a dream. Our Lady of Tinos, who is responsible for many miraculous cures at her yearly feast, had such a beginning: she was exhumed on the very day that the standard of revolt against the Turks was raised in 1821, which surrounds her island with a patriotic as well as religious and thaumaturgic aura. Several ikons have specific healing properties, a function they share with certain holy remains, like those of St. Gerasimos on the slopes of Mt. Ainos in Cephalonia, whose reliquary, borne yearly over the prone ranks of ailing pilgrims, cures madness. Ikons have been known to fly many homing miles through the air to resettle in the chapels whence profane hands have reft them. There is a category known as
acheiropoietoi
—“not made with hands.” One of these, Our Lady of Edessa (where iconoclast troops were later to stone a wonder-working Christ), led the Emperor Heraclius all the way to Ctesiphon to rescue the True Cross from Chosroes in the battle which is immortalized on the walls of Arezzo.

Attributions to the brush of St. Luke are much less fre-quent than in Italy. There are only three, I think, which, in the
Orthodox world, are incontradictably held to be the apostle's work. I have seen two of these Lukes, one in the monastery of Megaspelion which juts from the high rock face of an Achaean gorge, the other in the monastery of Kykko in western Cyprus. It was difficult to discern more, in either case, than the uneven convexities of what appeared to be black wax jutting from a buckled and almost all-obscuring plastron of silvergilt. The third is our Lady of Soumela, an ancient lodestar for oriental pilgrimage in the huge monastery towering above the valley of the Of, inland from Trebizond.
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When the Greeks (who had lived there without interruption almost since the occasion when Xenophon's army espied the sea from a neighbouring height) were uprooted at the exchange of populations in 1922, she came too; and after four decades of obscurity in Athens, she was re-enshrined with great state in a part of western Macedonia where a population of her former Laz-speaking votaries had been resettled.

Black holy objects, in the world at large, seem to invite special veneration; I think of these ikons, and of the vanished smoke-blackened Virgin, from which the old Byzantine Church of the Kapnikarea in Athens derives its name; and of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, the Black Christ of Lucca and a small dark Virgin among the canefields near the pitch-lake in Trinidad, all of them heavy with mana.

The obverse of this addiction to black images seems to be popular indifference to white ones, whether of alabaster or marble. Perhaps their very clarity and scrutability is antiseptic to the germ of magic. They are un-mythopoetic, and the most beautiful in the Christian world, those of Michelangelo, must be content with the praise of the educated. Is this because their very perfection, and the lack of mystery surrounding their origin,
over-humanizes them? At all events, piety and superstition seek darker loves. Perhaps the gods of ancient Greece, had they been snow-white as we see them in museums, would have suffered a like fate. But they were coloured all over, and their vo-taries were innumerable. It is easy to forget that the Parthenon and Delphi and Olympia were painted ox-blood and deep blue and ochre, and that the hosts of polychrome, black-eyed and staring statuary bristled with gold ornaments. The insides of the temples were obscure and mysterious and black smoke darkened the giant chryselephantine statues. They were curtained in purple and dripping with honey and wine and glistening with oil and blood, while the reek of carrion and burning meat filled the batlike gloom. Not only the gods of Olympus but the sinister chthonian demons haunted those precincts. I feel, too, that the archaic statues, because they were a further remove from the real, must have been magnets for a more fervid cult than their classical offspring.

It is perhaps odd that none of the great religious paintings of the Renaissance, none of the swirling baroque statues of the Counter-Reformation, with their welter of stone clouds and sunbursts, their crocodile tears and their brassy clamour, became cult objects on the same footing as their uncouth predecessors. Overstatement defeats them. Perhaps, after all, anthropomorphosis is a deterrent. There is, of course, an exception at the other end of Europe that represents a whole class of saints in facsimile: the amazing Virgen de la Macarena in Seville, borne out shaking among fanfares above the vast crowd from her church at midnight on a camelia-covered float sprouting into hundreds of candles under a canopy: a sad, pale and beautiful infanta of painted wood, with rings on her upheld fingers, a green and cloth of gold cloak sweeping six yards behind, a vast diadem on her head and an aureole of radiating gold spikes and the fortunes of half a dozen grandees round her neck in pearls and diamonds. Gasps and cries fill the air at her emergence and
an outbreak of cheers and clapping, while the stifling swarm, like an English crowd at a glimpse of royalty or a film star, thrust yet tighter and climb on each other's backs with cries of “
¡O la guapa! ¡La linda! ¡la hermosa!
”

Greek iconography, of all Christian art that includes the outward forms of sacred beings, seems to me to have set itself the highest and most difficult task. This does not mean, I hasten to say, that I am trying to compare the Michelangelo frescoes of the Vatican unfavourably with the worst eighteenth-century daub on a plank in a wayside chapel in Aetolia, or indeed (and only then with due allowance made for chronology) with any but the noblest in the achievement of the East. It is not a matter of technical skill or intrinsic beauty or the workings of plastic genius. What I do mean is this: in the foredoomed task of indicating the unfathomable mystery of Godhead in visible terms, the Greek ikon-painters chose the hardest way. They sought ingress to the spirit, not through the easy channels of passion, but through the intellect. Religion and philosophy were as inextricably plaited as they had been in pre-Christian times and this was due to the same philosophical temper which had saved Judaic Christianity (a brief and local thing) and made it Greek, then universal. Skilled in the handling of abstractions, knowing that the representation of Christ as God was as impossible a task as uttering the ineffable, they tried to indicate the immediately assimilable incarnation of Christ in such a way that it gave wings to the mind and the spirit and sent them soaring through and beyond the symbol to its essence, the Transcendent God, with whom, as they themselves had defined, He was consubstantial. If they failed in this aspiration it was failure on a vertiginously exalted height.