TIRANA, April 3- The post-Byzantine church paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries in the Ottoman Balkans, only in the last 20 years began to attract more and more the interest of experts. Dr. Ioannis Vitaliotis from the Research Center on Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art of the Athens Academy says it would not have been exaggerated if it were to be said that this later period of post-Byzantine painting was considered as something unworthy of exploring in detail.
The note of Vitaliotis is published as a preface in the book of Dr. Ahilino Palushi, a monograph titled “David Selenicasi – painter of post-Byzantine Renaissance in Albania” , an OMBRA GVG 2018 edition that Aleksander Meksi calls dignified. Meksi illustrates with the cover and the scene “The church narthex” of St. Myrus Kukuzeli in Monastery of the Great Lavra on the Holy Mountain painted in 1715.
“His study is about the work of an icon painter, who until now has not been fully acquainted by the history of art, monk David, from Selenica of Vlora. In a first form, this study was approved by the University of Tirana as a doctoral dissertation.”
Dr. Ioannis Vitaliotis says that in the recent relatively recent interest for the later post-Byzantine painting, Ahilino Palushi’s book comes to fill an important void. According to the inscriptions, David was active between 1715 and 1727, and as the reader will find, is not the most common case in post-Byzantine painter. He comes from the western edge of the post-Byzantine world, from a region which at that time was considerably Islamized.
“Moreover, this area was not distinguished as a center for cultivating ecclesiastical paintings, such as, for example, Agrafa, central Greece, or such as the Gramot mountain villages. However, not only did David become a prominent painter, but, apparently, and thanks to his stay on Mount Athos, he undertook the decoration of large urban churches, such as St. Cologne in Voskopoja (1726), in all respects the work of His Majesty, and the New Virgin Mary (Nea Panaghia) in Thessaloniki (1727). The most important point of David’s work is that it belongs to a short stream of post-Byzantine painting, which can be described as ‘neo-panseline,’ according to the legendary artist Manuel Panselino,” writes Dr. Ioannis Vitaliotis in the foreword.
The professor notes that the most prominent representative of this stream was the Athenian monk Dionysius of Fourna (1670-1744) from the school of Agrafa, whose fame is mainly due to the manual “Interpretation of the Art of Painting” (Hermeneia). He points out that in reality, this work is based on previous texts with similar content. Since Dionysus’s “Interpretation” was published in 1909 in St. Petersburg by Greek scholar Antonios Papadopoulos-Kerameus, it was a first class material for the recognition of Byzantine iconography at a time when Byzantine art studies had just begun.
On the other hand, Dionysius was an “ideologist” painter with aesthetic concerns. Dr. Vitaliotis said that his great desire was the regeneration of “dry” ecclesiastical painting. As a model he used the brilliant frescoes of the church of Protaton, the Cathedral of the Holy Mountain, painted around 1300. In the Athenian oral tradition of the 18th century, they were attributed to Manuel Panselino. Today we know that the decoration of Protaton is the work of Michael Astrapas and Euthius, famous painters from Byzantine Thessaloniki.
The three gifts of the book
Dr. Vitaliotis writes in the preface that David Selenicasi is part of an artistic renaissance movement, which is not oriented to Western patterns of the time, but on the contrary, returns to the glorious Athenian and Byzantine past. According to scholars from the Research Center on Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art of the Athens Academy, representatives of this stream refuse to import into their compositions time motifs that pertain to the “Oriental Rococo” or “Turkish Baroque” aesthetics.
In fact, these models arrived from Western and central Europe in Ottoman territory (first in Istanbul) and are used creatively by local artists, whether Christian or Muslim. In other words, David is eclectic: he consciously seeks out the source of his inspiration in the great art of his past and, at the same time, carefully extends to some Western innovations.
“Ultimately, our painter must be seen in the cultural context of the Balkans in the first half of the 18th century, when the Western encyclopaedism and enlightenment began to reluctantly send their reflections on the Ottoman Orthodox populations,” is written on the preface.
Ahilino Palushi’s book has three great gifts. The first gift consists in the fact that it is the first monograph designed for David Selenica’s work as a whole. David’s paintings are reviewed according to the monument, church or icon, with extended conclusions and enough bibliographic material. Dr. Vitaliotis emphasizes that it is very important that in the book of Palushi, the necessary balance between the presentation of details and the general view is reached. Something like this, if we notice the huge amount of material presented, published and unpublished, is not easy at all.
The second merit of this book is about the opportunity given to the Albanian artillery audience to get acquainted with one of the most interesting post-Byzantine painters that Albania has shown, with activities involving three neighboring countries, Albania, Greece and Northern Macedonia. In his study, Ahilino Palushi does not see David Selenica as a representative of any Albanian painting school but considers it in the broader context of the post-Byzantine art tradition of the beginning of the 18th century and, at the same time, in the narrower “neo-panseline” framework, Vitaliotis underlined. Of course, he says, something like this does not lead the author to neglect some of the local elements that appear in the work of this skilled painter.
“The third gift of Ahilino Palushi’s book, which I would like to emphasize in particular, is that although the author began to deal with the study of post-Byzantine painting in maturity, the fact that he is a professor of arts at the Artistic Lyceum ‘Jordan Misja’ equips it with a special intuitive insight. This is especially apparent in the pages dedicated to the stylistic analysis, where Ahilino Palushi arrives to perceive the stages of David’s evolution and maturity. Finally, the reader himself will have the opportunity to evaluate the above observations and the importance of this study. On my part, I would wholeheartedly wish not only a fruitful continuation of Ahilino Palushi’s work on the ecclesiastical painting in Albania, but also the publication of new similar studies in Albanian, which, let me say, is particularly dear to me,” notes Vitaliotis for the book.
Earlier, he notes that the accumulated knowledge from the systematic study of Orthodox Church painting of the 16th and 17th centuries played an important role in re-evaluating the last stage of post-Byzantine painting. The decisive factor was also the interest for the icons printed on paper, which until then were despised. These religious images, based on engravings, played a primary role in the formation of church painting of the 17th and 19th centuries. Something like this is no longer considered to be a decline of a centuries-old tradition, but as an artistic event with a variety of colors and dynamics, closely related to social developments within the orthodox millet of the Ottoman Empire. It is also treated as a link between traditional visual orthodox art and modernity.
Victory Puzanova is the first scholar which reflects the work of the painter David of Selenica, realized in the great basilica of Saint Koll in Voskopoja, with the help of Constantine and Christos. Puzanova removes the work of this author from a large number of smaller painters who have painted large and small church paintings of Voskopoja. The researcher pointing out the characteristics of his work as a master, sets him apart as a great painter who has performed fine painting studies. She goes on to argue further, expressing the conviction that David has studied at an art school of a major center, as such a possibility was almost impossible for our country at that time. Despite the superlative and highlighting the importance of this phenomenon, in the art of that period in our country, Puzanova does not deepen in giving information about the origin and activity of the painter.
A more complete analysis of this masterpiece fresco brings us later the other passionate scholar Theofan Popa. In his study, a general description of the iconographic and style program used by David in the fresco of St. Koll’s church in Voskopoja, gives some important hypotheses about the origin of the painter, schooling and other accomplished works from him, inside and outside the country.
