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197 THE TERM ‘CRETAN ICONS’ is generally considered to refer to the production of icons in Crete under Venetian domination, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Anyone who attempts to explore the historiography of Cretan icons soon realizes that it is connected to the historiography of Byzantium and the issue of national continuity from antiquity to the present day. Ever since Greece won its independence the issue of national continuity has been dealt with one way or another. Paparrigopoulos expressed the ideas of the young state, by introducing his threefold scheme for national history. The incorporation of the history of the Byzantine Empire in the ‘national’ narrative was deemed necessary as early as the nineteenth century and the study of Byzantine art and its incorporation in what was perceived as the national past was an essential step in this direction. In the question of the ‘continuity’ of the nation, the so called ‘post-Byzantine’ art became important. The book by N. Jorga, Byzance après Byzance, published in Bucharest in 1935, defined the subject of post-Byzantine studies as the continuation of byzantine forms. Accordingly, post-Byzantine art is considered the conservative continuation of Byzantine art during the ‘period of foreign occupation’. Therefore ‘Cretan’ icons – produced in Venetian Crete – may be considered in the overall context of paintings produced in Greek regions at the time. PostByzantine art serves as a concept, in which the different states and influences do not play an important role, since national continuity is cast as the protagonist. The ideas prevailing in the Greek State in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led, after some debate, to the incorporation of Byzantium according to Paparrigopοulos’ threefold scheme and consequently the incorporation of the post-Byzantine period into the national history, in order to demonstrate continuity. Cretan icons become therefore entangled in this wider political issue, examined – through the ‘Byzantine’ and ‘post-Byzantine’ art historical narratives – as an agent of Greek national history rather than the product of the Ottoman or the Venetian period. ‘Post-Byzantine’ thus becomes, through art, the missing link that connects the modern Greek state with the ‘glory of Byzantium’, a palpable proof of the nation’s continuity. With this in mind Greek intellectuals worked towards incorporating this kind of Greek cultural heritage into the national historical narrative. This paper is then faced by a number of questions: is the study of Cretan icons merely an extension of the problem of incorporating the Byzantine past in the national history? How may we deal with the periods of Venetian and Turkish domination within this framework of ‘national history’? Are we to examine the art that developed in the Ottoman or Venetian territories as a whole or to confine ourselves to those territories that now fall within the borders of the modern Greek state? When the Greek state was founded in the nineteenth century the spirit of Romanticism was over-burdening Classical Studies. Byzantium, however, was not acceptable as part of the newborn nation-state’s past. During the whole nineteenth century the preservation of Byzantine monuments was not among the priorities of the Archaeological Service, founded in 1834. A great number of DIONYSIS MOURELATOS

The debate over Cretan icons in twentieth-century Greek historiography and their incorporation into the national narrative