The Representations of the Virgin on Cretan Icons in Serbian Churches in Bosnia-Herzegovina

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the island of Crete, which had been under Venetian occupation since 1204, became the most important artistic centre in the Greek Orthodox world. Many scholars and artists who had fled to Crete from Turkish-occupied territories even before the fall of Constantinople contributed to this blossoming. The development of a style which is a direct descendant of the more idealizing and classicizing tendency of Constantinopolitan painting can be traced from the beginning of the 15th century. In Crete religious painting developed into an independent “Post-Byzantine” school. Artists were organized into a guild, the Scuola di San Luca, which in the second half of the 15th century consolidated its own artistic principles and iconographic standards in a program of instruction and apprenticeship that gave it continuity and coherence for at least 250 years. A considerable amount of information, from archives and icons, made it possible to determine the formation and development of this school of painting, which is the only one of Orthodox artistic schools that had a legitimate right to the title during this period. The development of art on Crete was directly dependent on the development of Cretan towns as important commercial and shipping centers. Documents from archives show that Cretan painters received many commissions from foreign traders, mainly Venetians; from Catholic bishops of the Greek territories occupied by Venice; from Orthodox monasteries, like those of Sinai and Patmos; and from Greek and Venetian nobles and other citizens of the Republic. Thus Cretan painters turned almost exclusively to the production of portable icons.