Raised Gilded Adornment of the Cypriot Icons, and the Occurrence of the Technique in the West

Abstract

Artistic contacts between the east and west Mediterranean and areas further north have been studied at the stylistic and iconographic levels. The present paper explores an additional means of documenting connections that operate in channels sometimes independent of the other two criteria. Investigation of a particular technological procedure becomes useful for art historical issues if it is specific enough to warrant a workshop-transmitted know-how for its application, and if it does not become widely enough used to be a general feature. Relief gilt decoration of the halos and background of a group of thirteenth-century icons on Cyprus, and in St. Catherine's monastery at Mount Sinai, was introduced as a cheaper substitute for embossed revetment in precious metals, the earliest examples of which survive in Georgia and then sporadically in the Byzantine sphere. Some patterns are executed free-hand, and others stamped, in both materials -- metal and gesso (pastiglia). Existence of such a decoration on some panel paintings in southern Italy, comparable to that on the icons, points to influence emanating from the east Mediterranean, chiefly Cyprus, where the procedure was firmly established over a period of centuries. Furthermore, morphological similarities on Catalan-Aragonese altar frontals suggest contacts with northern Spain, effected by Crusaders and traders. For other, fourteenth-century instances in England, the Netherlands, and Central Europe, a direct influence is more problematic; and the Neapolitan artistic center may be tentatively proposed as an intermediary for these interrelated northern occurrences.

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