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SAINT NICHOLAS

90 x 37 x 1.8 cm

Emmanuel Tzanes, 1683

The saint is portrayed standing and frontal, clad in the vestments of a prelate. He holds a closed gospel book in his left hand and blesses with his raised right one. Top left and right are Christ offering the gospel book and the Virgin the omophorion (pallium), respectively. On the gold ground, next to the head, the inscription: O AΓIOC NIKOΛAOC. The halo has punched decoration of random volute leaves and rosettes, in rather simple, almost extemporary technique, as is the case in Tzanes’s earlier works.¹ The saint wears a grey sticharion and a reddish phailonion, embroidered with gold crosses inscribed in squares and with a bluish green lining. The white omophorion is decorated with four large gold-embroidered crosses. Likewise gold-embroidered is the stole, visible below but badly damaged over its entire surface. Faintly discernible on the diamond-shaped maniple is a miniature figure of Christ drawn in gold.
The saint stands on dense white clouds. In a narrow zone beneath, a miracle at sea is depicted, which has not survived intact because the lower section of the icon has been sawn off. Only the upper part of the scene is discernible; the blue-green sea and the billowing white sails of a galley, its masts with fluttering red pennants. Beside the saint’s feet and above the clouds are the inscriptions, right: ΧΕΙΡ ΕΜΜΑΝΟΥΗΛ ΙΕΡΕΩC TOY ΤΖΑΝΕ (Hand of Emmanuel Tzanes, priest) and below: ΔΕΗCIC ΤΟΥ ΔΟΥΛΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΘΕΟΥ ΝΙΚΟΛΑΟΥ CIΓΟΥΡΟΥ, ΑΧΠΓ’ (Supplication of the servant of God Nikolaos Sigouros, 1683). Left is the coat of arms of the Sigouros family, with the initials NS.²

The iconographic type of Saint Nicholas in our icon is crystallized in wall- paintings and large-format icons in the twelfth century³ and recurs in fifteenth- century painting, as apparent from the icon in Corfu painted by Angelos,⁴ where the saint is depicted in the very same pose and vestments, differing only in the decoration of the phailonion with crosses. Angelos’s icon, which must have been brought to Corfu by Cretan refugees after the fall of Candia (Herakleion), may well have been the model used by Emmanuel Tzanes, who frequently copied established types of great fifteenth-century painters.⁵ Corresponding figures of prelates, of markedly conservative character, occur in icons by Tzanes in the Museo Correr, Venice (Saint Spyridon, 1636) and Corfu (Saint Gregory Palamas, 1654).⁶ In these, as in our icon, the bishops wear a cross-embroidered phailonion and the face is painted with the familiar small, parallel brushstrokes in a firm hand. Saint Nicholas’s facial features display even greater affinity with the technique of earlier icons, of the painter’s Cretan period, such as Saint Anthony (1645), in Corfu.⁷ The clouds in our icon are depicted with greater naturalism, devoid of linearity, as is the sea with the ship in the nautical scene lower down.⁸ This icon is the latest known dated work by Emmanuel Tzanes, executed in 1683 when he was 73 years old. There is nothing surprising in the conservatism of its style, for as Vocotopoulos has pointed out the Rethymnian painter reverts on other occasions to his old conservative style; in the icon of Saint Anthony (1645) he follows the style of the icon of Saint Spyridon (1636), so that there is homogeneity in the pair of works painted for the same dedicator.⁹
These two icons of single saints had border scenes from the life of the saint, as did nthe icon of Saint Nicholas by Angelos. It can be assumed, by analogy, that the same type of biographical scenes will have surrounded our icon. This assumption is reinforced by the presence of the miracle at sea in its lower section and also by the fact that the sides were sawn off some time in the past and a corded wooden frame added, which was removed in recent conservation. The dimensions of the icons of Saint Anthony and Saint Spyridon, 100.5 x 73 cm,¹⁰ are little different from those of our icon, taking into account the fact that the panel has been sawn off on all sides.
According to the aforesaid, Saint Nicholas belongs in a group of large-format icons by Tzanes in which saints are presented single and frontal, and surrounded by scenes from their life. The stylistic similarities between these icons, which date from different phases of Tzanes’s life, indicate that the painter adhered constantly to the types he used, depending on the commissions.

Tzanes painted this icon for its dedicator Nikolaos Sigouros, as declared in the votive inscription accompanied by the family coat of arms. The Sigouros family was one of the leading noble families of Zakynthos (Zante), as its armorial bearings attest.¹¹ It rose to distinction by equipping galleys and supporting the Venetians in martial campaigns. A scion of the Sigouros family, Draganigos Sigouros, was the subsequent Saint Dionysios (local saint of Zakynthos), while other members were renowned for their role in the naval battle at Lepanto (Naupaktos).¹² Leonidas Zois notes among them Nikolaos, son of Hector, who is mentioned in a document of 1599;¹³ he was a Knight of Saint Mark who fitted out galleys and was distinguished ‘in peace and war’; another document mentions Nikolaos a syndic, who was slain in 1656 during a naval engagement in the Dardanelles.¹⁴ Lastly, a document refers to Nikolaos Sigouros or Kalonas, censor and judge in 1683,¹⁵ the only one who can be identified with the dedicator of the icon of Saint Nicholas, since he was the only one alive in that year, 1683.

The painter’s contact with the aristocracy of Zante is attested also by an earlier icon of the Virgin of the Passion (Amolyntos), bearing the dedicatory inscription of the Andreas Kalonas family and dated 1641,¹⁶ while Nikolaos Katramis’s information concerning Tzanes’s residence on the island has not been confirmed.¹⁷ The appeal of Emmanuel Tzanes’s work on Zakynthos is in any case ascertained from much earlier; the wall-paintings in Hagios Georgios ‘tsi Kalogries’, 1669, include Saint Gobdelaas in the new iconographic type introduced by Tzanes in painting and diffused by his engraving that accompanied the printed text of the saint’s service (akolouthia), in 1661.¹⁸ The date 1683 on our icon shows that Emmanuel Tzanes received the commission for it while he was still resident in Venice, since he is known to have been vicar in the church of Saint George there until 1685.¹⁹ During this interval the painter maintained his connections with Corfu, where there are other icons produced in his Venetian period.²⁰ The icon of Saint Nicholas reveals that he also retained links with one of the foremost families of Zakynthos.

CONDITION Overpainted in sevefal places were the paint and the gesso have been destroyed. A corded woodcarved frame had been added ina later period. It was probably then that the lower part of the representation of the marine scene was sawn off. See Appendix III.

Bibliography Chatzidakis 1948, 472. nο, 12.

PROVENANCE Zakynthos.

Notes

1. See remarks on Tzanes’s haloes, Vocotopoulos.1990, 106.
2. See Rizo-Rangabé 1927, fig. on p. 242.
3. E.g. see the icon in Hagios Nikolaos tis Stegis, Cyprus, Icons from Cyprus 1975, 52, no. 15.
4. Vocotopoulos 1990, 16-17, no. 7, fig. 86: see also the representation on the border of the icon by Andreas Ritzos in Tokyo, Chatzidakis 1985, pl. 201. See Cat. no. 29, 268ff.
6. Drandakis 1962, 17-24, pl. 1. Vocotopoulos 1990, 119-120, no. 81, fig. 56; there is also a large icon of 1605 with the saint in the same type, in Chalkidiki, Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art 1986, 148-150, no. 150.
7. Vocotopoulos 1990, no. 72, 108-110, figs 50-51.
8. For miracles at sea see Mitsani 1994, 152-168, pls 35-44.
9. Vocotopoulos 1990, 109-110.
10. Vocotopoulos 1990, 110, n. 7.
11. Rizo-Rangabé 1927, 242ff.
12. Zois 1963, 585-589.
13. Zois 1963, 586.
14. Zois 1963, 587.
15. Zois 1963, 587. For members of the family named Nikolaos see also Rizo-Rangabé 1927, nos 30, 33, p. 247, no. 72, 250, no. 119, 251-252.
16. Konomos 1964, 22. Konomos 1988, 69. The Kalovas family from Rethymnon was entered in the Libro d’Oro of the Zakynthian nobility in 1631.
17. Katramis 1880, 341; see also Konomos 1988, 67-68, with related bibliography.
18. See below Cat. no. 32, 286-289, n. 11.
19. Drandakis 1974, 37-38. Vocotopoulos 1990, 104.
20. Vocotopoulos 1990, 107.