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SAINT DEMETRIOS ON HORSEBACK

50 x 34.5 x 2 cm

Mid-17th century

Saint Demetrios is depicted mounted on a red horse turned right; the galloping steed raises its two forelegs frontally, while turning its head backwards. The saint is also turned towards the right with a corresponding twist of the body to the front. With the spear held high in his*raised right hand and steadied by the left he slays Skyloyannis, lying on the ground. The corpulent male figure wearing a turban was repainted rather ineptly — his feet are very large — in a slightly later period, as was the rocky landscape lett. The soldier-saint – wears a chased gold cuirass and a deep blue cloak that billows out to the right behind his head. In the background left, behind the rocky mountain the well- drawn buildings of the city of Thessaloniki appear, among them a large, domed church and an edifice with elevated minaret. There is lavish punched, foliate decoration on the gold ground. The painting follows a skilfully incised preparatory drawing on the gesso, which is clearly distinguishable in the infrared photograph (Fig. 157).

The facial features, modelled with tiny brushstrokes and few highlights, the intricate decoration of the cuirass and the punched ground are of careful workmanship (Fig. 158). The counterpoise of the movements, the attitude of the soldier-saint and the galloping horse with raised forelegs, are borrowed from a model by Georgios Klontzas with Saint George slaying the dragon, in the Benaki Museum.¹ Minor differences are observed in the position of the horse’s head,which faces forwards, and the saint’s head, which is turned behind. The type is widely disseminated in a large number of icons for both soldier-saints. It was used by Michael Damaskenos in an icon in Corfu,² and later by Silvestros Theocharis in an icon after a reversed anthivolon (working drawing).³ Particularly popular during the second half of the seventeenth century, it is encountered in icons of Saint George by Emmanuel Tzanes, in the Benaki Museum (Fig. 159), in the Byzantine Museum and with a minor variation in an icon of Saint Demetrios in the Loverdos Collection, also in the Byzantine Museum,⁴ as well as in icons by Theodoros Poulakis, in Corfu.⁵ Tzanes’s type of Saint George is encountered exactly the same in small icons in Moscow and in a collection in London,⁶ in which the pose of the horse and the saint is repeated with just a slight deviation in the position of the latter’s head, which usually gazes straight ahead rather than downwards, The rendering of the rocky landscape is the same too, while there is analogy in the buildings with domes and minarets in the city depicted in the background.

Noteworthy among the icons of this type are two of Saint Demetrios, in Cephalonia; one in the Hypapanti church, of the Gerakis family,⁷ in which the horse stands still but Skyloyannis lies on the ground, his costume and features as in our icon; the other, in Hagios Nikolaos stous Soularous,⁸ in which the poses of the equestrian saint and Skyloyannis are the same as in our icon.⁹
The soft modelling of the flesh in our icon, with smooth planes and a few small white highlights on the prominent parts, recalls that by Silvestros Theocharis in Corfu. Comparable similarities with Theocharis’s art are ascertained in the meticulous decoration of the saint’s cuirass and in the drawing of the buildings in the city. Lastly, the punched vegetal decoration on the gold ground, imitating ornaments encountered in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italo-Cretan icons,¹⁰ links our icon with earlier traditions. In the light of the above observations, the icon could be ascribed to a painter associated with the workshop of Silvestros Theocharis and dated to the mid-seventeenth century. Skyloyannis and the rocky landscape were painted in a later period, perhaps in the eighteenth century.

CONDITION  Damage on the gold ground and overpainting low down on the figure of Skyloyannis, which was not removed in the recent conservation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished.

NOTES
1. Treasures of Orthodoxy 1994, no. 62, 241-242 (A. Drandaki).
2. Vocotopoulos 1990, no. 26, 50-51, figs 29, 30.
3. Vocotopoulos 1990, no. 56, figs 181-182.
4. Boura 1994, 361-364, figs 2, 3.
5. Vocotopoulos 1990, no. 91, 133, figs 181-182, with numerous other examples; see also no. 133, figs 208, 322.
6. Icons of Cretan Art 1993, 413-414, no. 60 (I. Kyzlasova). Th. Chatzidakis 1982, no. 41, fig. 23.
7. Cephalonia I 1989, no. 143, fig. on p. 99.
8. Cephalonia II 1994, fig. 119.
9. See also other icons in Cephalonia by Andreas Karantinos and others (Cephalonia I 1989, nos 136 and 144).
10. See related examples, Cat. no. 3, 80.