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SAINT ANTYPAS

34.6 x 23.4 x 1.8 cm

Konstantinos Kontarinis, 1738

The saint is portrayed as ‘an old man with long white beard’,¹ seated on a large, carved and gilded, wooden throne. He wears a red sticharion and green phailonion with broad folds in ochre tints. In his hands is an open gospel book with the inscription in cursive lettering: ‘I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief does not come except to steal…’ . (John 10:9-10). The throne, modelled on the Baroque thrones of Tzanes, is lavishly decorated: at the ends of the ridge of the back, recurving volute leaves, topped by two small eagles. The decoration on the base is original and intricate, with purti embracing sea monsters. Low down on the green ground left, the signature in black letters: XEIP κονσταντήνου του κονταρήνη 1738 (Hand of Konstantinos Kontarinis 1738) and right: ΔΕΙCIC TOY ΔΟΥΛΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΘΕΟΥ ΜΙΧΑΗΛ CΠΑΝΟΥ (Supplication of the servant of God Michael Spanos). Left and right in red capitals: O AΓIOC ANΤIΠAC.
Saint Antypas cured toothache, as the Athonite hagiographer Nikodemos Hagioreitis records in a megalynarion: ‘Having your venerable icon, thrice-blessed Antypas, as fortified bastion, I resort to it in all dangers and am relieved of toothache’.² His description is included in the Painter’s Manual and his characteristics are repeated just the same in the few known icons of him. On the earliest of these, a thirteenth-century icon in Sinai,³ Antypas is represented in bust with the same long white beard, he appears in exactly the same type on a much later icon in the Monastery of Stavronikita, an eighteenth-century product of a local workshop.⁴ Kontarinis also depicts him with the same facial features, together with Saint Achilleios and Saint Andrew, on an icon in the Loverdos Collection.⁵
In our icon the painter apparently follows analogous iconographic models to those used by Emmanuel Tzanes. This is deduced from the manner in which he paints the face (Fig. 204), hair and beard with parallel white lines, tiny but firmly drawn, as well as from the elaborate throne.⁶ Comparable figures of an enthroned hierarch occur in other eighteenth-century icons, such as those of Saint James the Less (Cat. no. 45) and Saint Spyridon (Cat. no. 46). So far the latest known dated works by Konstantinos Kontarinis were two icons of 1732, in the Kalligas Collection and the Christian Art Collection, Lefkada.⁷ Our icon of 1738 is now his last known dated work.

CONDITION  Excellent, No previous conservation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished.

NOTES
1. Hermeneia 1909, 268.
2. Nikodemos Hagioreitis 1868, 358.
3. Weitzmann 1978, 40, pl. 39. On the iconography see Lexikon 5, 1973, col. 201 and Hermeneia
1909, 268.
4. Stavronikita 1974, fig. 44 on p. 123.
5. Xyngopoulos 1956, pl. 69.1. On the iconography of the enthroned hierarch see also Cat. nos 6
and 46.
6. On the decoration of the thrones see Katselaki 1994, 463ff.
7. Vocotopoulos 1990, 163.