Rather Assertive than Polemical Imagery? Religious Politics in Constantinople and its Spinoffs in Crete during the Late Palaiologan Times

The project invites us to consider the religious history of Late Byzantium and its capital Constantinople through a distant gaze of regional Crete. Here, the period of Venetian dominion (1211–1669) was marked by efforts to cultivate cultural and religious relations with the capital. Eventually, Crete became a stage for the religious politics launched by the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople. It especially holds true for the period spanning over from the second half of the 14th century to the first half of the 15th century, when the patriarchate tried to reinforce its position in Crete in view of the discussion on the Church Union proclaimed twice – first in Lyon (1274) and after in Florence (1439) – but never put into practice. Interestingly, scholars saw repercussions in Cretan artistic production, even to such an extent that they explored images through a lens of the binary Crete-Constantinople relationship and the related polemics between Latins and Greeks. The glossary of modern scholarship, thus, often applied combative labels like ‘anti-Union’ and ‘pro-Union’, or ‘anti-Latin’ and ‘anti-Greek’ art, which, however, mask as much as they reveal. Written sources which would corroborate the polemical functions of images are still unknown, while visual sources as such are not enough inasmuch as they are not only unclear but also often polyvalent.

It is in this historiographical context that, in the project, the corpus of visual sources spans images from the monumental Palaiologan art of Crete of the late 14th and the early 15th century, in the context of modern scholarship related to the anti-Latin and anti-Greek agenda. The research object is the Cretan imagery and its broader dynamics with the religious ideas on the move between Constantinople and Crete in the late 14th and the early 15th century. The research objective is to understand the extent to which the Cretan imagery was polemical and how its ‘anti’ agenda deepens our knowledge of the then religious polemics and stances. Instead, the research thesis suggests that the unclear and sometimes even polyvalent content of images points to a rather assertive than polemical function.