Experts believe that the study of 700-year-old handwriting may have revealed the true identity of leading Byzantine painter Manuel Panselinos.
Conventionally known as Manuel Panselinos, the artist was known for introducing pathos into frescos, murals and especially icons from the 13th and 14th centuries.
He was a contemporary of Giotto, who is considered the father of Western painting.
But nothing is known of his life and according to Associated Press, scholars now believe Panselinos was just a nickname that he eventually became known as.
From Thessaloniki, his name was likely Ioannis Astrapas.
The art of Byzantium decorates churches across Greece, Serbia and other Orthodox countries and work attributed to Panselinos is considered the finest produced in an empire that covered Europe and Asia and survived the fall of Rome until the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453.
It has long been suspected that Panselinos, which is Greek for ‘full moon’, was a nickname for some member of the Macedonian School of painting based in Thessaloniki.
Now new research by a Greek monk and linguistics scholar linked the name with Macedonian School painter Astrapas.
Court handwriting expert Christina Sotirakoglou has matched lettering on a manuscript tentatively attributed to Astrapas with characters on a Panselinos church painting in northern Greece.
Father Cosmas Simonopetritis, a former senior administrator in Mount Athos said Sotirakoglou’s and his own research “clearly prove” Panselinos’s real identity.
“Panselinos was a real person, and (the name) was just the nickname by which Ioannis Astrapas became known,” he said.
Professor of Byzantine art in Athens, Constantinos Vafiadis, who was not involved in the studies, said the nickname theory and Astrapas link has value.
“I agree with attributing part of the paintings to Ioannis Astrapas,” he said. “But again there remains much ground for future research into that person, because other Mount Athos monuments from the same period have not yet been sufficiently published.”
“Panselinos” was a role model for generations of painters and his contemporaries are associated with a renaissance in Orthodox art.
Techniques and forms were revived from antiquity like facial expressions and greater attention to proportion and depth of field.
Earlier research linked Astrapas to the artist and scholar who wrote and illustrated Marcian Codex GR 516, an early 14th century Greek handwritten text covering subjects from astronomy to music theory.
A full moon was among the painted illustrations and Father Cosmas said for him, this was the main proof.
Then the writing had to be checked, and that’s where Sotirakoglou came in. But she could not see the Protato paintings at Mount Athos in person, given women are banned.
“I was forced to study the Protato paintings based on photographs,” she said.
“(The work) was very difficult, because the writing on the wall paintings is in capital letters, and the painters subdued their personal handwriting” to disguise their true style.
“The Marcian codex is written in very small lower-case letters” but the first clue came from the Greek letter Phi, the English F.
Matches also followed with the letters T and K.
Father Cosmas attended services at the Protato church on a daily basis during his administrative duties on Mount Athos.
“That’s where my desire was born … to explore the mystery around the name and the identity of Panselinos,” he said.
He thinks the artist “has now acquired his true identity.”
