An unlikely partnership between a Greek monk and a court handwriting expert has revealed the identity of a celebrated Byzantine painter who worked in Thessaloniki, the second city of the Byzantine Empire, from the late 13th century to the early 14th centuries.
For centuries, the paintings of Manuel Panselinos have been considered a high point of the Macedonian school, a loose term for the artists who revived Orthodox art at religious sites across the region. Little is known of Panselinos’s life and scholars have long suspected the name itself to be a nickname—Panselinos is Greek for “full moon”—a point now confirmed by Father Cosmas Simonopetritis and the graphologist Christina Sotirakoglou.
Panselinos is seen as bringing greater attention to perspective and human expression to Byzantine art. In addition to painting some of northern Greece’s most treasured church murals, Panselinos is also known to have written about the period’s art and worked on illustrated manuscripts.
Saint Demetrius fresco by Manuel Panselinos in the Protaton, Karyes, Mount Athos. Photo: public domain.
Sotirakoglou was able to match the lettering on a manuscript attributed to Ioannis Astrapas with characters that appear on murals of Protaton church, which belongs to the secluded (and male-only) Eastern Orthodox community of Mount Athos, a peninsula in northeastern Greece.
The first step came with research that tied Astrapas to the individual who had produced and illustrated Marcian Codex GR 516, a wide-ranging and handwritten text from the early 14th century. The main proof, Father Cosmas told AP News, was the presence of painted illustrations that showed the full moon.
The Protaton in Karyes, Mount Athos, Greece. Photo: Athanasios Gioumpasis / Getty Images.
Unfortunately, Astrapas did not affix his signature to the Protaton frescos. And even with a manuscript’s worth of writing, matching the lower-case letters of the Marcian Codex to the block capitals of the murals proved difficult. What’s more, Sotirakoglo said, the artist minimized his style on the mural to conform with a traditional format.
“It’s a Phi that stands out, and is similar,” Sotirakoglou said. “Matches also followed with other letters, T, with its proportions, which is bigger, covering the other letters and is topped with a curve, the proportions of the K. But when the Phi was revealed, the code of the writing was broken and the job became much easier.”
Finding out more about Panselinos has interested Father Cosmas for decades. While a senior administrator on Mount Athos, he regularly attended services in Protaton church and lingered over the frescos, which are widely considered the painter’s best work. “That’s where my desire was born,” Father Cosmas said. “[The artist] has now acquired his true identity.”