The Libraries and the Art

The monasteries of Athos together hold the greatest surviving collection of Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscripts in the world — many thousands of codices in Greek, Georgian, Slavonic, and other languages, preserved unbroken through the centuries — together with a vast heritage of frescoes, portable icons, and church treasures. The Mountain is thus not only a spiritual centre but the single richest repository of the Byzantine literary and artistic inheritance. This file treats the manuscript libraries and the wall-painting of the Macedonian and Cretan schools.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

The Manuscript Libraries

The libraries of the Athonite monasteries constitute the greatest surviving treasury of Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscripts anywhere in the world. Across the twenty houses and their dependencies the collections together run to many thousands of codices — commonly reckoned in excess of fifteen thousand manuscripts — in Greek above all, but also in Georgian, Church Slavonic, Romanian, and other languages, alongside great numbers of early printed books (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, ch. 8, on the libraries and their contents). The largest and most important collections are held by the senior houses — the Great Lavra, Vatopedi, and Iviron foremost among them — but every monastery has its library, and the whole forms a single, dispersed, and continuous archive of the Christian East (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8).

Two features make these libraries uniquely valuable. The first is their continuity: because the Athonite monasteries were never dissolved, sacked to destruction, or dispersed as the great libraries of the mainland Byzantine world so often were, their collections accumulated and survived across a millennium, so that Athos preserves texts and copies lost everywhere else (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8; on the archives of documents rather than books see Charters, Empires, and Ottoman Centuries). The contents are overwhelmingly religious — Scripture, liturgical books, patristic and ascetic works, hagiography, and the like — reflecting the purpose of the houses, but they also include classical texts, chronicles, and documents of great historical value (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8). The second is the associated archive of monastic documents — the imperial chrysobulls, the typika, and the deeds and acts preserved in the same monasteries — which, edited in the Archives de l’Athos, make the Mountain one of the best-documented institutions of the Byzantine world (Papachryssanthou, Actes du Prôtaton, Paris, 1975; Bryer and Cunningham, eds., Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism, Ashgate, 1996, on the archives). The study, cataloguing, and conservation of these collections is a major and ongoing field of Byzantine scholarship, and their care — including the vexed question of outside funding and access — is one of the practical challenges of the modern Mountain (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8; see Pilgrimage Numbers and Challenges).

The Frescoes: the Macedonian and Cretan Schools

Athos is equally a treasury of Byzantine and post-Byzantine wall-painting. The katholika (main churches), refectories, and chapels of the monasteries are covered with frescoes spanning the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries and beyond, making the Mountain a living museum of the development of Orthodox monumental painting (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, ch. 8, on the frescoes and the schools of painting). Two great phases and “schools” are conventionally distinguished.

The first is the Macedonian school of the early fourteenth century, whose supreme monument on the Mountain is the fresco decoration of the Protaton at Karyes, traditionally attributed to the painter Manuel Panselinos (see The Holy Community and Karyes). The Protaton frescoes — monumental, powerfully modelled, and dramatic — are among the masterpieces of the Palaiologan renaissance, the great flowering of late-Byzantine art contemporary with the hesychast golden age, and they set a standard for Athonite painting (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8, on Panselinos and the Protaton; on the Palaiologan period see Charters, Empires, and Ottoman Centuries). [Disputed: the historical identity of “Manuel Panselinos” and the precise attribution of the Protaton frescoes to a single named painter are not securely documented; “Panselinos” functions in the tradition as the name of the great early-fourteenth-century master of the Macedonian school, but the biographical details are late and uncertain, and scholars treat the attribution with caution (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8, noting the traditional attribution).]

The second is the Cretan school of the sixteenth century, whose great representative on the Mountain is the painter Theophanes the Cretan (Theophanes Strelitzas), who worked at the Great Lavra and at Stavronikita in the 1530s and 1540s. The Cretan school is more refined, controlled, and precise than the Macedonian, and Theophanes’ Athonite frescoes became a model for post-Byzantine painting throughout the Orthodox world (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8, on Theophanes the Cretan and the Cretan school at the Lavra and Stavronikita). Between and after these two schools the Mountain preserves painting of many periods and hands, so that its frescoes together document the whole later history of Orthodox monumental art (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8).

Portable Icons and the Church Treasures

Beyond the wall-paintings, the monasteries hold vast collections of portable icons — panel paintings of every period from the Byzantine centuries to the present — as well as illuminated manuscripts, liturgical metalwork, embroidered vestments, carved wood, and the whole apparatus of Orthodox worship accumulated over a thousand years (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8, on the portable icons and treasures). The wonderworking icons treated in the companion file (see Relics and Wonderworking Icons) are the most venerated of these, but they stand within a much larger artistic heritage. As with the manuscripts, the significance of this material lies partly in its sheer continuity and completeness: because the houses were never dispersed, they preserve not isolated masterpieces but whole living ensembles of worship, in which the icons, frescoes, vessels, and books belong together in the setting for which they were made (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8).

A Living Heritage, Not a Museum

It is essential to the Athonite understanding that all of this — the manuscripts, the frescoes, the icons, the treasures — is not a museum collection but a living heritage in continuous use. The manuscripts were copied to be read and prayed; the frescoes were painted to be the setting of the liturgy; the icons were made to be venerated; and on the Mountain they still are (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8; see Holy Icons for the theology of the icon in worship). This is also the source of a real tension in the modern period: the conservation of so vast and fragile a heritage requires resources, expertise, and access from the outside world, while the monasteries’ first concern is the integrity of their monastic and liturgical life, not the demands of scholarship or cultural tourism (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, ch. 8; see Pilgrimage Numbers and Challenges). The Mountain thus holds the greatest surviving inheritance of Byzantine art and letters not as a heritage site but as the working furniture of a still-living monastic world — which is precisely what makes it, to those who study it, uniquely precious.

See Also

References

  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. (Ch. 8 on the manuscript libraries and their contents, the frescoes and the Macedonian and Cretan schools, Manuel Panselinos and the Protaton, Theophanes the Cretan at the Lavra and Stavronikita, the portable icons and treasures, and the questions of conservation and access.)
  • Papachryssanthou, Dionysia. Actes du Prôtaton. Archives de l’Athos 7. Paris: Lethielleux, 1975. (The Protaton archive and the Archives de l’Athos series.)
  • Bryer, Anthony, and Mary Cunningham, eds. Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism. Aldershot: Variorum/Ashgate, 1996. (The Athonite archives, manuscripts, and art in their Byzantine context.)