Page View
Hazard, H. W. (ed.) / Volume IV: The art and architecture of the Crusader states
(1977)
VI: The arts in Frankish Greece and Rhodes, pp. 208-250
PDF (15.7 MB)
Page 211
Ch. VI FRANKISH GREECE 211 even more fleeting phase of the kingdom of Thessalonica, the Frankish settlement of Greece seems solid and durable; but even here little of note has been left in architectural monuments. The Gothic cathedrals of Cyprus might well be standing in northern France, and would seem there of equal quality with their untransplanted fellows; the carvings of Syria, the Nazareth capitals, the rich foliage of the Temple masons' yard, are among the triumphs of Romanesque art But in Greece, so rich in artistic memories, not ill provided with building stone, the Franks contented themselves with rude, unambi tious construction. On the north slopes of theAcropolis the ruined apse of the Hypapanti church that Enlart drew and attributed to the thirteenth century has been pulled down to make way for excavations, and proved in the dismantling tb be later, partially eighteenth-century work. The Villehardouin and De la Roche arms still surmount the doorway of the Little Metropolitan, but the building itself is a Byzantine church. Outside Athens, at Daphne, where the Cistercians had been installed by Othon de la Roche in 1211, the western porch has a curious outer row of pointed arches and the rebuilt cloister follows the outline of pointed arches formerly visible on the enclosing wall.4 In the sloping fields near Bitsibardi, above the Alpheus river, the church of Our Lady of Isova was built in the first half of the thirteenth century and destroyed by fire in 1262. Its ruins show it to have been an aisleless hall church, 135 feet long and 50 feet broad on its outside measurements, ending in a polygonal apse. It is carefully built of well-cut stones mixed with tiles, and the west end, with three windows, still rises to a high pitched gable (pl. LXIIc). A displaced piece of vaulting rib suggests that the roof of the choir may have been vaulted. All the details, simple but competently handled, seem to be the work of western masons. The church was never rebuilt after the fire. Instead a new and smaller church, St. Nicholas, was built beside it, divided into a nave and aisles and ending in three semicircular apses. There is no trace of an iconostasis and it must have been built for the Catholic rite, presumably in the fourteenth century and most likely by local workmen.5 The Cistercian convent of Zaraca (Kionia) near Stymphalia has some blocks of walls still standing, a jumble of fallen masonry, 4. G. Millet, Daphni (Paris, 1910), pp. 25-42, and cf. LeMonastère de Daphni: Histoire, architectures, mosaiques (Monuments de l'art byzantin, I; Paris, 1899); H. D. Kyriakopoulou and A. Petronotes, The Daphni Monastery (Society for Peloponnesian Studies, I; Athens, i 956) is an excellent recent guidebook, but difficult to find. 5. N. Moutsopoulos, "Le Monastère franc de Notre-Dame d'Isova (Gortynie)," Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, LXXX (1956), 76-94, 632.
Copyright 1977 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved. Use of this material falling outside the purview of "fair use" requires the permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. To buy the hardcover book, see: http://www/wisc/edu/wisconsinpress/books/1735.htm