This is a systematic publication of the approximately 20 Byzantine churches with wall-paintings which have survived destruction in the province of Rethymnon, Crete. They date from ca. 1000 A.D. to the fifteenth century. Most were decorated during the Palaeologan era, when the island was occupied by the Venetians (1211-1669 A.D). These monuments are little known to the scholarly world. The style and iconographic programme of each church is investigated, as well as the iconography of the scenes. Special attention is paid to rare and unique iconographic subjects, e.g., a full cycle of the Akathistos and a cycle of the Life of St. John the Evangelist. Certain themes prompt an examination of the degree of western influence on iconography and style. The wall-paintings of Rethymnon significantly enrich our knowledge of Byzantine art, especially that of the late Palaeologan era. Alongside local artists, who worked in a provincial style, we find painters who applied the styles that were in vogue in the great Byzantine artistic centres of Macedonia, Mistra and Constantinople itself. This can be explained by the immigration of artists from the major centres. A few are known to us by name. This publication is the first of four volumes on the churches in the nomos of Rethymnon, which will include the provinces of Mylopotamos, Amari and Agios Basileios. There are over 400 plates, many in colour.

This book by Professor Spatharakis is a study of the origin and development of a new iconographic type within the late Byzantine period, that of the left-handed Evangelist. Although mainly confined to manuscript illumination, it also takes account of the surviving depictions of the Evangelists in mosaic and fresco on the walls of the churches built during this period. The author examines the appearance of this new type of Evangelist portrait at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and how it came to be sufficiently influential to replace the tenth-century models used by the artists of this period. He investigates how long this new fashion lasted, and the subsequent influence of the left-handed Evangelist in later Byzantine art. This leads on to the question of whether the artists were content to follow older models, or were actively participating in the creation of fresh groupings. The isolation of the archetype, the contemporary parallels, and the subsequent influence of the group of Evangelist portraits examined in this study is based not only on iconographic similarities but on a detailed examination of the individual types. This work makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of Palaeologan iconography, and the working methods of the artists who were responsible for its creation.

The work of Ioannis Spatharakis on Byzantine manuscript painting has resulted in the standard corpus of dated illuminated Greek manuscripts, and an important survey of the history of the portrait in Byzantine manuscripts. His numerous papers published over the last twenty years have dealt with illuminated manuscripts from the era of Iconoclasm and the Macedonian Renaissance in the eighth and ninth centuries to the productions of the Palaeologan period in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These are reproduced here, along with a number of papers on iconographical themes, and unpublished studies of wall paintings in Crete. One paper is translated from Greek, and a number of others are published here for the first time.