Post by Teuta1975 on Oct 29, 2007 4:36:33 GMT -5
Paintings, piety and political comment in eighteenth-century Mani
John Chapman
University of Hertfordshire
The Mani peninsula in the southern Peloponnese, has a tradition of independence and separateness from mainstream Hellenic histories. Two things obvious to any visitor to Mani are the many villages with fortified tower-houses and the plethora of churches in the landscape. The architectural characteristics and wall paintings of the churches have fascinated many scholars; from the 1900s Lakonia Survey by Traquair and Dawkins,1 Megaw in the inter-war period 2 and recently by Greek scholars such as Drandakis and his colleagues.3 Mani churches, enumerated in their hundreds (Kassis lists over 1,500)4 possess a particular resonance for lovers of Mani.
The focus of this paper is a specific attribute of a wall painting, relatively common in the mid to late eighteenth-century. The scene is framed by a canopy, flanked by dancing women, musicians and princes. To the rear of the canopy are an Emperor and a King and sitting facing one another at the centre of the canopy are – on the left, an Ottoman Official, his cane topped by a crescent and on the right is an eighteenth-century Western gentleman also carrying a cane sometimes topped with a cross. He wears a tricorn atop a wig. Frock coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes complete his garb. This curious piece of iconography is unknown outside Mani, although the scheme into which it fits was prevalent throughout the Orthodox world.5 Yet both figures should be out of place in eighteenth-century Mani, which prided itself on its relative independence from Ottoman rule and western influence.
The overall scheme is the Ainoi or 'Praises', a graphical representation of the last Psalms (148-150), normally found in the western nave of an Orthodox church. The division of Orthodox holy space was delineated by Symeon of Thessalonike in his Sacred Liturgy. "The nave typifies the heavens and paradise, and the far end of the nave and the narthexes represent the creation of the earth for us and all the creatures upon earth".6
The Mani Ainoi paintings are normally in the western nave, though can be located in a narthex or side vault. The scheme follows the verses of Psalms 148-150. At the centre of the Ainoi is a full-length Christ in Majesty. Around this figure are circles of creatures giving praise to Him. The first is of Seraphim and Angels (Psalm 148:2), 'Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts'.7 Next are the signs of the zodiac representing Psalm 148:3-4, 'Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light. Praise him, ye heavens of heavens.'
The southern barrel vault will have representations of birds, animals, both domestic and fantastic, and humanoids. Some are creatures of fantasy, both animal – dragons and unicorns – and humanoid: one-footed Skiapodes, Sternophthalmoi with faces in their chests, and dog-faced Kynokephaloi, derived from travellers' fables.8 These refer to Psalm 148:10, 'Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl.'
The north vault is a mixture of scenes with musicians and dancing women from Psalm 149:3 'Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp' and a depiction of Psalm 149, 4-9: Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand; To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people; To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron'.
Further verses are: 'Fire, and hail; snow, and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his word' (Psalm 148:8), and in the next verse (148:9) hills and mountains are depicted along with trees, some of which are intended to be cedars. In some Mani churches fire, hail, snow, ice and wind are sometimes portrayed in human guise – the latter a man coming forth from a cave with a trumpet.
The scene with the canopy, with the Ottoman and the Westerner at the front, is central to a significant number of the Ainoi paintings in Mani. Who are they? Miltiadis Garidis, studied the churches of the area surrounding his home village of Doloi in Exo Mani for his study of the Last Judgment in post-Byzantine painting. He wrote,
Dans l'église de la Vierge-Source-de-Vie (1787) de la forteresse de Zarnata, dont les peintures sont pleines d'éléments populaires et folkloriques, puisés dans la vie, les lègendes et les gravures, surtout dans l'illustration des Psaumes et avec des influences italiennes apparantes dans certaines compositions, la représentation du Jugement Dernier se combine avec celle des Psaumes. Cette confusion est peut-être dûe á l'évocation des Juges dans les Psaumes, le mot Juges (=kritaί) étant compris comme désignant des Juges dans un tribunal. Ces Juges sont représentés sous un baldaquin, avec des traits et des attributs imprécis d'Empereurs et princes byzantins, d'un Seigneur vénitien en costume d'époque et d'un Cadimusulman, enturbanné.9
Garidis was probably over-keen to identify the Last Judgement, as this was the focus of his research, whereas it is clear is that this is not a conflation of two schemes, but a depiction of Psalm 148:11, 'Kings of the earth, and all people; princes, and all judges of the earth'. Sometimes there is an inscription 'Kριταί γης'.
Why Turkish and Venetian officials in an area which prided itself in its independence from outside powers? To answer this question we must analyse the history of the Ainoi scheme in Mani church wall paintings, and then attempt to match this to the contemporaneous history of the peninsula.
The variations of the Ainoi in Mani have common factors. The paintings are always post-Byzantine. The scheme requires a large amount of wall space, therefore is associated with largish (by Mani standards) churches such as monastery katholikons or 'parish' churches. Notably all the examples of the Ainoi in Mani occur in either Exo (Outer, NW) Mani or in the area known as Kato (Lower, SE) Mani. There are none in Mesa (Deep, SW) Mani, which was both poorer and had radically different societal traditions to its northern neighbours. Exo and Kato Mani were divided in the eighteenth century, into districts, usually a loose amalgam of villages, under the domination of kapetanoi (of Venetian terminology and a position in Maniat society from the early 1700s). Literally captains it really refers to dominant familial clans.
The earliest Mani version of the Ainoi is in Agios Nikolaos, in the castle of Zarnata. The fragmentary frescos in this ruined church show two distinct styles. The first, dated by Eleni Dori to the fifteenth century painter Xenos Digenis, the second to the early eighteenth century and Christodoulos Kalliergis of Mykonos.10
These early Ainoi paintings are too ruined by damp to identify any coherent version of the judges In a seventeenth century version of the Ainoi in Agia Sofia, Gournitsa, the judges are there if occluded by generations of candle-smoke, but it is clear that we are not looking at the Venetian and Ottoman judges. From the Venetokratia, the Ainoi painted by Anagnostis Makromallos in the monastery of Androubevitsa, south of Zarnata, (1704), has no reference to the judges.
I've identified twenty-three versions of the Ainoi in Mani. There may be examples I've missed, and probably a number where the paintings have been whitewashed over or have disappeared, to damp or, in two cases in Doloi, to earthquake in 1944. Fifteen at least have the judges as Turk and Venetian, and of these, the majority are dated to the period between 1740 and 1790.
Fortunately we know the names of both the painters and the dates of many of these Ainoi paintings. The earliest Ottoman and Venetian Judges is in Agios Georgios at Mirsini, Kato Mani, by Anagnostis of Langada and Nikolaos of Nomitsi in 1746. This team, are named in inscriptions at Agios Ioannis Chrysostomos, Skoutari, in 1750 and the monastery of Roussaki, Kalianeika in 1758. Observably this team also painted the Ainoi scheme at Agioi Theodoroi, Kambos in 1760, at the Panagia Monastery, Limeni, Agios Vasileios, Kelefa and two churches in Milia, Two other versions of the Ottoman and Venetian judges from this mid-century period exist in Agios Nikolaos, Proastio, thought to be by Anagnostis Selemperdakis of Koutifari who is named in an inscription, along with Nikolaos of Nomitsi, as the painter of the nearby Agia Triada painted in 1745.11 Another version is in the Dekoulou Monastery below Oitylo, (1765) by Anagnostis Demangeleas of Koutifari.
Not all Maniat Ainoi of the mid-eighteenth century include the Turk and Venetian. The monastery of Agios Nikitas near Doloi, painted in 1752 by Pentichorakis and Chaidemenakis, has the Temple where the judges would be. This variation is repeated in the Ainoi in the nave of Agios Nikolaos and Ioannis Prodromos in Stavropigio; artists unknown. An Ainoi dated 1752 in Agios Nikolaos at Germa in the Malevri area of Kato Mani by Michail Klirodetis also has no reference to the judges.
A generation later, in the 1780s, there are new variations of the Ainoi with the Ottoman and Venetian judges in northern Exo Mani by the team of Anagnostis Kalliergakis (or Kalliergis) of Proastio and Philippakis of Androuvitsa. This team painted the Ainoi in two churches near Zarnata; the Koimisis tis Theotokou, in 1786, and Zoodochos Pigi in 1787. This team observably painted the monasteries of the Panagia of Chelmos at Gaitses, Phaneromeni, Petrovouni and Agios Nikolaos in Kato Doloi (1785), where they were joined by Poulos Demangeleas and Pentichorakis of Gaitses. The dedication was recorded by Sokrates Kougeas in the 1930s12, but here the paintings were destroyed by earthquake in 1944.
The styles of these Mani painters demonstrate little intrinsic artistic value and are naive, stereotypical and all too often inaccurate. The Venetian is depicted in anachronistic mixes of clothing, his tricorns invariably inexact. Westerners were an uncommon sight in eighteenth-century Mani. John Morritt reported in 1795, 'We enjoyed not a little being stopped by our guides in some of the villages with an apology that the Maniotes had never seen a stranger, and they wished to show their friends so new a sight.'13 There are two more, later interpretations of the judges, both in Exo Mani. However both are 19th century and neither feature the Ottoman or the Venetian.
As Garidis commented, 'Il est évident que pour le cas de la peinture á l'échelle locale du village et la region, on ne dispose pas d'éléments suffisants pour soutenir que le phénom'ne de regression de la peinture savante vers une peinture populaire est un phénom'ne particulier á l'époque.'14 Garidis further proposed, 'nous essaierons d'étudier l'évolution de l'élement profane dans la peinture religieuse.' 15
Petronotis has identified these mid-eighteenth-century church painters as 'The School of Koutifari'.16 Koutifari being the old name for the village of Thalames in the Zygos area of Exo Mani. In fact the painters we can identify came from a variety of Exo Mani villages: Gaitses, Androuvitsa, Proastio, Nomitsi, Koutifari and Langada; less an aesthetic or pedagogic 'school' than a district's artistic reaction to the prosperity of Exo Mani in the mid-eighteenth century.
Relative independence, unrestricted trade in olive oil, dyes from holm oaks, rampant piracy and minimal taxation, meant that there was money to spare for conspicuous religious patronage in the kapetanoi-dominated villages of Exo and Kato Mani.17 The Maniates' religious fervour was remarked upon by many observers and the demonstrably large number of eighteenth-century wall paintings reveals families, villages and monasteries with cash to spare to hire local painters to decorate new churches or overpaint previous schemes. Gell noted at Kallithea in 1804, 'a new chapel, which is the more observable as this is a rare occurrence in any part of Turkey'.18
The Ottoman cadi and Venetian judge were painted by locals, from Mani. What was the political context of this phenomenon? The oft-heard claim that Mani was free and left to its own devices by the Ottomans throughout the Tourkokratia is at best a doubtful assertion and at worst wishful thinking. As the antipathetic Gell commented, 'It appeared that notwithstanding the boasts of freedom the whole business was a compromise, into which the Turks had entered to save themselves the trouble of an exterminating war and the Greeks for the sake of having no foreigner in the country'.19 Even the far more philhellenic Finlay was sceptical: 'It is said that Maina never submitted to a foreign conqueror. Though the assertion is repeated by many writers of authority, it is a vulgar error. It might, perhaps, be said with greater truth, that order and justice never reigned in Maina'. 20
The Ottoman hold on Mani was always de jure, but de facto tenuous and episodic. The Ottomans subjugated Mani in 1670 and dominated the peninsula for 15 years when Ottoman law and taxation were firmly enforced and piracy, a backbone of Maniat economic life, was stifled. In 1685 the Venetians replaced the Turks as rulers of the Morea, enthusiastically assisted by the Maniates. Soon there are the usual stories of the Maniates' time-honoured refusal to pay taxes or submit to census.21 However we know the Venetians assiduously carried out censuses and collected taxes from all quarters of Mani.22
The Venetian bureaucracy, proved so unpopular with the Maniates that in 1715 they assisted the Ottoman retaking of the Morea. From 1715 the Maniates paid a tiny levy yet remained under nominal Ottoman governance. First the Maniates enthusiastically assist the Venetians in ejecting the Ottomans then, thirty years later, equally enthusiastically connive to oust the Venetians. Is it not odd that they then chose representatives of those empires to depict the 'Judges of the Earth'?
It is clear there was no formal legal system in eighteenth century Mani. The evidence from foreign observers is damning. Morosini wrote of Mani in 1659, 'the inhabitants live without specific legal institutions, without rules of government, deprived of administration and leadership.'23 After an interim forty-five years of Ottoman then Venetian rule, Mani reverted to old customs, except that in Exo and Kato Mani the kapetanoi system, established by the Venetians, provided local hegemonies. In 1786 an anonymous Frenchman's report to his Foreign Office wrote,
Le Magne n'a et ne s'auroit avoir de loix ecrittes; le peuple s'en rapporte dans les discussions qu'il peut avoir, quand la force n'en a pas décidé, á la sagesse et au jugement des vieillards; leurs chefs m'me ne jouissent de l'honneur de les juger que lorsqu'ils l'ont obtenu par l'age. Ces capitaines n'ont nulle autre authorité et nulle distinction extérieure.24
Some years later, Dimo and Nicolo Stephanopoli, from Corsica visited Mani in the late 1790s as envoys of Buonaparte. The pair were inordinately fond of depicting the Maniates as freedom-loving republican descendants of the ancient Spartans, but even their revolutionary zeal could not conceal the fact that there was no law in Mani: 'Chez eux, point de notaires, point d'hommes de loi, et par conséquent point d'huissiers'. 25 Disregarding the observation that eighteenth-century Maniates were spared the afflictions of bailiffs, it is clear that legal processes were crude and arbitrary, 'S'il s'élevait un proc's, les parties s'addressaient á un arbitre, qui, pour l'ordinaire, était un vieillard: son jugement était sans appel.'26
Thomas Parnell, Consul for the Dutch in Patras, confirms this impression. In 1817 he described the Maniates as 'peuple accoutumé a l'indépendance et á la piraterie, ne connaissant ni loi ils ont constamment vecš et vivront toujours dans la plus grande anarchie'.27 William Martin Leake, an assiduous observer (and British Agent), wrote of the Maniates in a letter to Lord Harrowby (3 May 1805), 'Their internal disputes, which arise from a want of any other law than that of the lex talionis, render it necessary for every man to go armed with musquet or with a dagger or pistols.'28 Any form of codified law, such as that of the Byzantine Hexabiblos, as Tourtoglou points out, was not introduced to Mani until the Kapodistrian era, and then had to be imposed under duress. Only in the 1830s were regular courts established in Mani.29
The evidence of Western visitors confirms the impression that the kapetanoi were local tyrants. Gell observed in his 1804 visit: 'Under a hundred captains they are a hundred times more oppressed than they would be under the worst despotism of the Turks.'30 This was also the conclusion of Charles Cockerell in 1812 who wrote of his stay at Kardamyli with Panayotis Mourtzinos, Kapetanios of Androuvitsa, 'In no part of Europe at any rate, if indeed in the world, could one find such singular scenes or come upon a state of society so exactly like that of our ancient barons [Ö] The whole gave us a picture of feudal life new and hardly credible to a nineteenth century Englishman.'31 And John Morritt wrote, after his 1795 visit to Exo Mani, of the kapetanoi, 'They were perfectly independent of each other; the judges of their people at home, and their leaders when they took the field.'32
With such capricious and arbitrary rule, is it not likely that some inhabitants of Exo and Kato Mani regretted the disappearance of a (relatively) neutral legal structure in an area famed for endemic inter-village and inter-family feuding? The depiction of the Judges of the Earth as Turkish cadi and Venetian was a deliberate interpretation by specific groups of Maniat painters and directed at a broad communal audience in the relatively independent, oligarchic Exo and Kato Mani. So why did they used the despised Muslim Turks and Catholic Venetians to represent 'The Judges of the Earth'?
The painters the Ainoi were moralists. They were fond of adding a bottom layer of paintings to their churches. To the rear of the nave and clearly intended for the laity was a vivid depiction of what happened to sinners. In extremely crude and luridly explicit frescos the tortures of hell were offered to the downward gaze of the congregation. If the worshippers were to raise their eyes, in a mixture of supplication and relief, to more spiritual things they would get a vision of the world they inhabited, with local women dancing to the music of local musicians in local costumes. And in the centrepiece, emphatically framed by a canopy, 'The Judges of the Earth'. Not locals at all.
The tortures of hell. Mid-18th century
The Ainoi judges are a deliberate expression of nostalgia for past times of legal stability and justice and as such hardly square with the populist legends of a fiercely independent Mani. The judges were potent symbols of occupying powers in Mani, yet were used here as a vivid political comment, indicting the contemporary lawless nature of Mani by those who suffered under the arbitrary despotic powers of the kapetanoi. The Mani wallpainters of the mid-eighteenth century, were first and foremost communicators, and knew they had a captive audience from religiously corporate communities who would not have failed to take the graphic point.
Notes
This communication is a condensed version of a paper 'The Stange Case of the Ottoman and Venetian Judges in Eighteenth Century Mani', for a forthcoming issue of Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies.
John Chapman
University of Hertfordshire
The Mani peninsula in the southern Peloponnese, has a tradition of independence and separateness from mainstream Hellenic histories. Two things obvious to any visitor to Mani are the many villages with fortified tower-houses and the plethora of churches in the landscape. The architectural characteristics and wall paintings of the churches have fascinated many scholars; from the 1900s Lakonia Survey by Traquair and Dawkins,1 Megaw in the inter-war period 2 and recently by Greek scholars such as Drandakis and his colleagues.3 Mani churches, enumerated in their hundreds (Kassis lists over 1,500)4 possess a particular resonance for lovers of Mani.
The focus of this paper is a specific attribute of a wall painting, relatively common in the mid to late eighteenth-century. The scene is framed by a canopy, flanked by dancing women, musicians and princes. To the rear of the canopy are an Emperor and a King and sitting facing one another at the centre of the canopy are – on the left, an Ottoman Official, his cane topped by a crescent and on the right is an eighteenth-century Western gentleman also carrying a cane sometimes topped with a cross. He wears a tricorn atop a wig. Frock coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes complete his garb. This curious piece of iconography is unknown outside Mani, although the scheme into which it fits was prevalent throughout the Orthodox world.5 Yet both figures should be out of place in eighteenth-century Mani, which prided itself on its relative independence from Ottoman rule and western influence.
The overall scheme is the Ainoi or 'Praises', a graphical representation of the last Psalms (148-150), normally found in the western nave of an Orthodox church. The division of Orthodox holy space was delineated by Symeon of Thessalonike in his Sacred Liturgy. "The nave typifies the heavens and paradise, and the far end of the nave and the narthexes represent the creation of the earth for us and all the creatures upon earth".6
The Mani Ainoi paintings are normally in the western nave, though can be located in a narthex or side vault. The scheme follows the verses of Psalms 148-150. At the centre of the Ainoi is a full-length Christ in Majesty. Around this figure are circles of creatures giving praise to Him. The first is of Seraphim and Angels (Psalm 148:2), 'Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts'.7 Next are the signs of the zodiac representing Psalm 148:3-4, 'Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light. Praise him, ye heavens of heavens.'
The southern barrel vault will have representations of birds, animals, both domestic and fantastic, and humanoids. Some are creatures of fantasy, both animal – dragons and unicorns – and humanoid: one-footed Skiapodes, Sternophthalmoi with faces in their chests, and dog-faced Kynokephaloi, derived from travellers' fables.8 These refer to Psalm 148:10, 'Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl.'
The north vault is a mixture of scenes with musicians and dancing women from Psalm 149:3 'Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp' and a depiction of Psalm 149, 4-9: Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand; To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people; To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron'.
Further verses are: 'Fire, and hail; snow, and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his word' (Psalm 148:8), and in the next verse (148:9) hills and mountains are depicted along with trees, some of which are intended to be cedars. In some Mani churches fire, hail, snow, ice and wind are sometimes portrayed in human guise – the latter a man coming forth from a cave with a trumpet.
The scene with the canopy, with the Ottoman and the Westerner at the front, is central to a significant number of the Ainoi paintings in Mani. Who are they? Miltiadis Garidis, studied the churches of the area surrounding his home village of Doloi in Exo Mani for his study of the Last Judgment in post-Byzantine painting. He wrote,
Dans l'église de la Vierge-Source-de-Vie (1787) de la forteresse de Zarnata, dont les peintures sont pleines d'éléments populaires et folkloriques, puisés dans la vie, les lègendes et les gravures, surtout dans l'illustration des Psaumes et avec des influences italiennes apparantes dans certaines compositions, la représentation du Jugement Dernier se combine avec celle des Psaumes. Cette confusion est peut-être dûe á l'évocation des Juges dans les Psaumes, le mot Juges (=kritaί) étant compris comme désignant des Juges dans un tribunal. Ces Juges sont représentés sous un baldaquin, avec des traits et des attributs imprécis d'Empereurs et princes byzantins, d'un Seigneur vénitien en costume d'époque et d'un Cadimusulman, enturbanné.9
Garidis was probably over-keen to identify the Last Judgement, as this was the focus of his research, whereas it is clear is that this is not a conflation of two schemes, but a depiction of Psalm 148:11, 'Kings of the earth, and all people; princes, and all judges of the earth'. Sometimes there is an inscription 'Kριταί γης'.
Why Turkish and Venetian officials in an area which prided itself in its independence from outside powers? To answer this question we must analyse the history of the Ainoi scheme in Mani church wall paintings, and then attempt to match this to the contemporaneous history of the peninsula.
The variations of the Ainoi in Mani have common factors. The paintings are always post-Byzantine. The scheme requires a large amount of wall space, therefore is associated with largish (by Mani standards) churches such as monastery katholikons or 'parish' churches. Notably all the examples of the Ainoi in Mani occur in either Exo (Outer, NW) Mani or in the area known as Kato (Lower, SE) Mani. There are none in Mesa (Deep, SW) Mani, which was both poorer and had radically different societal traditions to its northern neighbours. Exo and Kato Mani were divided in the eighteenth century, into districts, usually a loose amalgam of villages, under the domination of kapetanoi (of Venetian terminology and a position in Maniat society from the early 1700s). Literally captains it really refers to dominant familial clans.
The earliest Mani version of the Ainoi is in Agios Nikolaos, in the castle of Zarnata. The fragmentary frescos in this ruined church show two distinct styles. The first, dated by Eleni Dori to the fifteenth century painter Xenos Digenis, the second to the early eighteenth century and Christodoulos Kalliergis of Mykonos.10
These early Ainoi paintings are too ruined by damp to identify any coherent version of the judges In a seventeenth century version of the Ainoi in Agia Sofia, Gournitsa, the judges are there if occluded by generations of candle-smoke, but it is clear that we are not looking at the Venetian and Ottoman judges. From the Venetokratia, the Ainoi painted by Anagnostis Makromallos in the monastery of Androubevitsa, south of Zarnata, (1704), has no reference to the judges.
I've identified twenty-three versions of the Ainoi in Mani. There may be examples I've missed, and probably a number where the paintings have been whitewashed over or have disappeared, to damp or, in two cases in Doloi, to earthquake in 1944. Fifteen at least have the judges as Turk and Venetian, and of these, the majority are dated to the period between 1740 and 1790.
Fortunately we know the names of both the painters and the dates of many of these Ainoi paintings. The earliest Ottoman and Venetian Judges is in Agios Georgios at Mirsini, Kato Mani, by Anagnostis of Langada and Nikolaos of Nomitsi in 1746. This team, are named in inscriptions at Agios Ioannis Chrysostomos, Skoutari, in 1750 and the monastery of Roussaki, Kalianeika in 1758. Observably this team also painted the Ainoi scheme at Agioi Theodoroi, Kambos in 1760, at the Panagia Monastery, Limeni, Agios Vasileios, Kelefa and two churches in Milia, Two other versions of the Ottoman and Venetian judges from this mid-century period exist in Agios Nikolaos, Proastio, thought to be by Anagnostis Selemperdakis of Koutifari who is named in an inscription, along with Nikolaos of Nomitsi, as the painter of the nearby Agia Triada painted in 1745.11 Another version is in the Dekoulou Monastery below Oitylo, (1765) by Anagnostis Demangeleas of Koutifari.
Not all Maniat Ainoi of the mid-eighteenth century include the Turk and Venetian. The monastery of Agios Nikitas near Doloi, painted in 1752 by Pentichorakis and Chaidemenakis, has the Temple where the judges would be. This variation is repeated in the Ainoi in the nave of Agios Nikolaos and Ioannis Prodromos in Stavropigio; artists unknown. An Ainoi dated 1752 in Agios Nikolaos at Germa in the Malevri area of Kato Mani by Michail Klirodetis also has no reference to the judges.
A generation later, in the 1780s, there are new variations of the Ainoi with the Ottoman and Venetian judges in northern Exo Mani by the team of Anagnostis Kalliergakis (or Kalliergis) of Proastio and Philippakis of Androuvitsa. This team painted the Ainoi in two churches near Zarnata; the Koimisis tis Theotokou, in 1786, and Zoodochos Pigi in 1787. This team observably painted the monasteries of the Panagia of Chelmos at Gaitses, Phaneromeni, Petrovouni and Agios Nikolaos in Kato Doloi (1785), where they were joined by Poulos Demangeleas and Pentichorakis of Gaitses. The dedication was recorded by Sokrates Kougeas in the 1930s12, but here the paintings were destroyed by earthquake in 1944.
The styles of these Mani painters demonstrate little intrinsic artistic value and are naive, stereotypical and all too often inaccurate. The Venetian is depicted in anachronistic mixes of clothing, his tricorns invariably inexact. Westerners were an uncommon sight in eighteenth-century Mani. John Morritt reported in 1795, 'We enjoyed not a little being stopped by our guides in some of the villages with an apology that the Maniotes had never seen a stranger, and they wished to show their friends so new a sight.'13 There are two more, later interpretations of the judges, both in Exo Mani. However both are 19th century and neither feature the Ottoman or the Venetian.
As Garidis commented, 'Il est évident que pour le cas de la peinture á l'échelle locale du village et la region, on ne dispose pas d'éléments suffisants pour soutenir que le phénom'ne de regression de la peinture savante vers une peinture populaire est un phénom'ne particulier á l'époque.'14 Garidis further proposed, 'nous essaierons d'étudier l'évolution de l'élement profane dans la peinture religieuse.' 15
Petronotis has identified these mid-eighteenth-century church painters as 'The School of Koutifari'.16 Koutifari being the old name for the village of Thalames in the Zygos area of Exo Mani. In fact the painters we can identify came from a variety of Exo Mani villages: Gaitses, Androuvitsa, Proastio, Nomitsi, Koutifari and Langada; less an aesthetic or pedagogic 'school' than a district's artistic reaction to the prosperity of Exo Mani in the mid-eighteenth century.
Relative independence, unrestricted trade in olive oil, dyes from holm oaks, rampant piracy and minimal taxation, meant that there was money to spare for conspicuous religious patronage in the kapetanoi-dominated villages of Exo and Kato Mani.17 The Maniates' religious fervour was remarked upon by many observers and the demonstrably large number of eighteenth-century wall paintings reveals families, villages and monasteries with cash to spare to hire local painters to decorate new churches or overpaint previous schemes. Gell noted at Kallithea in 1804, 'a new chapel, which is the more observable as this is a rare occurrence in any part of Turkey'.18
The Ottoman cadi and Venetian judge were painted by locals, from Mani. What was the political context of this phenomenon? The oft-heard claim that Mani was free and left to its own devices by the Ottomans throughout the Tourkokratia is at best a doubtful assertion and at worst wishful thinking. As the antipathetic Gell commented, 'It appeared that notwithstanding the boasts of freedom the whole business was a compromise, into which the Turks had entered to save themselves the trouble of an exterminating war and the Greeks for the sake of having no foreigner in the country'.19 Even the far more philhellenic Finlay was sceptical: 'It is said that Maina never submitted to a foreign conqueror. Though the assertion is repeated by many writers of authority, it is a vulgar error. It might, perhaps, be said with greater truth, that order and justice never reigned in Maina'. 20
The Ottoman hold on Mani was always de jure, but de facto tenuous and episodic. The Ottomans subjugated Mani in 1670 and dominated the peninsula for 15 years when Ottoman law and taxation were firmly enforced and piracy, a backbone of Maniat economic life, was stifled. In 1685 the Venetians replaced the Turks as rulers of the Morea, enthusiastically assisted by the Maniates. Soon there are the usual stories of the Maniates' time-honoured refusal to pay taxes or submit to census.21 However we know the Venetians assiduously carried out censuses and collected taxes from all quarters of Mani.22
The Venetian bureaucracy, proved so unpopular with the Maniates that in 1715 they assisted the Ottoman retaking of the Morea. From 1715 the Maniates paid a tiny levy yet remained under nominal Ottoman governance. First the Maniates enthusiastically assist the Venetians in ejecting the Ottomans then, thirty years later, equally enthusiastically connive to oust the Venetians. Is it not odd that they then chose representatives of those empires to depict the 'Judges of the Earth'?
It is clear there was no formal legal system in eighteenth century Mani. The evidence from foreign observers is damning. Morosini wrote of Mani in 1659, 'the inhabitants live without specific legal institutions, without rules of government, deprived of administration and leadership.'23 After an interim forty-five years of Ottoman then Venetian rule, Mani reverted to old customs, except that in Exo and Kato Mani the kapetanoi system, established by the Venetians, provided local hegemonies. In 1786 an anonymous Frenchman's report to his Foreign Office wrote,
Le Magne n'a et ne s'auroit avoir de loix ecrittes; le peuple s'en rapporte dans les discussions qu'il peut avoir, quand la force n'en a pas décidé, á la sagesse et au jugement des vieillards; leurs chefs m'me ne jouissent de l'honneur de les juger que lorsqu'ils l'ont obtenu par l'age. Ces capitaines n'ont nulle autre authorité et nulle distinction extérieure.24
Some years later, Dimo and Nicolo Stephanopoli, from Corsica visited Mani in the late 1790s as envoys of Buonaparte. The pair were inordinately fond of depicting the Maniates as freedom-loving republican descendants of the ancient Spartans, but even their revolutionary zeal could not conceal the fact that there was no law in Mani: 'Chez eux, point de notaires, point d'hommes de loi, et par conséquent point d'huissiers'. 25 Disregarding the observation that eighteenth-century Maniates were spared the afflictions of bailiffs, it is clear that legal processes were crude and arbitrary, 'S'il s'élevait un proc's, les parties s'addressaient á un arbitre, qui, pour l'ordinaire, était un vieillard: son jugement était sans appel.'26
Thomas Parnell, Consul for the Dutch in Patras, confirms this impression. In 1817 he described the Maniates as 'peuple accoutumé a l'indépendance et á la piraterie, ne connaissant ni loi ils ont constamment vecš et vivront toujours dans la plus grande anarchie'.27 William Martin Leake, an assiduous observer (and British Agent), wrote of the Maniates in a letter to Lord Harrowby (3 May 1805), 'Their internal disputes, which arise from a want of any other law than that of the lex talionis, render it necessary for every man to go armed with musquet or with a dagger or pistols.'28 Any form of codified law, such as that of the Byzantine Hexabiblos, as Tourtoglou points out, was not introduced to Mani until the Kapodistrian era, and then had to be imposed under duress. Only in the 1830s were regular courts established in Mani.29
The evidence of Western visitors confirms the impression that the kapetanoi were local tyrants. Gell observed in his 1804 visit: 'Under a hundred captains they are a hundred times more oppressed than they would be under the worst despotism of the Turks.'30 This was also the conclusion of Charles Cockerell in 1812 who wrote of his stay at Kardamyli with Panayotis Mourtzinos, Kapetanios of Androuvitsa, 'In no part of Europe at any rate, if indeed in the world, could one find such singular scenes or come upon a state of society so exactly like that of our ancient barons [Ö] The whole gave us a picture of feudal life new and hardly credible to a nineteenth century Englishman.'31 And John Morritt wrote, after his 1795 visit to Exo Mani, of the kapetanoi, 'They were perfectly independent of each other; the judges of their people at home, and their leaders when they took the field.'32
With such capricious and arbitrary rule, is it not likely that some inhabitants of Exo and Kato Mani regretted the disappearance of a (relatively) neutral legal structure in an area famed for endemic inter-village and inter-family feuding? The depiction of the Judges of the Earth as Turkish cadi and Venetian was a deliberate interpretation by specific groups of Maniat painters and directed at a broad communal audience in the relatively independent, oligarchic Exo and Kato Mani. So why did they used the despised Muslim Turks and Catholic Venetians to represent 'The Judges of the Earth'?
The painters the Ainoi were moralists. They were fond of adding a bottom layer of paintings to their churches. To the rear of the nave and clearly intended for the laity was a vivid depiction of what happened to sinners. In extremely crude and luridly explicit frescos the tortures of hell were offered to the downward gaze of the congregation. If the worshippers were to raise their eyes, in a mixture of supplication and relief, to more spiritual things they would get a vision of the world they inhabited, with local women dancing to the music of local musicians in local costumes. And in the centrepiece, emphatically framed by a canopy, 'The Judges of the Earth'. Not locals at all.
The tortures of hell. Mid-18th century
The Ainoi judges are a deliberate expression of nostalgia for past times of legal stability and justice and as such hardly square with the populist legends of a fiercely independent Mani. The judges were potent symbols of occupying powers in Mani, yet were used here as a vivid political comment, indicting the contemporary lawless nature of Mani by those who suffered under the arbitrary despotic powers of the kapetanoi. The Mani wallpainters of the mid-eighteenth century, were first and foremost communicators, and knew they had a captive audience from religiously corporate communities who would not have failed to take the graphic point.
Notes
This communication is a condensed version of a paper 'The Stange Case of the Ottoman and Venetian Judges in Eighteenth Century Mani', for a forthcoming issue of Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies.