Where did the Renaissance begin? There has been an official answer to that question since 1550, the date that Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was first published. According to this version, it all began in Florence and the first painter in the long line that ended with Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo was named Cimabue. But here’s another suggestion: you could just as well try looking in the rolling hills of Serbia.
My wife and I went travelling there earlier this year. For a couple of nights we stayed in the town of Novi Pazar in the south-east of the country. From the religious point of view this town is a remnant of the Ottoman Empire; according to the census of 2022, nearly 80 per cent of the population is Muslim (with just 71 atheists). Architecturally, the place is a mishmash of traditional Balkan buildings, randomly combined with modernist concrete blocks erected in the days of Tito. (Our hotel was designed in a beguiling and possibly unique combination of styles, Ottoman revival and 1970s Yugoslav brutalism.)
In the Middle Ages, however, this area was the central stronghold of the Kingdom of Serbia. Nearby are three of the most ancient churches in the country. Our main goal was to visit one of these, the Monastery of Sopocani, because it was said to contain an extraordinarily beautiful cycle of 13th-century frescoes, roughly dated to around 1270. In his book Byzantine Painting: The Last Phase (1968), David Talbot Rice remarks that ‘as regards beauty of colouring, originality of conception, grandeur of propor-tions and effectiveness of composition’, the paintings at Sopocani ‘are to be counted among the finest of mediaeval times’.
I’ve owned that book for decades but never really expected to see these pictures for myself. Earlier this year however fate, in the form of David Hockney, took me to Serbia. Simultaneously with his mammoth exhibition in Paris, there was a smaller one in Belgrade. This was a commemoration of Hockney’s first retrospective in 1970, which was held at the Whitechapel and then went on tour to, among other places, the Serbian capital (the artist travelled by river down the Danube from Vienna and wore a splendid tweed suit at the opening). I was asked to give a talk, and my wife and I thought this was a good opportunity to see this corner of the Balkans.
It turned out that Professor Talbot Rice wasn’t wrong about the frescoes at Sopocani. They are somewhat battered, having survived centuries of neglect, ruin, pillage and iconoclasm. The monks were obliged to flee to the north in 1689, and in 1759 a priest named Milovan paid a visit, ‘to behold the beautiful and ruined Monastery with great weeping and lamentation’. There was no roof on the building for around two centuries before it was restored – in fact partially rebuilt – in the 1920s.
To what extent were western European artists aware of the frescoes of the Sopocani Monastery?
All in all, then, it’s verging on miraculous that there are any remaining paintings visible at all. But although there were large losses – nothing at all remains of the paintings on the dome, which collapsed – what survives is spectacular.
That’s true most of all of the ‘Dormition of the Mother of God’, a panoramic picture which unfurls across the central areas of the west wall of the main body of the church. This features, front and centre, the Virgin lying on her bier (the Orthodox Church refers to Mary ‘falling asleep’, a subject described as ‘the death of the Virgin’ in western iconography). Above is Christ, holding the soul of his mother wrapped in grave clothes and backed by a sizable phalanx of angels brandishing lighted candles in elaborate holders. On either side are bevies of ministering priests, disciples and apostles, weeping and kneeling.
The swirling organisation of all these figures is symphonic, the whole design focuses on Christ and Mary, with the two buildings at the rear receding in opposite directions (Byzantine perspective could be the opposite of Renaissance perspective which had a single vanishing point). Just as striking is the colour, which is a mellow combination of soft mauves, ochre yellows, greens and blues. Above all there is a moving humanity in the way the grieving figures bend and sway.
This is certainly a masterpiece, as are many other contemporary frescoes at Sopocani and in other Serbian monasteries such as Studenica, which we visited on our journey south. The question is how these relate to other art being created at the same time, both west and east of Serbia. The painters, it is assumed, were Byzantine. But to what extent were western European artists aware of their works?
This conundrum has been much discussed, sometimes irritably, by scholars for a long time. Like quite a few art-historical questions, it goes back to Vasari. Of course, his great book is and was fundamental to our understanding of the Italian Renaissance. Nonetheless, there are many things that he either did not know or got completely wrong.
Vasari makes considerable mention of the ‘Greek style’ (‘maniera greca’), but not in a flattering way. He considered it ‘clumsy’. The first artist whose life he relates is Cimabue. Cimabue’s starting-point, Vasari wrote, was the work of the Byzantine artists operating in Italy at the time, but he ‘added much perfection to the art, relieving it of a great part of their rude manner, [and] he gave honour to his country with his name and with the works that he made’.
‘His country’ was of course Florence, and the life of Cimabue is a crucial element in Vasari’s Florentine-centric view of Italian art. He was vague about non-Florentines such as the Roman master Pietro Cavallini and the Sienese Duccio, getting the latter’s era wrong by about half a century.
So how about those Greeks and their ‘rude manner’? Many examples from the Balkans and the Greek world demonstrate that 13th-century Byzantine art was far from ‘clumsy’ or ‘crude’. At its best, as the frescoes at Sopocani show, it was both innovative and wonderfully accomplished. The Crucifixion at the Monastery of Studenica, which we called at en route, is tenderly poignant and in a new way: the body of Christ sags on the cross, his eyes closed, his expression gently sorrowful. This was painted around 1208. About 40 years later, Giunta Pisano, a leading Italian artist, painted a strikingly similar crucifix for a church in Bologna. Cimabue’s first known work, also of Christ on the cross, has this same pose and mood. So did his later one, badly damaged in the 1966 flood – a work that fascinated and influenced Francis Bacon.
At its best, Byzantine art was both innovative and wonderfully accomplished
The question is: how much interaction took place between eastern and western Europe during this formative period? There were certainly contacts. At Sopocani, there is a narthex (an entrance chamber) which was frescoed a little later. There, on the north wall is a picture deliberately echoing the Dormition of the Virgin. It depicts the burial of Queen Anna, whose son King Stefan Uros I built the monastery. She was the daughter of the Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo, who succeeded in diverting the Fourth Crusade to the Christian city of Constantinople, which – to the great profit of Venice – was then sacked.
Perhaps medieval artists travelled further than we imagine. ‘Could Duccio have visited Constantinople?’, Talbot Rice asked, wistfully. He answered: ‘It is certainly a possibility.’ On the other hand, it’s very far from a certainty. The truth is that we know next to nothing for sure about 13th-century Italian artists, and even less about their Byzantine and Balkan contemporaries. But thanks to Vasari, some of the former are stars whereas the latter – often anonymous – are little known.
We were the only people viewing the frescoes that day at Sopocani, though a few others came in to pay their devotions. It was the same all over the country. In stark contrast to Florence, there were almost no tourists in Serbia at all. Today you sometimes have to contend with a rugby scrum of fellow art lovers in order to glimpse a masterpiece, but here is a place where you can contemplate great art entirely on your own.
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