Famagusta: Art and Architecture, vol. I

458 Pages·2014·8.848 MB·English

by  Annemarie Weyl Carr (Ed.)

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Editorial Coordinator
Evelien Chayes
Editorial Board
Lorenzo Calvelli
Christopher Celenza
Evelien Chayes
Gilles Grivaud
Martin Hinterberger
Michalis Olympios
Christopher Schabel

Famagusta

Volume I
Art and Architecture
Edited by
A W C
nnemArie eyl Arr
© 2014 Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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without prior permission of the publisher.
D/2014/0095/243
ISBN 978-2-503-54130-3
Printed on acid-free paper
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Annemarie Weyl CArr
Introduction 7
Acknowledgments 23
Tassos PAPACostAs
Byzantine Famagusta: An Oxymoron? 25
Nicola ColdstreAm
Famagusta Cathedral and the Rayonnant Style 63
Michalis olymPios
The Shifting Mantle of Jerusalem:
Ecclesiastical Architecture in Lusignan Famagusta 75
Michalis olymPios
Saint George of the Greeks and Its Legacy: A Facet
of Urban Greek Church Architecture in Lusignan Cyprus 143
Michele BACCi
Patterns of Church Decoration in Famagusta
(Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries) 203
Maria PAsChAli
Mural Decoration in Saint George of the Greeks at Famagusta 277
Justine m. AndreWs
The Role of Genoa in the Visual Culture of Famagusta 315
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Tassos PAPACostAs
A Gothic Basilica in the Renaissance:
Saint George of the Greeks at Famagusta 339
BIBLIOGRAPHY 367
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ANNEMARIE WEYL CARR
INTRODUCTION
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind –
as many sensual perfumes as you can...
Constantine Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’1
The sheer profusion of their goods and peoples gives the great
late medieval trade emporia of the Eastern Mediterranean Levant
a special hold upon the imagination that is sensory and evocative.
Among them, Famagusta alone still offers a concrete, sensory ex-
perience of its late medieval cityscape. Gothic edifices uncoloured
by restoration still dominate the view; palm and cypress trees still
rise in their midst, imprinting their ‘otherness’ on the astonished
eye (Fig. 1). The chapters that follow examine these tangible wit-
nesses to the town’s late medieval and Renaissance life. Famagusta
soared abruptly to urban scale at the end of the thirteenth centu-
ry, as Christians of all creeds fled the fall of the mainland crusader
states to Mamluk and Mongol expansion. Flooded with refugee
artisans and merchants, the city became the easternmost fulcrum
of European commercial interests in the cross-Asian luxury trade.
Even among the fabled trade emporia of the eastern Mediterrane-
an Levant, it was famously, often fabulously rich. Its wealth, daz-
zling to travelers and pilgrims, is still registered in the remains of
its architecture, consisting largely now of churches. The ensuing
book explores the visual and material evidence of these church-
es. It is the first of two volumes designed to assess and consoli-
date the current state of research on medieval Famagusta across
the range of historical disciplines. Its successive chapters exam-
ine the history, architecture, ritual configuration, and adornment
1 C. P. Cavafy. Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed.
George Savides, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 67.
10.1484/M.MEDNEX-EB.5.107469
7
INTRODUCTION
of these tangible witnesses to the community’s late medieval and
Renaissance life. Famagusta’s cityscape offers an exceptional pic-
ture of the ways in which a radically diverse population, with var-
ied creeds, commercial aims, and political agendas, constructed a
workable form of shared existence and secreted a coherent exo-
skeleton of civic buildings to house and articulate it. In Cyprus
itself, moreover, the churches are unique in preserving – if tenu-
ously – the paintings in Latin-, Syrian-, and Armenian-, as well as
Greek-rite, liturgical spaces.
Famagusta has been both fabulous and unfortunate. A child of
disaster, it rose meteorically as artisanal, commercial, and monas-
tic communities from the Crusader mainland implanted them-
selves with astonishing effectiveness on the east coast of Cyprus:
the vast majority of Famagusta’s churches were built within the
brief span of some eighty years, from about 1290 to 1373. Violent-
ly curtailed by the Genoese conquest and century-long hegemony
(1373-1464), the city’s resilience emerged once again under the
Venetians (1474-1571), but its Ottoman history (1571-1878) was
bleak. Locked in its massive Venetian fortifications, it was main-
tained essentially as a penal colony, its Greek population deliber-
ately dispersed and foreign visitation forbidden. Those churches
appropriated as mosques survived intact; the others were prey to
the elements. Few travelers gained access to them. The city never
ceased to command the fascination of pilgrims, travelers, and his-
torians, but access to it was rarely possible, and both its surviving
buildings and its historical record are riddled with holes.
Western European interest in Cyprus’ medieval centuries
emerged in the later nineteenth century within the purview of
France’s assertion of its interests in the Holy Land: though Lou-
is de Mas Latrie dedicated his indispensible L’île de Chypre, sa si-
tuation presente et ses souvenirs du Moyen Âge to the newly installed
British governor of Cyprus, Sir Garnet Wolseley, in 1879,2 the
British never claimed Famagusta for scholarship. Both George
Jeffery and Rupert Gunnis would publish valuable overviews of
Famagusta’s buildings,3 but it was the French scholar Camille En-
2 louis de mAs lAtrie, L’île de Chypre, sa situation presente et ses souvenirs du
Moyen Âge, Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1879.
3 GeorGe Jeffery, A Description of the Historic Monuments of Cyprus. Studies
in the Archaeology and Architecture of the Island, Nicosia, W. J. Archer, 1918; ruPert
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INTRODUCTION
lart who took possession of – and still dominates – the study of
Famagusta’s buildings. His monumental L’Art gothique et la Renais-
sance en Chypre of 1899 remains authoritative today, as demon-
strated by the fact that all major modern publications on Fama-
gusta’s architecture – with the sole exception of Michael Walsh’s
edited volume of 20124 – are either a translation or an updating
of his work.5 This durability reflects both Enlart’s own exception-
al capability, and Famagusta’s fraught condition. Excavations and
repair work overseen by Theophilus Mogabgab in the 1930s and
40s were suspended throughout the troubled years of the 1950s
and early 60s, and emphatically terminated by the Turkish inva-
sion of 1974.6 A courageous new initiative to study the physical
remains of the city, spearheaded by Thierry Soulard and Cathe-
rine Otten-Froux in the 1990s,7 has been germinal to the studies
Gunnis, Historic Cyprus. A Guide to its Towns and Villages, Monasteries and Castles,
London, Methuen, 1936.
4 Medieval and Renaissance Famagusta. Studies in Architecture, Art and History, edd.
Michael J. K. Walsh, Peter W. Edbury, Nicholas S. H. Coureas, Farnham, Surrey
and Burlington, Vermont, Ashgate, 2012.
5 CAmille enlArt, L’art gothique et la Renaissance en Chypre, 2 voll., Paris, E.
Leroux,1899; CAmille enlArt, Gothic Art and the Renaissance in Cyprus, trans. and
ed. David Hunt, London, Trigraph in association with the A.G. Leventis Foun-
dation, 1987; L’art gothique en Chypre, edd. Jean-Bernard de Vaivre, Philippe Plag-
nieux, Paris, Diffusion de Boccard, 2006 (Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions
et Belles-Lettres, 34); Monuments médiévaux de Chypre. Photographies de la mission de
Camille Enlart en 1896, edd. Jean-Bernard de Vaivre, Philippe Plagnieux, Paris, As-
sociation des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 2012, pp. 79-201.
6 theoPhilus moGABGAB, An Unidentified Church in Famagusta, in «Report of
the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus», (1939), pp. 89-96; theoPhilus mo-
GABGAB, Excavations and Researches in Famagusta, 1937-1939, in «Report of the
Department of Antiquities, Cyprus», (1951), pp. 181-190.
7 L’art gothique en Chypre; thierry soulArd, L’architecture gothique grecque du
royaume des Lusignan: les cathédrales de Famagouste et Nicosie, in Identités croisées en un
milieu méditerranéen: le cas de Chypre (Antiquité – Moyen Âge), Textes issus d’un col-
loque organisé par le Groupe de recherche d’histoire de l’Université de Rouen, 11-13 mars
2004, edd. Sabine Fourrier, Gilles Grivaud, Mont-Saint-Aignan, Universités de
Rouen et du Havre, 2006, pp. 355-384; CAtherine otten-froux, Une enquête
à Chypre au XVe siècle: le Sindicamentum de Napoleone Lomellini, capitaine génois de
Famagouste, 1459, Nicosia, Cyprus Research Centre, 2000 (Texts and Studies in
the History of Cyprus, 36); eAd., Notes sur quelques monuments de Famagouste à la
fin du Moyen Âge, in Mosaic: Festschrift for A. H. S. Megaw, edd. Judith Herrin, Mar-
garet Mullett, Catherine Otten-Froux, London, British School at Athens, 2001,
pp. 145-154; eAd., Un notaire vénitien à Famagouste au XIVe siècle: Les actes de Sime-
one, prêtre de San Giacomo dell’Orio, (1362-1371), «Θησαυρίσματα», XXXIII (2003),
15-179. Dr. Otten-Froux’s curiosity about the buildings and objects cited in her
texts has been a steady stimulus to the art historians.
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INTRODUCTION
offered in this volume. Facilitated by the opening in 2003 of the
border that still divides Cyprus, these studies are being joined to-
day by a veritable surge of interest in Famagusta that has accom-
panied Cyprus’ integration into the European Union in 2004, and
Famagusta’s enrollment on the World Heritage Fund’s Watch List
of Endangered Monuments in 2008.
The prospects for Famagusta’s future have brightened in the
wake of this enrollment.8 Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize
here that the conditions for its study remain significantly limited,
and that these restrictions have fundamentally shaped the work
presented in the ensuing chapters. Opportunity to view and meas-
ure the monuments in medieval Famagusta has been unimpeded,9
but there was no question in this project of any archaeological or
other intervention. Thus all archaeological observations on archi-
tectural fabric, building history, functional and liturgical adaptation
of worship spaces, accommodations for burial, evidence of actual
interments, and found objects of daily use are based on long-past
excavations, most recently by Theophilus Mogabgab in the 1940s.
The chapters are based above all upon keen observation, made in
existing light, on the surface, and without scaffolding. Under these
conditions, foundations and many structural features of buildings
remain inaccessible, and paintings are legible only with the most
concentrated patience. Only months-long scrutiny of the roofless
walls of Saint George of the Greeks in differing seasons, times of
day, and lighting conditions permitted Maria Paschali’s perception
of the paintings’ many unique features; Michele Bacci developed
pioneering methods with high-resolution digital images, coaxing
remarkable insights from what look from the ground like the mer-
est shadows. In time, technologically based archaeological sound-
ings, structural analyses, and programs of fresco conservation will
surely amplify the evidence offered here. It rests on the keenest
and most considered perception possible today.
8 See in particular the restoration and consolidation of the church of Saints
Peter and Paul by USAID-SAVE: W.C.S. remsen, müGe sevketoG˘lu, husAyn
kuCuksu, A. Aslier, BArBArA rossmiller, Church of Sts. Peter & Paul-Sinan Pa¸sa
Mosque (c. 1360), Famagusta, Cyprus. Critical Structural and Emergency Masonry Re-
pairs, Final Report, US-AID SAVE, January 25, 2011. I am grateful to Barbara Ross-
miller for providing me a copy of this report, prepared for the building’s formal
reopening on 25 January 2011.
9 We owe particular thanks to Müge Sevketog˘lu for facilitating our visits.
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