The bay of Cattaro (Kotor) school of icon-painting 1680-1860
2014
Relying on post-Byzantine tradition, eleven painters from five generations of
the Dimitrijevic-Rafailovic family, accompanied by Maksim Tujkovic, painted
several thousand icons and several hundred iconostases between the late
seventeenth and the second half of the nineteenth century. They worked in
major Orthodox Christian monasteries in Montenegro, Kosovo and Metohija,
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Dalmatia, but their works can mostly be found in
modest village churches in the Bay of Kotor (Cattaro) and on the South
Adriatic coast. The decoration of these churches was financially supported by
the local population headed by elders. Along with a reconstruction of their
biographies and a chronological overview of their major works, this paper
seeks to trace stylistic changes in the Bay of Kotor school of icon-painting.
While simply varying a thematic repertory established in earlier periods, the
painters from the Bay of Kotor were gradually introducing new details and
themes adopted from Western European Baroque art under indirect influences
coming from the monastery of Hilandar, Corfu, Venice and Russia. This process
makes this indigenous school of icon-painting, which spanned almost two
centuries, comparable to the work of Serbian traditional religious painters
(zografs) and illuminators active north of the Sava and Danube rivers after
the Great Migration of the Serbs (1690). Despite differences between the two,
which resulted from different cultural and historical circumstances in which
Serbs lived under Ottoman, Venetian and Habsburg rules, similarities in
iconography and style, which were inspired by an urge to counteract
proselytic pressures, are considerably more important.
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