Byzantine History in Μικρογραφίαι of George Klontzas

Abstract

Μικρογραφίαι of George Klontzas (c. 1540‒1608), famous Cretan panel and a miniature painter, composed between 1590 and 1592, the most important illustrated Greek manuscript of its era, present, according to the artist’s interpretation, the key historical events and personalities of the Greek history up to his own times. In narrating them, it appears that Klontzas adopted the new political-ideological concept, emerged immediately after the Fall and inspired by Gennadios Scholarios, the first patriarch of Constantinople under the Ottomans, and his intellectual circle, which called for the acceptance of a new political circumstances ‒ the disappearance of Byzantium and the rise of the Ottoman Empire.