Sculpture in Venetian Crete, 1211 to 1669

Given in Greek, this lecture by Maria Vakondiou of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (FORTH) presents the two-volume work Η γλυπτική στη βενετική Κρήτη, 1211-1669 (Sculpture in Venetian Crete, 1211–1669), which she co-edited with Olga Gratziou in 2021. The book grew out of the research programme Western Art in Crete, which documented stone sculpture produced on the island during four and a half centuries of Venetian rule.

Vakondiou explains how the project recorded 376 detached and fragmentary pieces held in collections across Heraklion (Venetian Candia), Chania, Rethymno and Lasithi, alongside studies of surviving monuments, fountains, rural church tombs and heraldry. Two fragments from Candia show what such pieces preserve: a 14th-century marble foliage capital with parallels in the church of St Mark, and a defaced male portrait head whose deliberate mutilation may date either to the Ottoman period or to Venetian prohibitions against official self-promotion.

The talk outlines the five categories of the catalogue: architectural members, figural sculpture (including reliefs from Latin mendicant churches and an Orthodox relief of St Onuphrius), coats of arms, funerary monuments, and stone furnishings such as holy-water basins and fountain spouts. Vakondiou discusses the stones used, primarily local soft limestone, reused ancient and Early Byzantine Thasian marble, and red marble resembling Rosso di Verona at the Dominican church of St Peter. She also addresses stylistic dating, where Gothic forms persisted alongside all'antica motifs into the 16th century, the value of Giuseppe Gerola's early 20th-century photographs for tracing provenance and reuse, and what a reversed Franciscan IHS trigram from Chania indicates about stonemasons' working methods.