Constantinos Parthenis

This monumental work on paper is a highly-finished drawing for Parthenis' painting of The Virgin and Child for the church of Agios Alexandros in Paleo Faliro (fig. 1). Parthenis was also commissioned to decorate the inside of the whitewashed church of Agios Georgios in 1906-7, and would cover its walls with frescos marrying Byzantine iconography and a modern aesthetic (fig. 2). 

From the late works of Gysis onwards, Symbolism was the dominant stimulus for the visual vocabulary of Greek painting of the early Twentieth Century. Although this movement would heavily influence Parthenis in works such as Tree-Lined Road (lot 5), he would stray from the landscape idiom and embrace indigenous traditions: 'in his symbolist works he introduced the linear motifs of Attic vase painting; in religious themes he depicted the non-perspectival space of the Byzantine icon painters and made use of the horror vacui compositional element of folk art' (Antonis Kotidis, '20^th Century - The First Thirty Years,' in Lambraki-Plaka, ed., Marina Lambrakis-Plaka, Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 121). 

Fresco and wall-painting are nods to historic Byzantium, and the project would have had great appeal to Parthenis in its encouragement of symbolic and abstract interpretation as seen in Byzantine art. The lack of depth and the decorative positioning of the figures in the picture space make no genuine reference to reality, but to concepts and symbols that speak to worshippers and are infused with deep spiritual meaning.   

The project represented the artist's pride in Hellenic aesthetic tradition in a forum that would expose a primarily Greek audience to recognisable Christian symbols, and in this 'higher homeland' Parthenis would stage this heroic phase in Greek modernism. As stated by Marina Lambraki-Plaka, '... the essence of [his] style is an ideal Greece of myth, history and art, where the Olympian gods, Byzantine saints and heroes of the war of Independence all move about freely and are reconciled with an ease transcending time' (Marina Lambrakis-Plaka ed., Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 137).

FIG. 1, Constantinos Parthenis, The Virgin and Child, Agios Alexandros, Paleo Faliro
214D08100_comp

FIG. 2, Constantinos Parthenis in front of his finished murals in the church of Agios Georgios, Poros in 1907.
212D08100_comp