International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Konstantinos Vafeiades
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece; 
[e-mail]
Byzantine Painting Treatises: 
Fact or Conjecture? The Case of 
Codex Panteleimoniensis 259
The use of painting manuals in Byzantium is not fully documented. The first complete, 
extensive and well-structured painting manual dates from the post-Byzantine period. It is about 
the book «Hermeneia tes zographikes technes», which was written by the hieromonk Dionysios 
between 1729 and 1733.
So far no earlier manual of such completeness and orderly structure and as Dionysios’ Hermeneia 
has been found. Fragments of technical advice are preserved in Codex Vaticanus Graecus 209, fol. 
284v (ca. 1355) and in Codex Vaticanus Graecus 214, fols. 1r-3v (15
th
c.), which is attributed to the 
metropolite of Kiev and bibliographer Isidore. The detailed description of a saint’s physiognomy which 
occurs in numerous Byzantine texts, such as the Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitane, belongs to 
the ancient tradition of the ostentatious orations. Therefore, the evidence we have from the Byzantine 
period is insufficient for a proper documentation of the existence of painting manuals in Byzantium. 
Nevertheless, a codex in the monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Mount Athos (Gr. 259), dating 
from the 16
th
century, includes Byzantine material relating to painting. A complete uncorrupted 
text on pages 1r - 37v gives us a great deal of information about mural and icon painting, especially 
quotations from the Bible, patristic apophthegmata, and epigrams of all kinds. Even so, there is 
not a single reference to how somebody can paint the portrait of a saint or a biblical scene. So the 
content of the codex 259 has no relation to what we know from Dionysios’ Hermeneia. Furthermore 
the metrical list of the emperors’ names and that of the patriarchs of Constantinople, which are 
included in this manuscript, are concluded by the end of the reign of the emperor Andronikos II 
(1328). The epigrams of the same codex occur as well into the Palaeologan monuments determining 
the date of the context of this manuscript to the first half of the 14
th
century.