Allegory of the Holy Communion

Crete surrendered to the Ottomans in 1669 after a siege that had run for more than 20 years, and painters trained in the Cretan manner carried it west, to the Ionian islands and to Venice. This panel belongs to the decades on either side of 1700, which is as close as the National Gallery will date it, and the museum gives no painter for it. The craft is the old one, pigment bound with egg yolk on a wooden panel, the method of the icon workshops. The subject came from elsewhere. Allegories of the Holy Communion entered Orthodox painting from Western models spread by engravings, and other Greek panels of the same theme survive, one of them in the Byzantine and Christian Museum a short walk away in Athens. This one is wide and low, about 91 centimetres across and 57 high.