by Vlisidi A., Doulamis A., Bakolas A. and Moropoulou A.
ABSTRACT
The Cretan School was an important school of hagiography that flourished during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, while Crete was still under Venetian rule and reached its peak after the Fall of Constantinople, being the central expression of Greek painting. Cretan artists developed a particular style of painting under the influence of both Eastern and Western artistic traditions and movements. By the end of the 15th century, Cretan artists had established a distinctive style of hagiography, distinguished by the dark brown flesh formation and the dense microscopic highlights on the cheeks of the faces, the bright colours in the garments and, finally, the colour balance of the overall composition. This paper focuses on investigating the nuances of the images of this School in order to determine whether the artists of this period follow a common colour pattern. For this purpose, the CIELAB colour analysis method was used, during which the three colour parameters (L*, a* and b*) were measured in 48 digital images of representative hagiographies of the Cretan School of period 1 and from these the combined colour parameters (h*, C* and E*) were calculated through mathematical processing. The statistical analysis of all the interrelationships of the parameters revealed two strong linear correlations between a) the brightness of the images (L*) and their total colour coefficient (E*) as well as b) the yellow tint coefficient (Δb*) of the images with the colour saturation coefficient ΔC*. The corresponding linear relationships were found a) (ΔE*)=1.218 (ΔL*)- 9.69, with R2=0.91 and b) (Δb*) = 1,043 (ΔC*)+0.36 with R2=0.97) which proves that yellow/blue hue prevails in all images and that the brightness of the image depends on the geometric mean of the set of all colours. Due to the high correlation of Δb* with ΔC* (R2=0.97) this information could be used as a preliminary estimate of whether an unknown hagiography could belong to the Cretan School.
