Fresco Painting in the Laskarid Realm

This chapter analyzes fragmentary remains of Laskarid fresco painting to connect the artistic developments before the Fourth Crusade in 1204 to Palaiologan painting in Constantinople after 1261. While in ruins and badly preserved, they warrant critical study and documentation given how they have been invoked in secondary scholarship as the new metropolitan art. The few remaining examples of Laskarid fresco painting are presented and reconstructed to an extent that future publications on thirteenth-century painting in the northeastern Mediterranean can make use of them. In identifying these frescoes as works of Laskarid patronage, I draw comparisons between Hagia Sophia in Nicaea and contemporaneous artworks I have found in Laskarid architectural phases at Pergamon, Anaïa, Nymphaion, and Thessaloniki, in the context of other thirteenth-century art and architectural works at Chios, Samos, Rhodes, Heraklea at Latmos, and Patmos. These works substantiate the first articulation of Laskarid mural art in the field and provide the necessary touchpoint for understanding the innovations of Palaiologan painting in the capital after 1261.