The Landscape of Medieval Greece 337
connection with French masons, the Gothic forms that reached the shores
of the Mediterranean are less ornate and heavier than their counterparts in
northern France reminiscent of earlier Romanesque architecture.30 Despite
the fact that certain of these elements seem to have appeared on Greek soil
even before the Fourth Crusade, the presence of a broken arch has typically
(and conveniently) signaled a post-1204 date.31 Following Camille Enlart,
Ramsay Traquair, and Antoine Bon scholars have taken the appearance of any
of these features on a monument as an unmistakable sign of western influence
without questioning its provenance or possible infiltration into the local archi-
tectural idiom as may be the case with the numerous rural churches of Crete
that are covered with a pointed barrel vault.32
The maritime republic of Venice participated in an altogether different world
of political and artistic affiliations. Its unique cultural links with Byzantium
and its commercial orientation towards the Levant (Syria and Egypt) pro-
moted an artistic style geared to Mediterranean forms, showing deference to
Byzantine and later on to Islamic traditions33 as well as lingering associations
with bulkier Romanesque forms that were particularly important in the south
of France and Spain.34 Byzantine architectural or decorative forms had a par-
ticular cultural and political significance in Venice itself because within the
30 Maria Georgopoulou, “Gothic Architecture and Sculpture in Latin Greece and Cyprus,” in
Byzance et l’extérieur, ed. Michel Balard, Byzantina Sorbonensia 21 (Paris, 2005), pp. 1–28,
esp. 3.
31 In an earlier article Charalambos Bouras cautions the reader not to interpret the broken
arch as an absolute sign of a date after 1204; cf. Charalambos Bouras, “Επανεξέταση του
καθολικού της Ζωοδόχου Πηγής, Δερβενοσάλεσι” [“Reaxamination of the Monastic Church
of Zoodochos Pege, Dervenosalesi”], Δελτίον Χριστιανικής Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας, ser. 4, 17
(1993–94), 32. Three churches (Hagia Moni in Nauplion of 1149, Taxiarches in Kalyvia,
Karystos, and in the monastery of St. John the Theologian in Patmos) display broken
arches that date before the Fourth Crusade. See also Charalambos Bouras, Byzantine and
Post-Byzantine Architecture in Greece (Athens, 2006).
32 Maria Vassilaki, “The Church of Virgin Gouverniotissa at Rotamies, Crete” (unpublished
doctoral thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1986), 110. The pointed
barrel vault was systematically used in France by 1120–30 that is to say before the full-
blown arrival of the Gothic style; cf. Henry and Emmanuel Du Ranquet, “De l’emploi des
arcs-doubleaux sous les berceaux romans,” Bulletin monumental 98 (1939), 189–214, at 201.
33 Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian
Architecture, 1100–1500 (New Haven, 2000).
34 Maria Georgopoulou, “Gothic Architecture and Sculpture in Latin Greece and Cyprus,” in
Byzance et l’extérieur, ed. Michel Balard, Byzantina Sorbonensia 21 (Paris, 2005), pp. 1–28;
Marcel Durliat, L’art dans le Royaume de Majorque: Débuts de l’art Gothique en Roussillon,
en Cerdagne et aux Baléares, (Toulouse, 1962); and Marvin Trachtenberg, “Gothic/Italian