| The art of Rethymnon icon painter Emmanuel Tzane evolved over time, moving from the imitation of Byzantine tradition to the search for naturalness and the adoption of an Italianate technique. This is revealed by study of the iconographic figure of Aghios Govdelaas that the artist himself created: it first appeared in an engraving in an edition of the liturgy honouring the saint, which Tzane produced in Venice in 1661, and was repeated by him in altered form in a series of subsequent icons. This paper focuses on the way in which the new figure was created, models for it and the reasons it predominated in the 17th and 18th century, dislodging the earlier depiction of the saint as a Byzantine martyr. |