Old Styles Die Hard: Late Gothic, Classicism, and Architectural Nostalgia in Venetian Cyprus

Scholarly literature on early modern architecture in Northern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula has been muddling the waters of canonical architectural-historical periodization by problematizing the continuous relevance of Late Gothic styles alongside the Italianate all’antica design mode long after the end of the Middle Ages. Termed “Renaissance Gothic” or “Modern Gothic,” this strand of architectural discourse has been shown to have been at once rooted in local building tradition and inventive in its handling of surface effects, microarchitectural detailing, and vaulting design. In the Latin-ruled polities of the Eastern Mediterranean, late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Gothic architecture not only comes in short supply, but also exhibits little of the flamboyancy of its Western European counterpart. In Venetian Cyprus (1474/89–1571), a handful of urban church and public buildings, together with a small number of loose and reused architectural fragments, display Gothicizing features redolent of the grand Latin cathedrals of the Lusignan period (1192–1474/89). The paper takes the Greek cathedral of the Panagia Hodegetria in Nicosia as its starting point in examining the remarkable currency of past visual forms at a time when the large-scale refortification works carried out under the Serenissima attracted a host of Italian military engineers and masons to the island, steeped in the principles of classicizing design. Through the lens of the Hodegetria’s unmitigatedly historicist countenance, it will address the social issues that led to the sixteenth-century revalorization of Lusignan Gothic architecture as a legitimate alternative to officially-sanctioned architectural classicism.