THESSALONIKI, Greece — Crime-solving techniques applied to a medieval illuminated manuscript in Paris may have solved a centuries-old puzzle — the true identity of a leading Byzantine painter who injected humanity into the rigid sanctity of Orthodox religious art.
A contemporary of Giotto, considered the father of Western painting, the artist conventionally known as Manuel Panselinos was equally influential in a totally different tradition that's largely overlooked in the West.
But nothing is known of his life, and scholars now believe Panselinos was just a nickname that eventually supplanted the real name of the man for whom it was coined — likely Ioannis Astrapas, from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki.
The art of Byzantium, that decorates churches across Greece, Serbia and other Orthodox countries, stands out for the stark formalism of its elongated, glowering saints, quasi-cubist mountains and doe-eyed Madonnas.
Work attributed to Panselinos, from the late 13th and early 14th centuries, is considered the finest produced in an empire that straddled Europe and Asia and endured from the fall of Rome until the capture of the imperial capital Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Art historians had long suspected that the name — Greek for "full moon" — could have originated as a nickname for some member of the so-called Macedonian School of painting, based in Thessaloniki.
Recent research by a Greek monk and linguistics scholar linked ''Panselinos'' with Macedonian School painter Astrapas. Now court handwriting expert Christina Sotirakoglou has matched lettering on a manuscript tentatively attributed to Astrapas with characters on a church painting in northern Greece, long seen as Panselinos' best work.
Father Cosmas Simonopetritis, a former senior administrator in Mount Athos, the semiautonomous monastic community where the Protato church stands, says Sotirakoglou's and his own research "clearly prove" Panselinos' real identity.