The birth of portrait in the orthodox space: representations of an individual in Greek books printed in Bucharest and in Venice at the beginning of the 18th century.
First Greek typographies, organized to provide churches with liturgical texts and to disseminate anti-Latin polemical writings among the Orthodox flock, emerged in the West, primarily in Venice with its considerable Orthodox Greek population. At the end of the 17th century, the printing presses with Greek type appeared also in Romanian principalities due to the support of local princes. The long Western tradition of publishing in Greek influenced in significant way book printing in Eastern Europe. Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem and his successor Chrysanthus Notaras, who were the most important promoters of Greek book publishing in Romanian principalities, were closely connected with Western circles of intellectuals, especially with those, who were active in book publishing. Orthodox church hierarchs used all opportunities for the dissemination of Orthodox texts, collaborating in book editing with Western publishers and trying to introduce new editing practices to their own typographies. One of such inventions was the introduction of modern Western-style figural portraits of the authors or patrons, previously represented in the editions only by their coats of arms. The first example of such illustration in a book published in Bucharest is the famous portrait of the patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem, integrated in the “History of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem” (1715, 1722?). The present paper focuses on the “invention of the portraits” of individuals, spread in the Orthodox world from the beginning of the 18th century, their stylistic particularities and the collaboration of patriarchs of Jerusalem Dositheus and Chrysanthos with Parisian and Venetian etchers in order to embellish editions, issued for the Orthodox readers under their auspices.