Manual of Christian Iconography

of Dionysius, another anonymous Hermeneia tes zographikes technes Interpretation of the Art of Painting, which Dionysius himself has integrated using altered phrasing in his own work, and which Porphyrius Uspensky published several years ago in a Russian translation 1. The reader can find its Greek text here between pages 237 and 253.

The writing of Dionysius was destined to be debased at the hands of the notorious forger Constantine Simonides. He was young in age, and the nephew of one of the Athonite monks, residing on Mount Athos at the time when Didron was visiting the monasteries there, searching for Byzantine icons and codices of Dionysius's writings. After Didron departed, Simonides, in the year 1840, promoted himself as the discoverer of the supposedly genuine? text of Dionysius’s work, and he hurried to sell or gift a copy of it—in which he relegated Dionysius to the 15th century—to Didron 2. Fortunately, Didron and his collaborator Durand did not take this into account for the essential parts of the Hermeneia Interpretation in their annotated French translation published in 1845, having been content for those parts, it seems, only with the copy of the text previously sent to them from Athos 3. However, they did unsuspectingly prefer Simonides’ materials for the hagiological section of the Hermeneia, as will be demonstrated below, and this was due to their likely lack of a complete copy of the Hermeneia. Simonides then wished to exploit for his own material gain the impression made in Europe by

1) Erminiia ili nastavlenie k zhivopisnomu iskusstvu, napisannoe, neizvestno kem, vskore posle 1566 goda. Pervaia ierusalimskaia rukopis 17-go veka Hermeneia or instruction on the art of painting, written by an unknown author shortly after 1566. First Jerusalem manuscript of the 17th century. Kiev, 1867, 8vo, 56 pages (cf. Trudy Kiev. Dukh. Akademii Works of the Kiev Theological Academy 1867, vol. 3, pp. 139–192). This contains, in Russian, the first three appendices of the present book.

2) Simonides was on Athos in the year 1839 learning the art of painting. See the curious biography of Simonides recorded anonymously by Demosthenes Chaviaras of Symi in the Lexicon of History and Geography by S. Voutyras, vol. 7, pp. 580–583.

3) The Simonidean manuscript exists today in the Bibliothèque de Chartres (H. Omont, Inventaire sommaire etc., vol. 3, p. 367, no. 38); it bears the following inscription: "Guide of the painters as to the ecclesiastical order; written by Dionysius, hieromonk from Fourna of Agrafa, in the year 1458. Constantine Simonides found it on Mount Athos, on the 15th of March, 1840, and copied it."