This lecture is going to penetrate below the painted surface of icons trying to investigate their technical background.
It will focus on working drawings, in the form of pricked and imprinted cartoons employed by icon painters at the time when icons were massively produced in Venetian Crete and from which they spread to mainland Greece and the Ionian islands.

The material of working drawings that I will use comes from the portfolio of Andreas Xyngopoulos at the Benaki Museum, which contains 452 working drawings and was co-published in 2015 by the Benaki Museum and the A.G. Leventis Foundation thanks to a generous funding from the latter.