Alexios Angelos Komnenos, a Patron without History?

Abstract

This article focuses on the superb quality of the painted cycle of the twelfth-century Byzantine church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi. Rather than extolling the high quality as an end in itself, however, the article uses the cycle's excellence as a way of gaining access to the figure of the donor, a distinguished but historically almost wholly unknown Byzantine aristocrat, Alexios Angelos Komnenos. Reading in the cycle's aesthetic and iconographic choices the characteristics of its donor, the paper maintains that Alexios was a man with exquisite artistic taste, high social aspirations, and a keen interest in current political and ecclesiastic events. Moreover, as a patron of an important monastic foundation in twelfth-century Macedonia, Alexios also played a significant role in the political and cultural dominion that his family established in the region at that time.