Konstantinos Volanakis

Biography

In the account books of Afentoulis, a sugar merchant in Trieste, boats, ships and harbours appeared in the margins and between the columns of figures. They were drawn by a young clerk, Konstantinos Volanakis. His employer could have dismissed him, but decided otherwise.

Volanakis was born on 17 March 1837 in Heraklion, on Crete. His parents came from a small village, Volani, near Rethymno. He finished secondary school in 1856 on Syros and that same year, at the urging of his older brothers, went to Trieste to work as a bookkeeper. Afentoulis was related to his family (possibly he was the husband of his sister Polyxeni) and paid for his studies. In 1860 Volanakis entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His teacher is given as Karl von Piloty, and possibly also Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Among the Greek students there were Nikolaos Gyzis, Georgios Jakobides, Nikiphoros Lytras and Polychronis Lembesis.

His teachers disapproved of landscape, calling it a sign of painting in decline, and advised portraiture. Volanakis, it seems, had no success with portraits, and he stayed faithful to the sea.

The turning point came after the naval Battle of Lissa (1866), in which the Austrian fleet defeated the Italian. Emperor Franz Joseph announced a competition for a picture of the victory. Volanakis won it and received a thousand gold florins and the right to sail free for three years on ships of the Austrian navy. He made full use of these voyages and painted a great many canvases and sketches. The exact year of the competition is not known: 1869 is given, or a time soon after 1866. His “Battle of Lissa” is today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. After his studies he worked in Munich, Vienna and Trieste.

In 1883 Volanakis returned to Greece and settled in Piraeus, where his family had a pottery workshop. The reason given is the insistence of his wife, who found the cold German winters hard to bear. Gyzis, godfather of his daughter, warned him that in Athens paintings sold for next to nothing and that his career would suffer. Until 1903 Volanakis taught at the Athens School of Fine Arts, first elementary drawing and later drawing from plaster casts of statues. His pupils included Michalis Oikonomou and Sophia Laskaridou. He also ran a private school of his own. In 1889 he received the Silver Cross of the Order of the Redeemer.

The sea, ships and harbours remained his main subject. Together with Ioannis Altamouras he is counted among the most prominent Greek seascape painters, and together with Gyzis, Lytras, Jakobides and Theodoros Vryzakis he is placed in the academic realism of the Munich School. Bright works such as the “Fair in Munich” suggest to me a closeness to Impressionism, though to call him an Impressionist would be a stretch. His “Battle of Salamis” is well known: it was taken for the Battle of Actium, and a photograph of it still hangs in the council chamber of Preveza because of that mistake; the researcher Manolis Vlachos showed in 1974 that the subject was different, and that the queen on the prow of a ship is not Cleopatra but Artemisia. He painted “The Burning of a Turkish Frigate” more than once: the 1882 version is in the Naval Museum in Piraeus. Volanakis shows the burning ship, while the Turkish sailors in the water and the fireships are barely visible.

His last years were spent in modest circumstances: the family was large and his pictures fetched low prices. To earn money he arranged with a Piraeus framemaker to paint pictures to fit ready-made carved frames, rather than frames to fit pictures. Volanakis died in Piraeus on 29 June 1907. Five or six people came to the funeral. His works are held in the National Gallery of Greece, the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation and the Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation.