(b Nicosia, 23 Jan 1900; d Nicosia, 28 April 1994). Cypriot painter and teacher. From 1921 to 1923 he studied painting at the Royal College of Art in London, and in 1926 he returned to Cyprus, where he combined his painting with extensive art teaching at numerous schools. His earlier works show a certain amount of experimentation with modernist styles, particularly Cubism, but he was also concerned with the rendering of the human form as he observed it in the villages of Cyprus. At the Festival of Our Lady of Araka (1942; Nicosia, Gr. Embassy) shows his characteristically monumental and schematized female forms constructed of broad unified surfaces of colour with a similarly schematized but atmospheric landscape in the background. From the 1940s Diamantis depicted many of his subjects in a rather more realistic and individual manner. The four seated figures in Coachmen of Asmaalti (1943; Nicosia, State A.G.) have the vitality and character typical of many of his male subjects; generalized architectural forms also begin to appear, their broad surfaces intensifying the monumentality of the figures they frame. From the 1960s his works became more expressive, with a higher degree of generalization and use of abstract forms. His best-known work is the World of Cyprus (l. 17.5 m, 1967–72; Aristotelian U. Thessaloniki), a series of 11 acrylic panels. In it he depicts the architecture and colour of Cyprus, as well as its people and their relationships, presented to the viewer in the form of a great pageant, in which the individuality of particular characters and of Cyprus itself is set against the generalization of the human form and spirit. Diamantis had a major influence on succeeding generations of Cypriot artists.

• Diamantis, Adamantios
  • Cyprus, §V, 2: Ottoman and modern architecture, painting and sculpture