The painter of the Deposition

Two artists worked on the frescoes of the exonarthex, who present completely different artistic personalities from a stylistic point of view, although they collaborated to carry out a single iconographic program. One of them was conventionally called the painter of the Deposition, from the famous homonymous fresco of the exonarthex. He also painted the individual prophets and saints of the west wall and the scenes of the south, which begin with Christ being led to the praetorium and end with the unbelief of Thomas. The figures he designs are rendered plastically, slender or corpulent with small heads and thick necks. Their movements are intense, the folds of the clothes are plastically rendered. The mountainous landscape of the compositions develops in height and culminates in a cascade. The artist expresses in a unique way for Byzantine art, with gestures, movements, but mainly with facial expressions, the dramatic and expressionistic sense of divine Passion and human pain. The same painter is also attributed to figures of saints and scenes of the main church, such as the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the Nipter, the Last Supper and the Three Children in the Furnace.