Page 57 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter I
of the wall surfaces. It seems that Mihail Astrapas and Eutychios have applied this par- ticular experience in their work inside the relatively small interior of the chapel of Saints Joachim and Anna at the Monastery of Studenica (c.1316). After all, both Panselinos and Mihail Astrapas were from Thessaloniki and it is almost entirely undoubted that they would have met if not even cooperated in one of the ateliers of Thessaloniki, or perhaps even worked in the chapel of St Euthymios together. The dates of their work allow us to make such a speculation.
The peculiar interior in the monastery of Gračanica is characteristic for its high ceil- ings and a somewhat narrow space of the naos. This prevents the observer from appre- ciating many of the frescoes in the upper sections. However, the image of Christ the Pantokrator in the dome of Gračanica (image 55) gazes at the observer most directly, with the austerity of the analogous depiction at Daphni (image 13), and the wisdom of Christ’s portrayal in Deesis at Hagia Sofia in Constantinople. Christ the Pantokrator at Gračanica, is undoubtedly the work of Mihail Astrapas and Eutychios. This is the most representa- tive rendering of this particular type of Christ’s portrait that has been preserved from the Byzantine epoch. The carefully rendered proportions of Christ’s torso, the slow, cos- mic-like motion implied in the stretched clothing, and the movement of the blessing hand, are crowned with Christ’s austere and wisdom-imbued gaze. As seen in image 55 it is as if the depiction of Christ absorbs the viewer into the actual space of the dome.
In 1315 Georgios Kallierges decorated the church of Christ the Saviour in Veria (Greece) and perhaps the church of St Vlasios, also in Veria (the painting in the latter has not been published yet). In the church of Christ the Saviour he signed his work and included a statement that he is “the best of all painters in Thessaly.”41 Through his painting Kallierg- es demonstrated an intense creativity concerned with the inner world. This inner world is primarily conveyed through a very particular approach to colour.
As it can be observed in the Dormition of the Virgin in the church of Christ the Sav- iour in Veria (image 45), in spite of depicting the figures in dynamic motion, through his drawing, Kallierges projects a serene kind of stillness. In this composition the purple-blue and red-earth nuances, used in certain features, relate the entire theme to the deep blue colour of the sky in the background. Together with the golden-colour halos, the ochre which is used for Christ’s robes, as well as in few other segments of the composition, softly balances the dominant nuances of blue and purple. The overall atmospheric out- come of this fine chromatic combination is reminiscent of the ambivalent colour that the
41 Μαρία Καμπούρη-Βαμβούκου και Θανάσης Παπαζώτος, Η Παλαιολόγεια Ζωγραφική στη Θεσσαλονίκη (Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Εξάντας, 2003), 18.
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