(FIG. 12-27). It is an image of passionate grief. The artist captured
Christ’s followers in attitudes, expressions, and gestures of quite hu-
man bereavement. Joseph of Arimathea and the disciple Nicodemus
kneel at his feet, while Mary presses her cheek against her dead son’s
face and Saint John clings to Christ’s left hand. In the Gospels, neither
Mary nor John was present at the entombment of Christ. Their inclu-
sion here, as elsewhere in Middle Byzantine art, intensified for the
viewer the emotional impact of Christ’s death. Representations such
as these parallel the development of liturgical hymns recounting the
Virgin’s lamenting her son’s death on the Cross.
At Nerezi, the painter set the scene in a hilly landscape below a
blue sky—a striking contrast to the abstract golden world of the mo-
saics favored for church walls elsewhere in the Byzantine Empire.
The artist strove to make utterly convincing an emotionally charged
realization of the theme by staging the Lamentation in a more nat-
ural setting and peopling it with fully modeled actors. This alternate
representational mode is no less Byzantine than the frontal, flatter
figures of Ravenna. In time, this more naturalistic style would also
be emulated in Italy (FIG. 19-9).
PARIS PSALTER Another example of this classical-revival style
is a page from a book of the Psalms of David. The so-called Paris Psalter
(FIG. 12-28) reasserts the artistic values of the Greco-Roman past
12-28David composing the Psalms, folio 1 verso of the Paris Psalter,
ca. 950–970. Tempera on vellum, 1 2 –^18 10 –^14 . Bibliothèque Nationale,
Paris.
During the so-called Macedonian Renaissance, Byzantine painters
revived the classical style. David is here portrayed as if a Greek hero
and is accompanied by personifications of Melody, Echo, and Bethlehem.
12-27Lamentation over the dead Christ, wall painting, Saint Pantaleimon, Nerezi, Macedonia, 1164.
Working in the Balkans in an alternate Byzantine mode, this painter staged the emotional scene of the Lamentation in a hilly landscape below a blue
sky and peopled it with fully modeled figures.
334 Chapter 12 BYZANTIUM1 in.