The wall paintings of the thirteenth century in the Church of the Saviour at Zica

The monastery of Zica, located in central Serbia, contains some original early thirteenth century wall paintings, dated about 1220. These show two scenes from the Passion of Christ---the Crucifixion and the Deposition from the Cross---also the figures of eight apostles and two angels.;The poor state of preservation of all paintings makes their study difficult. Nevertheless, the faded remains of the life-size figural images still convey to the beholder a sense of dignity and grandeur attesting to classical artistic concepts, for example the contrapposto stances of the imposing figures of the apostles, suggestive of antique statuary. In the Crucifixion scene the figures of the Virgin and the Apostle John display an elegance and poise that is intrinsic to Byzantine metropolitan art. The figure of the crucified Christ shows a sense of monumentality that possibly reflects a nascent stage of the new classicizing "monumental" or "volume" style of the thirteenth century.;During the Latin rule between 1204 and 1261, which severely upset the longstanding artistic leadership of Constantinople, the evolution of Byzantine painting towards the "Palaeologan Renaissance" is uniquely represented by a sequence of Serbian monuments. The first wall paintings to display a progressive version of the new style appear to have been created in Milegeva during the 1220's, that is nearly contemporary with Zica.;The new classicizing features in Byzantine art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are said to have ultimately been adopted from a learned classical vocabulary of the art of the Macedonian Renaissance in the ninth and tenth centuries. The paintings in Zica give a quite unexpected support for that reasoning: A specific arrangement of the figures in the Deposition scene demonstrates an iconographic scheme that had become totally antiquated by the thirteenth century, yet was common in the Macedonian Renaissance. Equally surprising is a barely legible inscription in the Crucifixion scene, also reflecting a past tradition. Zica thus very likely is part of a deliberate revival of the Macedonian Renaissance.