The Dormition of the Virgin Mary

This small canvas, 45 by 34 centimetres, is dated to about 1753, just before the painter began the ceiling of the church of Panagia Faneromeni in Zakynthos, the largest commission he ever took. The National Gallery keeps preliminary material for that ceiling, and this picture carries one of its subjects. It is the feast of 15 August, the Virgin asleep on her bier with the apostles gathered around her, a scene Greek painters had repeated for centuries. The handling is what had changed. The Ionian islands were Venetian territory then, and painters there had left egg tempera on wood for oil on canvas, which is what you are looking at here. On the Faneromeni vault the Virgin took the place an Orthodox congregation expected Christ Pantokrator to occupy. That ceiling came down in the earthquake of 1953, and of its scenes only the Nativity of the Virgin survives, on Zakynthos.