Christ and the Samaritan Woman Fresco: Hodegetria, Mystras

Three bearded heads, packed so closely that their haloes overlap, occupy this detail of Christ’s meeting with the woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:5–42). They belong to the Christ and the Samaritan Woman fresco in the narthex of the Hodegetria at Mystras, the katholikon of the Brontochion Monastery, also known as the Aphentiko, whose painted decoration dates from the early fourteenth century. Neither Christ nor the Samaritan woman appears within the detail. Its subject is the company around them: two dark-haired men and, between them and set a little higher, an elder with grey hair and a rounded beard.

Three disciples from the scene of Christ and the Samaritan Woman, narthex of the Hodegetria (Aphentiko), Brontochion Monastery, Mystras, early fourteenth century.

Battered as they are, the heads keep enough of their modelling to show the quality that has placed the paintings of this church among the finest of the Palaiologan period, and enough of their arrangement to be read against the Gospel narrative they illustrate.

Three Haloed Heads in the Narthex Fragment

Cut off at the shoulders by the photograph, the figures look at first like a row of busts. They form part of a narrative scene, however, and the heads are turned accordingly. At the left of the composition a dark-haired figure, his full beard rendered in deep brown and olive, turns in three-quarter view towards the right, and his eyes follow the same direction. A reddish mantle crosses his shoulder, its folds marked near the neck by bands of lighter pink and ochre. The figure at the right repeats the movement with a different physical type: brown hair, a shorter beard, a flushed cheek. He too looks out of the detail towards the right. Below him a red garment meets a mass of very dark blue that fills the lower corner.

The elder in the middle interrupts this shared direction. His head is the most nearly frontal of the three, and his heavy-lidded eyes are lowered and drawn towards the left. Grey hair, laid in short curling locks against greenish tones and picked out with strokes of white, frames a forehead crossed by pale horizontal lines; the beard is full and rounded at the chin. Of his garment only a greenish-grey field remains, worn down to the pale plaster in irregular patches.

Each halo is a broad ochre-coloured disc, bounded by a thin red-brown line and an outer band of paler colour. The discs overlap one another and compress the three men into a single unit, the elder’s head placed highest. Above them the ground turns to a mottled reddish-violet, while at the upper left a lighter area carries traces of green too fragmentary to identify.

Losses are extensive.

A broad lacuna opens between the central and the right-hand heads. It exposes the grey, granular plaster beneath the paint layer and carries away part of both haloes and the area beside the right-hand face, down towards the shoulder. Elsewhere the surface is scored with scratches and pitted with small losses, and the central garment has suffered most. The faces are comparatively legible, and it is in the faces that the painter’s skill is concentrated.

Modelling, Colour and the Constantinopolitan Connection

All three heads follow the same procedure. Dark olive-green tones, corresponding to the proplasmos of Byzantine practice, establish the shadows along the jaw, under the cheekbones and in the eye sockets. The lit areas are built up in warm ochre and pink. Short, parallel white strokes then sharpen the structure: across the elder’s forehead, along the ridge of each long, straight nose, on the cheekbones and beneath the eyes. Red accents define the nostrils, the small mouths and the rims of the eyelids.

Within this common method the painter varied the effect considerably. In the left-hand head the olive shadow spreads so far across the cheek and beard that the face seems to emerge from darkness on one side only. The right-hand face is warmer, its pink cheek set against dark shading, and the elder’s is the coolest of the three: greenish greys in hair and beard, pale lines on the brow and a downward look that gives the head a contemplative weight. Age, colouring and bearing are distinguished, but the shared facial type (heavy brows, narrow nose, compact mouth) holds the group together.

Such handling places the fragment within the most ambitious painting of its time. The dedication of the church to the Hodegetria, its architectural type and the exceptional quality of its interior decoration have all been read as evidence of a direct link between Mystras and Constantinople. Melita Emmanuel, citing D. Mouriki, counts the paintings of the Hodegetria among the most brilliant of the Palaiologan period and relates them directly to Constantinopolitan painting.

Reading the Christ and the Samaritan Woman Fresco through John 4

In the account of the Fourth Gospel, Christ is alone when the woman comes to draw water, because his disciples have gone into the town to buy food (John 4:7–8). They return only after the conversation has reached its climax (John 4:26–27). John records that they were astonished to find him speaking with a woman, and that none of them asked what he wanted or why he was talking with her (John 4:27). The Orthodox Church reads the whole passage, John 4:5–42, at the Divine Liturgy on the fifth Sunday of Pascha, the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman.

The three haloed men in the detail are best understood as these returning disciples. The townspeople who later come out to meet Christ (John 4:30) would hardly have been given haloes, and the text offers no other group of companions. No inscription naming the individual apostles survives within the photographed detail, so any attempt to identify them would rest on physiognomy alone.

How, then, does the painter register the disciples’ surprise? Within the limits of the detail, he does so only through their glances. The two younger men look in the same direction, towards the right and beyond the edge of the photograph, while the elder lowers his eyes and turns them the other way. Whether this divergence was meant to convey the silent wonder of verse 27 cannot be settled from a detail that excludes the figures towards whom they look. The restraint of the heads, without a visible gesture or open mouth, at least suits a text in which the disciples are explicitly said to have kept quiet (John 4:27).

Water and Healing in the Narthex Programme

The Samaritan scene did not stand alone. In her study of the Mystras programmes, Melita Emmanuel describes a narthex cycle that includes the Teaching of Christ in the Temple, which she relates to Luke 4:18–19, and episodes and miracles of the ministry: the Healing of the Blind, the Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14–15), the Healing of the Man with Dropsy (Luke 14:1–6), Christ and the Woman of Samaria (John 4:5–42), and the Wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11). Further healings painted in the same church, among them the Paralytic at Bethesda (John 5:1–9), belong to the same early fourteenth-century decoration.

These scenes, especially those involving water, Emmanuel connects with the image painted on the tympanum over the entrance to the naos: the Virgin as the Life-giving Source, shown between her parents Joachim and Anna with two small flying angels. The image points to the Constantinopolitan monastery of the Theotokos of the Source, where healings of the blind and of people suffering from dropsy were reported. Its holy spring was actively promoted under Andronikos II. In the same period its feast was moved to the Friday after Easter, Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos composed its office, and the miracle at Cana was also celebrated in that church, on 8 January.

The Samaritan episode fits this pattern closely. At the well Christ promises the woman a water after which no one thirsts again, a water that becomes in the drinker a spring rising to eternal life (John 4:13–14). Emmanuel reads the water scenes of the narthex as carrying a baptismal symbolism and treats Cana as an image of the Eucharist. She attributes the composition of the programme to the founder, Abbot Pachomios, and sees in it the religious and monastic ideals of Theoleptos of Philadelphia and Patriarch Athanasios I of Constantinople, the two most influential prelates of Andronikos II’s reign. She also notes that cycles of Christ’s ministry became prominent in monumental painting in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

The selection itself has become a subject of research. Maria Alessia Rossi has examined the miracle cycles preserved in eight Byzantine churches of the early Palaiologan period. She asks why particular episodes were included or left out and considers the political and theological concerns that may lie behind those choices. Christ and the Samaritan Woman is among the subjects her analysis addresses. Visualizing Christ's Miracles in Late Byzantium

Pachomios and the Building of the Hodegetria

The church was built at the north-eastern edge of the Lower Town of Mystras by the hegumen Pachomios, archimandrite and great protosynkellos of the Peloponnese. Its date rests on the earliest written reference to the monument, a note recording the gift of a precious Gospel book by Metropolitan Nikephoros Moschopoulos in the year 6820 from the Creation, that is, 1311/12. In free translation the note reads: “This Gospel was dedicated to the monastery of the Most Holy Theotokos of the Brontochion by me, the humble Metropolitan of Crete and proedros of Lacedaemonia, Nikephoros, for the salvation of my soul.” The gift shows that church and monastery were already functioning by 1311/12, which is why construction is placed at the end of the first decade of the fourteenth century. Emmanuel gives a different range for the foundation, between 1313 and 1322. She also records that Pachomios obtained privileges for his monastery from the emperors Andronikos II and Michael IX, copies of whose chrysobulls were painted in the small south-western chapel.

The building introduced what came to be called the Mystras type. On the ground floor it has the plan of a basilica; on the upper floor, that of a complex five-domed cross-in-square church. The narthex, where the miracle cycle was painted, is also two-storeyed and rises to a dome of its own. The side aisles carry low domical vaults that support the upper floor, and on this floor stand the piers of the central dome and the four corner domes. Upstairs, the floor extends over the aisles, the narthex and the prothesis and diakonikon to form a continuous gallery. The type had distant forerunners in Early Christian and Middle Byzantine monuments, among them the chapel of St Nicholas at the Katapoliani on Paros, Hagia Eirene in Constantinople, Hagia Sophia at Bizye and the Church of the Transfiguration at Chernihiv. Scholars attribute its fully developed form to a change of plan during construction, when galleries were added for reasons connected with the ideology of the political leadership of Mystras. The same scheme was later used for the Pantanassa and for the remodelling of the Metropolis, while the Church of the Holy Apostles at Leontari in Arcadia follows the same basic design.

Conceived on a lavish scale, the interior once had large polychrome marble slabs lining the lower walls of the sanctuary, naos and narthex to a height of about 1.30 m, a costly form of revetment rarely used at that date even in the capital. At intervals within this zone, arched frames enclosed painted standing saints. Almost all of this has been destroyed, and only a few surviving pieces still indicate the quality and range of colour of the marbles.

The paintings have fared somewhat better, though unevenly. Some have been lost entirely and many others are badly worn. What survives still allows the iconographic programme and the organisation of the decoration to be reconstructed. The complex architecture, with its many separate spaces and surfaces, encouraged a larger number of iconographic units than a simpler church would have allowed, including Gospel narratives as well as isolated figures from the Old and New Testaments.

Sources

Emmanuel, M., “Religious Imagery in Mystra. Donors and Iconographic Programmes”, pp. 119–127. austriaca.at

Rossi, M. A., “Christ’s Miracles: Selection and Iconography”, in Visualizing Christ’s Miracles in Late Byzantium: Art, Theology, and Court Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2024, pp. 47–144.