Vision of the Heavenly City in Jošanica Monastery

Abstract

The article discusses the iconography of an enigmatic fresco in the narthex of the Jošanica monastery in Central Serbia (dated 1430-33), the meaning of which was unknown due to its unique iconography and lost captions. After the discovery of the mural paintings in the 1950s and their cleaning during the 1960s, the fresco was regarded by early reports to be part of the cycle of a hermit’s life. In his 1995 study on the narthex program, S. Petković proposed the identification of the fresco as the Vision of Eulogios, providing as iconographic parallels a fresco in the Pherapont monastery and an icon in the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow. Reconsidering the fresco’s structure, the author of this article argues that the mentioned Russian examples do not match the scene in Jošanica and that the fresco represents a Vision of the Heavenly City based on Isaiah’s prophecy from Is. 26:1- 11. Although the fresco is hapax within medieval wall paintings, the article discusses examples from manuscript illumination which provide analogies, the closest parallel being the marginal illustration of Isaiah’s Ode in the Kiev Psalter from 1397.