UNKNOWN MASTER, Italian
(active in the 1290s)

Scenes from the New Testament: The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas)

1290s
Fresco
Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi

This anonymous painter is called the Master of Arrest after this scene painted in the Upper Church. The fresco is located below the Nativity in the clerestory of the south wall in the second bay of the nave.

Frescoes painted on the nave walls of the Upper Church in Assisi pair Old Testament stories on the right side with the life of Christ on the left. In the nave scene of the Kiss of Judas, painted by an unidentified Roman master, we see how Roman-trained artists adopted Early Christian and Byzantine prototypes with their solid figural mass, and modeled drapery forms revealing the body beneath them to enliven stories from the life of Christ.




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