Hieromonk Damascene is the most prominent painter on Mount Athos at the turn of the 18th century. He stemmed from Ioannina and he came to Mount Athos as a young painter in the 80s of the 17th century, where he stayed all of his life. Having learned the basics of the art of painting at a workshop, which had been invited to Mount Athos apparently from Epirus, separated from it and established a workshop of his own, which dominated on Mount Athos for more than two decades and used to undertake large scale works in lots of monasteries like Dionysiou, Docheiariou, Vatopedi, Karakallou, and the Great Lavra as well as in Skyros island. He himself has also painted numerous icons, which are kept in various Athonite monasteries as well as in churches in Northern Greece, Bulgaria, and Cyprus and in various private and state collections in Switzerland, Russia, Greece, and Lebanon. Damascene worked in a transitional artistic period on Mount Athos and he incorporated trends from various artistic origins. At his time local painting activity on Mount Athos had just started again after an abrupt cessation of more than two decades and was characterized by awkwardness towards the paintings of the old masters due to the lack of painters capable of teaching the following generation of local artists. He developed his own distinct style. Having stayed at Docheiariou Monastery for a relevant long time he indulged in the work of Tzortzis, who had painted the main church of it. He scrutinized his paintings and his iconographic programme and was extensively influenced by him. Besides, he studied the works of the other masters who had worked on Mount Athos in the 16th century, Theophanes the Cretan and Frangos Castellanos, and borrowed specific elements from them. Avoiding innovations he tried to keep up the byzantine tradition, as he saw it in the work of the masters he had studied. Damascene’s eagerness to improve his work by studying the work of old masters is clear in his late works. He was heavily criticized by the well-known painter Dionysius of Fourna, who strongly disliked Damascene’s style of painting and guided young painters not to follow untalented painters like him but to study instead the works of old byzantine masters like Panselinos in Protaton. Damascene’s response was to go to the church of Protaton, where he tried to copy the late byzantine style of Panselinos’s works there. Hieromonk Damascene was a man of knowledge and a good grounding.
