In the frescoes of St. Sophia at Ohrid and St. Pantelejmon at Nerezi (near Skoplje), one notices the more obvious Byzantine characteristics, the broad simple handling, the restrained emotion, and the flatness.
Byzantine mural decoration was an art rigidly controlled by the Church, not only as to the subjects illustrated, but also as to their exact disposition on the walls of the church. Artistically these pictures were as rigid as the scheme in which they were embodied. Any change in iconography was seldom fortuitous. Perhaps the most striking feature of this art is its frontality. The figures are designed to communicate with the observer and therefore they nearly always face him so as to include him in their company.
Serbian painting, however, soon developed on its own lines, and thirteenth and fourteenth century frescoes preserved there surpass anything of the same date in and around Byzantium, which was disturbed by wars and invasions at this period.
In the first quarter of the fourteenth century a major change took place. A much greater interest in detail is evident, an enormous increase in the variety of subject matter, and the development of narrative painting, which led to a division of the walls into smaller and smaller compositions. Portraits of living people and scenes from contemporary life abound, and there is a growth of secular painting in churches, which would not have been possible a century before.
Much Serbian painting was destroyed or covered over by the Turks: the work of copying was seriously begun after the Second World War, when a number of French copyists were invited to Yugoslavia.
Philip James