Люди в ней отличаются друг от друга позами, одеяниями и тщательно выписанными лицами.
Despite the damage the fresco has suffered in the past (earthquakes in 1997 threatened the entire church), many of the individual figures and anecdotes can still be appreciated. Careful attention has been lavished on the gestures, facial expressions and costumes of the Calvary crowd, especially the pageant-like tournament of knights, who reappear in proud regional variations wherever later painters employed the motif.
But the real drama is in the air: soaring above the heads of the crowd, amid a swarm of wildly expressive, mourning angels, the three crucified, clad in loincloths, are boldly spotlit against the deep lapis lazuli back- ground.
In photographs Lorenzetti’s Christ appears somewhat larger than the Thieves, but this is the result of a spatial device the painter has used, in the absence of a worked-out perspective or landscape, to show that the Thieves’ crosses are planted further in the background.
His portrayal of the thieves is likewise indicative of both his naturalistic strivings and his concern to re-create biblical history: the malefactors are distinguished not only from Christ but from one another in significant and expressive ways.
Whereas the figure on Christ’s right, a clean-shaven young man, hangs from his cross, asleep in death, his head tilted down to mirror Christ’s, his opposite, a bearded figure, turns his head away from the central cross, a gesture that enacts his symbolic blindness to Jesus’s divinity.
Consistent with John’s Gospel, he remains alive while the tortores hack away at his legs; his muscular body tenses in response to the punishment. Sanctity is thus accorded only to the convict on Christ’s right, whose halo identifies him as the Penitent Thief.
Their asymmetry is confirmed elsewhere in the church. In the 14th-century Magdalene Chapel Dysmas (the Good Thief) appears in his own standing portrait, grouped among other famous penitents whose lives furnished Franciscan authors with a useful template for the spiritual biography of their beloved founder, the Poverello of Assisi, whose imago suffuses the entire edifice.
