The challenge in this painting was to render his visionary spirit, the dreamer that looks deep into the future. To do this I distorted the face in two ways: the eyes are no more aligned (like they were in the original photograph), the eyes’ axis leans diagonally giving the viewer the impression that the face is turned 3/4 to the left (which it is not, in the original photo it is en face).

The face is also elongated, a feature inspired by the buzantine painting of the Komnenos period (11th-12th cent.) when the saints’ faces were elongated (this way the painters of that time underlined the spirituality of the figure).

No background here, just a light layer of white, a reference to the golden background of the byzantine icons that also inforced the sense of transcedence. The hat is the secular element in the painting so that we do not forget that Antonio was human and therefore elegant in the Italian way.

The painting is a palimpsest, meaning that there are two older paintings lying underneath: the relief of older brushstrokes is  still visible under the more recent layer. The paints are thin/liquid thus denoting the flowing time and were spread both by brush and fingers. Four colours used here, red, blue, black and white, a variation of the traditional byzantine 4-colour rule, only it is blue instead of yellow ochre which denotes that the psychology of the depicted figure completely lacks impulsiveness and is deeply spiritual.