Irakli Gamrekeli was one of the founders of Georgian scenography and a prominent theater and cinema artist, futurist, and constructivist. Born on May 17, 1894, in Gori, Georgia, to a priest's family, he received his primary education at a theological school.Essentially a self-taught artist, he also spent time at the Medical Institutes in Rostov and Odessa, but failed to graduate, feeling that painting was his true calling.

Esma Oniani's creative and personal worldview is based on an empirical exploration of pain, sadness, and vanity. In different languages, the word "worldview" presents peculiar linguistic transformations. The Germans, for example, express this idea with the term "Weltschmerz" (world pain), which refers to perceiving the world through spiritual pain. In Oniani’s creative work prevail epistemological beginnings based on cognition and ontological being. Man, as the central value in the world, shapes its cognitive existence. This principle is revealed in the anthropocentrism of Oniani’s poetry and painting, where every color, and everything – painting and word – are grounded in human emotions and expressiveness.

The men were both ascetics and missionaries, whose mission was to preach Christianity, and the foundation of monasteries became part of this mission. It is hard to know to which theological doctrine these ascetics adhered, and there is a great variety of scholarly opinion regarding this fact, seeing some declaring them Chalcedonians, others anti-Chalcedonians, while part of the academic community believes them to have been Nestorians.