Byzantine Culture

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The Icons of Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai

Saint Catherine's on Mount Sinai holds the oldest surviving icons in the world, including sixth-century encaustic panels that escaped iconoclasm. The collection, its survival, and its greatest works.

At the foot of the mountain where Moses was held to have received the Law stands a fortified monastery built by Justinian I in the 550s. It has been continuously inhabited ever since — the longest unbroken monastic occupation anywhere in the Christian world — and it holds about two thousand icons, including roughly a dozen from the sixth and seventh centuries.

Those dozen panels are the most important objects in the history of Christian art, because they are the only substantial group of pre-iconoclast icons to survive anywhere.

Why They Survived

The iconoclast controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries destroyed almost all the portable religious images in the Byzantine Empire. Two centuries of systematic removal left the eastern Mediterranean effectively empty of early panel painting.

Sinai escaped because by then it was not in the empire. The Arab conquest of Egypt in the 640s placed the monastery under Muslim rule, and the monks — who held a document of protection traditionally attributed to the Prophet Muhammad himself, of which a copy is kept at the monastery — were left alone. Byzantine imperial edicts did not run there.

The dry desert climate did the rest. Panel paintings survive badly in damp; in the Sinai they survive extraordinarily well.

Encaustic

The oldest Sinai icons are painted in encaustic: pigments suspended in hot wax, applied with a brush or a heated metal tool. It is the technique of the Roman mummy portraits of the Fayum, and it produces a soft, luminous, almost fleshy surface with visible brushwork and real modelling.

This matters historically. It demonstrates that the earliest Christian icons were made by painters working in a direct continuation of Greco-Roman portrait practice, using the same materials and the same conventions. The stylised, linear manner of later Byzantine icons — built in egg tempera with hatched highlights — is a subsequent development, not an origin.

The transition from encaustic to tempera happened around the seventh or eighth century, and the reasons are unclear. Egg tempera is cheaper, quicker and easier to control at small scale, which may be sufficient explanation.

The Great Panels

Christ Pantokrator, sixth century. The most famous icon in the world, and deservedly. Christ holds a jewelled gospel book and blesses; the face is asymmetrical to a marked degree, the left side (the viewer’s right) calm and the other more severe. The image is painted with confident naturalistic modelling — shadow under the eye, a highlight on the cheekbone, individually painted strands of hair. Whether the asymmetry encodes a theological point about the two natures of Christ or is simply how the painter saw is unresolvable, but the effect is unmistakable.

The Virgin and Child enthroned between Saints Theodore and George, sixth century. The Virgin is seated frontally with the Child on her lap; two military saints stand stiffly in front, staring out; two angels behind look upward at a hand emerging from heaven. The picture contains, in one panel, two entirely different painting manners — the naturalistic angels and the flat, frontal saints — and it is therefore the single best piece of evidence for the stylistic transition underway in the sixth century.

Saint Peter, sixth century. A bust of the apostle holding keys and a cross-staff, with three medallions above. The handling is thoroughly classical.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent, twelfth century. Monks climbing a ladder toward Christ while demons pull them off into the mouth of hell. It illustrates the ascetic treatise written by John Klimakos, abbot of this monastery in the seventh century, and it is the most reproduced image of Byzantine monastic spirituality. The treatise itself is discussed in Byzantine monasticism.

The Rest of the Collection

Beyond the early panels, the monastery holds icons of every period from the seventh to the nineteenth century, including:

  • A large group of eleventh- and twelfth-century Constantinopolitan work
  • Icons in a distinctly Crusader style, made in the thirteenth century by painters working for Latin patrons in the Levant, mixing Byzantine and western conventions — the best evidence anywhere for the artistic encounter described in crusader art and Byzantium
  • Calendar icons and menologia showing the saints of each month in miniature
  • Post-Byzantine Cretan and Greek work

The library is equally important: some 3,300 manuscripts in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, Slavonic and other languages, second only to the Vatican among Christian collections. The Codex Sinaiticus, the fourth-century Greek Bible now largely in the British Library, was found here in the 1840s by Constantin von Tischendorf under circumstances the monastery has disputed ever since. Recent work with multispectral imaging on the palimpsests — manuscripts scraped and overwritten — has recovered erased texts in languages including Caucasian Albanian, previously almost unknown.

Study and Access

The icons were effectively unknown to scholarship until the twentieth century. A Russian expedition photographed some in the 1900s; the decisive work was done by joint expeditions from Michigan, Princeton and Alexandria from 1956, led by Kurt Weitzmann and George Forsyth, who photographed and catalogued the collection systematically. Weitzmann’s volumes on the early icons, published from 1976, remain the standard reference.

The monastery is a working religious community, not a museum. A selection of icons is displayed in a purpose-built gallery opened in 2001; most of the collection is not on public view. Access for visitors depends on the security situation in the Sinai peninsula, which has been variable, and on the monastery’s own arrangements.

What They Changed

Before the Sinai icons were published, the early history of the icon was a matter of inference from texts. Afterwards, it became a matter of looking at objects.

Three conclusions followed, and they have held. The icon is a direct descendant of the Roman portrait. The pre-iconoclast image was more naturalistic than what came after. And the abstraction of mature Byzantine painting was arrived at deliberately, by painters who could have done otherwise — which is what the theology of icon veneration would predict, since the image was never intended as a likeness in the ordinary sense.

The Building and the Charter

The monastery’s physical and legal survival are as remarkable as its collection, and both go back to its foundation.

Justinian built the fortified enclosure between about 548 and 565, with granite walls up to fifteen metres high, a basilica with a carved cypress roof, and a garrison of soldiers and their families settled to defend it — the Jebeliya, whose descendants still work at the monastery.

The sixth-century church survives substantially intact, including its roof beams with dedicatory inscriptions naming Justinian and his wife Theodora, and its apse mosaic of the Transfiguration — a major sixth-century work that is rarely reproduced because it is difficult to photograph and inaccessible to most visitors.

The legal protection rests on the Ashtiname, a document held at the monastery granting protection to the monks, traditionally issued by the Prophet Muhammad in 623 and marked with his handprint. What the monastery holds is a copy; the original was reportedly taken to Istanbul by Selim I in 1517, who issued his own confirmation. The document’s authenticity is debated by scholars and has never been the point — it was honoured, repeatedly, by Muslim rulers for fourteen centuries, and the monastery was never sacked.

The Weitzmann Expeditions

The collection’s entry into scholarship is a story worth knowing, because it explains why the material appeared so suddenly.

A Russian expedition under Porfiry Uspensky visited in the 1840s and 1850s and removed a number of items, including icons now in Kiev.

The decisive work was done by joint expeditions from the universities of Michigan, Princeton and Alexandria, beginning in 1956 under George Forsyth for the architecture and Kurt Weitzmann for the icons and manuscripts. They photographed the collection systematically over several campaigns.

Weitzmann’s catalogue of the icons from the sixth to the tenth centuries appeared in 1976, and the subsequent volumes covered the later material. The effect on the field was immediate: a body of pre-iconoclast panel painting that scholarship had assumed did not exist anywhere.

Conservation has continued since, in collaboration with the monastery, and work on the manuscripts — particularly the multispectral imaging of palimpsests from the 2010s onward — continues to produce results.

The Palimpsests

The library’s erased manuscripts have turned out to be as significant as the icons.

Parchment was expensive, and a text no longer wanted was scraped off and the sheet reused. The undertext often survives as a faint chemical trace, invisible to the eye but recoverable by imaging the page under different wavelengths and processing the results.

The Sinai Palimpsests Project, working since 2011, has imaged well over a hundred manuscripts and recovered texts in ten languages. The finds include previously unknown Greek medical texts, early Christian writings, classical fragments, and — most unexpectedly — substantial material in Caucasian Albanian, a language of the medieval Caucasus previously known from a handful of inscriptions and effectively undeciphered.

Recovering a lost language from the scraped underside of a Sinai prayer book is not what most people expect from Byzantine studies, and it is a reasonable illustration of why the monastery matters beyond its paintings.

Visiting

The monastery is a functioning Orthodox community of a small number of monks, in the South Sinai governorate of Egypt, at the foot of Jebel Musa.

A purpose-built gallery opened in 2001 displays a selection of icons and manuscripts. Most of the collection is not on view, and the library is accessible to accredited researchers only.

Access depends on the security situation in the Sinai, which has varied considerably since 2011, and on the monastery’s own arrangements; opening hours are short and closed on Sundays and feast days. The practical advice is to check current conditions close to the date rather than plan far ahead.

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