The origin and rescue of sacred images

A new exhibition has opened in the Louvre. An international exhibition with exceptionally valuable objects that have never been exhibited abroad.

This is not unusual in the exhibition. But everything else is. The fact that the objects were given to the musem not on loan, but for safekeeping. That they were transported to France not with the usual insurance, but under armored military cover. That the exhibition consists of only five objects – although four of them belong to the oldest and most valuable representatives of their subject. That the exhibition has no catalog, only short information labels in French, English and – Ukrainian. And that, due to the lack of a catalog and the brevity of the labels, it is not clear at all what justifies the ambitious title: The origin of sacred images.

The first questions can be answered from the daily news, while the last one only from the modern literature on icons, and this is the actual purpose of this post. But let’s get over the first ones first.

Back in May, the Louvre announced that the most valuable artefacts of the National Museum of Kyiv would be transported under military cover via Poland and Germany to Paris, where they would find refuge from wartime destruction and looting. Indeed, according to Unesco’s October 2022 report, the Russian invaders destroyed or looted in Ukraine 468 cultural objects and institutions, including 35 museums. The Ukrainian state is therefore trying to secure endangered artefacts in foreign collections. For example, the Vatican Museum undertook the preservation of the icons of the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves during the war. This monastery belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, nominally dependent on Moscow, until the Ukrainian state handed it over, in this March, to the other, Kyiv-centered, autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which had been approved by Constantinople in 2018. Therefore the Russian press immediately started to spread the news that the Ukrainian state wants to cover Western arm shipments by sending the art treasures of the “Russian Church” to the West, and that these treasures would never be seen in Ukraine again.

In another war, decades ago, we Hungarians would have been very happy if there was a country in Europe where we could keep our art treasures safe from the destruction and plundering of the enemy – wait, which enemy? well, the Russians. But there was none, because the Hungarian state made sure, then as now, that we had no friends in Europe, only the one whose ass we were kissing until its destruction dragged us down with it. This is why a part of our art treasures are still – admittedly or secretly – in Russia, where the 1998 law declared their reparation character, meaning that we will never see them in Hungary again. Now we should rejoice that the Ukrainian state, which is fighting for its own freedom as well as for the freedom of all Europe, still has friends in Europe, who help to ensure that these treasures of humanity are preserved and remain accessible to professionals and visitors.

As the original purpose was not exhibition, but preservation, it is no wonder that the majority of the artefacts transported to the West cannot now be viewed, but they are being preserved and restored with the help of donations from civil foundations. Nevertheless, the Louvre has agreed with the National Museum of Kyiv that, partly as a gesture to the supporters of these civil foundations, five particularly valuable icons will be on public display between June 14 and November 6.

I only note in parentheses that in addition to support, the supporters also have to fight hard for seeing the objects. The current mass museum concept of the Louvre is about getting visitors from the ticket control to the Mona Lisa as quickly as possible, and then back to the exit. This route is marked by a thousand arrows, while all the rest by almost none. And the attendants handle information with the well-known French mentality: if God gave you an office, He has obviously also given you brains. So they, with superior confidence, direct you towards endless corridors, at the end of which there is surely no icon exhibition. One of the mademoiselles wants to definitely send us back to the entrance, saying that every morning she used to see there this poster of the exhibition, which we actually just photographed there among all the other posters. So we walk about four kilometers in the museum, while on the ground floor, under a staircase, in the passage between the classical Greek and Islamic exhibitions, we discover the five icons placed in semi-darkness, but illuminated by excellent spotlights.

The first icon is a late 13th or early 14th-century micro-mosaics. Apart from the beautiful silver filigree frame – probably a Byzantine work – it follows, in its main lines, the iconography of St. Nicholas that appeared in Novgorod, as does its contemporary from Novgorod preserved in the Tretyakov Gallery.

The real surprise comes only after that. Four icons from the Monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai, probably all from the 6th century, the time of the earliest known Christian icons. From before the Byzantine destruction of icons in the 8th and 9th centuries, barely a dozen Christian panel paintings have survived, the vast majority of them in the St. Catherine Monastery in Sinai, where the hand of the image-destroying Byzantines did not reach. These four icons were brought from there by Porfiry Uspensky (1804-1885), Arch-Abbot of Odessa, orientalist and archaeologist, who was appointed head of the Russian Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem in 1842, and in the following four years he extensively traveled through the Christian East from the monasteries of Athos through the Holy Land to the Sinai. His travelogue, published in two volumes in 1856, does not detail how he acquired the icons and other art treasures in Sinai. When visiting the Sinai Monastery, don’t try to imitate him!

The Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai

The travelogue with the detailed description of the monasteries visited and their art treasures did not attract much attention. But when art historian Nikodim Kondakov (1844-1925) presented at the Moscow Archaeological Congress, in 1890, the four icons brought by Father Uspensky and left by him to the Kyiv Archbishop’s Treasurey, they caused a sensation and greatly contributed to the revival of interest in icons. The Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski, who was particularly interested in the Eastern tradition, published their description a year later in Volume I of the Byzantinische Denkmäler, and from then on they have been generally recognized as the origins of Christian icon painting, although several other contemporaries are preserved in the Sinai Monastery. In 1917, when the Archbishop’s Treasury was nationalized, the icons were transferred to the Kyiv National Museum, which was named after and grew out of the legacy of the great Kyiv art collector couple Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko. In the century since their “discovery”, very few foreign visitors had the opportunity to see them in the reality.

The technique of the icons is special from the point of view of later ages. The panel paintings of the period – not only Christian icons, but also pagan votive paintings, Egyptian mummy portraits, and even Greek marble statues – were painted using the encaustic technique, which mixed pigments with melted beeswax, and then burned it onto the surface with a heated iron tool. This gave the pictures a characteristic, deep, fiery color, similar to oil painting a thousand years later.

The comparison with contemporary genres is also a hint at the reasons of the title of the exhibition: The origin of sacred images. According to the older Christian tradition, Christianity used icons from the beginnings. They mainly refer to the Evangelist St. Luke, who is said to have painted the image of the Virgin Mary after life. Today, at least four dozen copies of this very holy icon are preserved in various places. Of course, the original everywhere.

Prague’s U Černého vola, “The Black Ox” brewery also takes its name from the symbolic animal of St. Luke the Evangelist, doing his holy painting above the pub’s entrance.

However, the art historical literature of recent decades sees this story differently. Christianity, which grew out of a Jewish environment, was originally an aniconic religion: it neither practiced nor needed images. It began to embrace these when it was joined by Greek, Roman and Egyptian believers, whose previous religious or civil culture included the use of images, and they were adapted to Christian themes. Hans Belting in Likeness and presence (1990) mainly examines Christian paraphrases of Roman political images, while Thomas F. Mathews in The dawn of Christian art in panel paintings and icons (2016) points out that the first known Christian icons are actually adaptations of Greek and Egyptian religious votive panel paintings. Christians begin to use images, at first only simple symbols in the catacombs, in the 2th and 3rd century, and it takes another 2-3 centuries until they adopt and adapt the pagan religious panel painting, which was very widespread at the time, to their beliefs. The first icons are therefore from the 6th century not because the earlier ones did not survive, but because the very first ones were made at that time. And they are pretty much the same that you see here in the Louvre.

The first icon is a portrait of St. Sergius and Bacchus. These two Greek soldiers were martyred at the beginning of the 4th century, during the persecution of Christians under Emperor Galerius. They were buried in the Syrian Resafa – known as Sergiopolis in Byzantium –, where an important shrine was built over their tomb, and their cult spread throughout the ancient world. The Little Hagia Sophia in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district, which was built in the 6th century as a kind of model, in order for its designers to show that their innovative architectural construction will stand firmly in the newly built Hagia Sophia, is also dedicated to them.

This icon depicts them half-legth, in military uniform, like the tombstones of Roman patricians. And above them, in a small medaillon, the face of Christ appears. This compositional solution also goes back to Roman official representations. Roman officials used to depict themselves with the effigy of their superior, usually the emperor, in a medaillon above their heads. In the case of a saint, this was replaced by the effigy of his superior, Christ. The 5th-century ivory diptych of the consul Justinus from the Bode Museum in Berlin shows not one, but three medaillons above the consul’s head: Christ in the middle, and the imperial couple on either side of him.

The next icon also depicts the martyrs St. Plato and Glykeria in the form of a half-length tomb portrait. The former lived in the 4th century in Ancyra (today’s Ankara), the latter in the 2nd century in Traianopolis. What brings them together on one icon is that their feast was on October 24. This picture was painted with a more clumsy hand than the previous one, but the white and red highlights of the face and the colors of the dress show that he at least knew what he was supposed to paint. The panel may have gone through several repaintings, which also did not raise its quality. On the right side, a strip was added with oil paint instead of encaustic, which sharply separates from the original painting. Between the two saints are fragments of a gilded cross decorated with precious stones, and the remains of an inscription under the upper edge. Deciphering the latter shed light on the identity of the martyrs.

The third icon is a very beautiful Virgin with the child Jesus. Hans Belting especially draws attention to how much more classical this icon, made with counterpoint in mind, is, than the not much later icon of the Virgin in the Roman Pantheon, which already represents the rigid medieval “showing” pose.

Finally, the fourth icon, the representation of St. John the Baptist, shows a structure similar to the icon of Sergius and Bacchus. Here, too, John’s “superior”, Christ, appears in a medaillon. To him points, according to the plot of Jn 1:29-30, St. John the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God!” This was also read on the fragmentary inscription he carried in his hand. On the other side, in a similar medaillon, the image of the Virgin Mary appears, and thus the three figures form a special deesis group – the central triple group of the iconostasis – in which the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist plead with Jesus not from both sides, as usual, to judge mercifully humanity, but the one from the same heavenly height as him, and the other from here on earth, according to his earthly form.

This solution of medaillons is also used by an icon that Father Uspensky left in the Sinai Monastery, but which Belting connect, on stylistic grounds, with the icons that came to Kyiv. This icon, also from the 6th century, depicts St. Peter, with a medaillon image of Christ above his head, and two other medaillons next to this latter, in which research mostly sees the mother and son who ordered the icon and donated it to the monastery.

This is, in short, the reason why this exhibition, condensed into four images, can bear the title The origin of sacred images. Its detailed explanation would of course require a detailed catalog, which would tell you picture by picture and illustrated with several other icons what Belting and Mathews say in their works. We hope that this will also be born, and we can read it at six o’clock after the war in the Chalice. Or rather in the Black Ox.