Icon with Virgin (Theotokos) and Child between Saints Theodore and George

0:00:06.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re at a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Africa and Byzantium. And we’re looking at an icon, in fact, one of the oldest icons that has survived.

0:00:16.5 Dr. Beth Harris: And when we use that term, we’re generally referring to a sacred image, in this case, the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child on her lap, a saint on either side of her, two angels behind them, and the hand of God. Most icons were destroyed during a period we call the Byzantine Iconoclasm, when huge numbers of images were destroyed in a controversy around the appropriateness of images in religious worship.

0:00:44.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And the reason this icon survives, is because it’s held in the monastery of Saint Catherine’s in the Sinai Peninsula, quite far from the capital of Byzantium. And of course, we’re seeing this icon now, in the even electric lights of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but at Saint Catherine’s with flickering candles, some of the soot from which is still visible at the bottom of this icon. You can imagine how that gold leaf flickers and becomes alive.

0:01:11.9 Dr. Beth Harris: So it’s important to put this in the context of where we are in the history of Christianity. It’s only two centuries since the Emperor Constantine made it legal to practice Christianity. And in the 500s, we’re still at this early moment of Christian image making.

0:01:28.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: This was a synthetic moment where the presence of the antique of an older polytheistic tradition was still present. Polytheistic deities were still part of the visual culture and could still be drawn on.

0:01:42.1 Dr. Beth Harris: There were several possible sources for images like this: images of polytheistic deities, of ancient Roman emperors, mummy portraits. These are all possible sources for these very early Christian icons. In fact, art historians describe this as the coming together of two different styles. The illusionistic style, left over from ancient Greek and Roman art, where the figures are rendered in three dimensional form, where we see foreshortening, movement. But then this more abstracted style that we see, especially in the soldier saints on either side of Mary.

0:02:20.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, look at the rendering of the Virgin Mary’s body. There’s a real sense of truth there. You can almost feel that fabric.

0:02:28.2 Dr. Beth Harris: Not only does it wrap around her shoulders, but we can see the form of her legs, her thighs, and the pull of the drapery toward her left foot. And so there is a sense of real naturalism and modulation of light and dark.

0:02:42.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And if you look at the two soldier saints that flank the Virgin Mary and Christ child, you can see that their left leg is ever so slightly behind the right leg, and there’s a little bit of a shadow that’s cast under those left knees, so that there is just a remnant of that older classical tradition.

0:03:00.1 Dr. Beth Harris: Each of those saints holds a cross. Their bodies cast shadows. On the other hand, when we look at those saints overall, it’s clear that the figures are elongated, that the decorative patterning of their clothing renders them rather flat, and that their frontality also has a sense of flatness.

0:03:21.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: Which gives a sense of formality and of an otherworldliness. And I find that in contrast to the more animated craning of the necks that we see to the angels above, who look up and over, as if we’ve caught them at a moment in time. Space is left between the halos of those figures in front, and through those, we can see this incredibly energetic brushwork expressing the drapery worn by the angels. And there is distance there. There is real space that is constructed. And so there is, on the one hand, especially with the soldiers, a sense of the eternal. And then there is the sense of animation of the momentary.

0:04:00.6 Dr. Beth Harris: These figures are not set back within an illusionistic space. We do have a hint of a niche, but the figures are very close to us. And that gives us a sense [that] we are in their space, they are in our space; we are looking at one another.

0:04:17.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: Art historians are fairly confident that this was made in Constantinople, and was probably the result of the patronage of the emperor and the empress at this moment, Justinian and Theodora, who we know are responsible for funding the construction of Saint Catherine’s. This is a painting in encaustic on wood. That is, pigments are suspended in wax, and that becomes the medium on a wood panel. And that’s a tradition that is not new.

0:04:44.9 Dr. Beth Harris: What we’re looking at here is essentially an image of Mary as the Queen of Heaven, holding the Christ child in this throne that is bedecked with jewels. So we know that we’re not looking at an image of Mary and Christ on earth. We’re looking at an image of Mary and Christ, and saints, and angels, in a heavenly space.

0:05:03.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: For a 6th-century worshipper, this was an opportunity to, through these figures, come into the presence of the divine.

0:05:10.9 Dr. Beth Harris: What’s so interesting for me about seeing this object today at the Met, is to see this moment of transition between a polytheistic Roman Empire, and a Christian Byzantine Roman Empire, here, continuing to look at the importance of Egypt and Africa in the development of Christianity and our earliest Christian images.