The Blessing Christ
This image is one of the earliest surviving icons of Jesus. Kept since the sixth century at the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mt. Sinai in Egypt, it escaped the destruction of the iconoclasts and, protected by overpainting and the dry desert air, has remained almost undamaged to this day.
This large icon (about 33 x 18 inches in size) shows Christ in half-length, not in a narrative context but posed frontally and directing a steady gaze outward. Behind him hangs a wall covering known as the cloth of honor. His right hand is raised in blessing: three of the fingers touch to represent the presence of the Trinity; the other two are raised, and denote the two natures of the Savior, with the forefinger, bent and partially masked by the middle finger, standing traditionally for the Incarnation. In his left hand Christ holds a jeweled book: the cross and the four groups of pearls suggest it is a Gospel book, but in any case it is, as he is, the Word of God.
This painting was unknown to the world for centuries, until the St. Catherine icons were first studied in the 1950s; a cleaning in 1962 stripped away the disfiguring overpaint and revealed its extraordinary beauty. It is now Sinai's best-known icon.
A Votive Offering
The monastery at Mt. Sinai was founded and dedicated by the Emperor Justinian between the years 548 and 565, and the language of the documents relating to it suggests that the painting was a votive offering of the emperor's. The concept of the votive offering predates Christianity, and, in form and style, the inspiration for this panel was clearly pagan in origin. There survive panels like this one of chiefly Roman and especially Egyptian origin, dating roughly from the first to the third centuries.
Such panels each depict a pagan god in a half-length, frontal pose, holding symbols of his divine powers (a thunderbolt, say, for Jupiter) and with a halo of light ringing his head. A votive offering of this type was made or given in response to a divine intervention in the human world—a cure, a good harvest, election to office, or some other benefit conferred. It was a free-will offering, not an obligation. Inscriptions on these panels could state the nature of the favor received, the god responsible, and the name of the grateful recipient.
Frequently such pictures were given to the treasury of the temple of the god involved, so that the treasuries also became small museums. As state sponsorship of the temples decreased, votive panels were instead kept in private hands and placed in a part of the house set aside for private devotion.
With the advent of Christianity, these practices continued with some essential changes. For one thing, as Christianity gained acceptance and the Church became a more public institution, votive panels moved from the realm of private devotion to that of public piety in the great houses of worship that were built throughout the empire. Inscriptions, too, changed over time, from statements in the indicative to requests and continuing petitions; that is, the votive offering had become a prayer as well.
So the Sinai panel has pagan antecedents and prototypes. The scholar Kurt Weitzmann was the first to point out the likeness between the Blessing Christ and a type of Jupiter image that was important to Justinian and recurs in coinage and other imagery commissioned by him. As emperor, Justinian claimed earthly dominion over the entire world, and saw himself as a kind of supreme ruler, like Jupiter. If this panel were a votive offering from Justinian to the monastery, as seems likely, we might see it as the emperor's prayer that Christ, the true ruler of all, would look kindly upon and bless all those under Justinian's dominion.
Invitation to Prayer
Yet this image is not exactly the Christ Pantocrator, the Ruler of All, that we know from later and more official Byzantine commissions (see Figure 2, Church of the Holy Sepulcher). Instead, in its use of the encaustic medium and its approach to the subject, this panel more closely resembles the mummy portraits best known from Roman Fayum in Egypt (see Figure 3). These were portraits of the deceased which were placed over the face of wrapped mummies before burial.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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