Summary
Živković Miloš
Triptych from Saint Catherine's Monastery at Sinai - an unknown work of old Serbian Icon Painting
Relations between Serbia and the famous monastery аn Sinai, which was ded- icated to the Mother of God since its founding in the 6th century, and to St. Cather- ine from the end of the 15th or the beginning of the 16th century, were continuous and very intensive during the Middle Ages. One important aspect of Serbian-Sinaitic ties was the pilgrimages of prominent Serbs, ie their endowment activity. As is well known, the first Serbian archbishop Sava had a pioneering role in that regard. Sava visited Sinai on his second pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1235, after he retired from the throne of the head of the Serbian Church. Following his example, the care of the Sinai monastery was expressed in later times by Serbian medieval rulers and nobles. Another, in a way even more interesting, and in terms of research more complex, aspect of the Serbian-Sinaitic spiritual connection and cultural exchange, concerns the presence of Serbian monks and the existence of a Serbian scriptorium in Sinai. Numerous Serbian manuscripts from the 13th and 14th centuries – which make up a majority in the collection of Slavic books in the monastery of St. Cather- ine – are the best evidence of this phenomenon.
Given the chronological scale and nature of Serbian-Sinaitic contacts in the Middle Ages, it is quite surprising that, besides the aforementioned manuscripts, no other artifact of Serbian provenance was found in the monastery of St. Catherine – icon, reliquary, liturgical object, etc. However, it is by no means excluded that some future, systematically designed field research in that direction could be productive, at least to some extent. One of our own, almost accidental discoveries in the Sinai collection of icons leads us to such a perhaps too optimistic belief.
The work in question did not attract the attention of researchers of the rich col- lection of icons in the monastery of St. Catherine. It is a triptych of simple form, com- posed of three icons with Slavic inscriptions (fig. 1). The central place belongs to the bust, semi-profile representation of the Mother of God. Saint Nikolas is shown in direct communication with her. The bust of St. Stephen is the only one placed frontally. Apparently, the Sinai triptych has reached our days in a fragmentary form. Based on the appearance of the right edge of the icon of the Mother of God (fig. 2), it can be fair- ly reliably assumed that there was another representation in the extension of the same panel, which was cut off from the whole at some point. As the most reasonable, there is a possibility that the frontal representation of Jesus Christ was located at the desig- nated place. The Savior’s frontal figure would quite resemble the programmatic logic of the triptych, so that semi-profile representations of the Mother of God and Saint Nich- olas would be directed towards him, creating a composition of Deisis.
According to its stylistic features, the Sinai triptych can be dated quite reliably to the 14th century. Parallels for some of his artistic characteristics can be found in works from different developmental stages of painting in the 14th century (fig. 3). Thus, for example, some images of the saints in the church of St. Nicholas in Palež, which was most likely frescoed between 1350 and 1355 by artists from Macedonia, are characterized by a certain rigidity and rigor in expression, as a result of intense shading during face modeling (fig. 4a). In terms of the treatment of the faces, in the search for even more related works, one should also bear in mind the paintings from the second half of the 14th century. Thus, the three Sinai busts, and especially their sharp-faced faces, somewhat «manneristically» painted, are worth comparing with the representations of the martyrs in the narthex of the Church of the Trans- figuration of the Zrze Monastery (1368/1369). Although these «portraits» (fig. 4в) differ somewhat in physiognomy from the Sinai ones, as the color in Zrzе is much more intense and vivid, the two paintings bring together a related treatment of light, performed with quick, clearly visible strokes, and shadows, achieved in a calmer but rather wide coatings of paint. The green background also speaks in favor of classify- ing the Sinai triptych into the painting of the 14th century. The green background – and not the gold one, as was usually the case – appears during the mentioned century on several icons painted by masters from Constantinople and Thessaloniki, but also by painters from regional art centers, such as Cyprus or Veria. The coloristic solution in question is also present in Serbian icon painting of the 14th century, al- though it cannot be said that it was widely accepted.
Furthermore, certain features of Slavic inscriptions are not opposed to the classification of the Sinai triptych into the corpus of Serbian medieval painting. From the orthographic point of view, the way in which the words «saints» are ab- breviated in legends with the characters of Saints Stephen and Nicholas is especially interesting (st+iq). It is a spelling irregularity, so the thought arises that the painter of the triptych was probably Greek. In the same way, the labels of the sanctity appear in two monuments painted in the last decades of the 13th century – the third layer of frescoes in the Church of St. Peter in Ras and on the wall paintings of the Church of St. Achilleus in Arilje.
Finally, when trying to determine the provenance of the Sinai triptych, its iconographic features deserve full attention. First of all, one should point the fact that St. Stephen is not depicted in clothes and with the attributes of a deacon, but in a chiton and himation, and with a scroll in his hands, that is, in the so-called ap- ostolic form (fig. 5). This information is very indicative. Although they are known from Early Christian and post-iconoclastic art, especially in Constantinople, the representations of the Protomartyr in chiton and himation appeared almost exclu- sively in Serbian art during the late Byzantine era (fig. 6). In addition to this distinct iconographic feature, the Serbian images of St. Stephen had, as is well known, a very prominent, especially chosen place in the painted programs of Serbian me- dieval churches. This circumstance is convincingly interpreted as a kind of artistic expression of the role that St. Stephen had as the patron of the Serbian ruler, ie the Serbian lands. In contrast to this, during the 13th and 14th centuries, St. Stephen was depicted in apostolic form in other areas of the Byzantine cultural world only as an exception. It is an opportunity, in addition to the already known ones, to draw attention to another such example here – an unpublished icon from the monastery of St. Catherine, probably painted sometime during the „Palaeologan Renaissance” in Byzantine art (fig. 7).
Unlike the bust of St. Stephen, the other two representations on the Sinai trip- tych are not characterized by such distinct iconographic curiosities. In this respect, only the crosses on the omophorion of St. Nicholas require special clarification (fig. 8), as they are decorated with the cryptograms Ф̃ Х̃ Ф̃ П̃, which are resolved as Φῶς Χριστοῦ Φαίνει Πᾶσι («The light of Christ illuminates everything»). This acronym, based on an excerpt from the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, appears on the rep- resentations of St. Nicholas on several late-Byzantine examples (fig. 9). It seems that, in light of our earlier assumption about the Serbian provenance of the Sinai triptych, the fact that the abbreviation in question was written on some very important fig- ures of Saint Sava, as well as on the clothes of some other Serbian hierarchs, could have a certain significance (fig. 10).
To conclude, consideration of the stylistic and iconographic features of the triptychs from the monastery of St. Catherine suggest that it is a work of Serbian art from the middle or second half of the 14th century. Its author was probably educated in an art workshop in the southern parts of the Serbian state, perhaps in Macedonia. If the triptych was originally intended for the monastery of St. Catherine – that is, if it did not arrive there later, which is not unthinkable – then it is quite possible that it was brought there by a Serbian pilgrim, maybe even a monk who settled permanent- ly or for some longer time at Sinai. The portable character of the triptych only fur- ther supports such a thought. As can be concluded on the basis of his iconographic program, the pious devotee who carried it with him on his journey placed his hopes in the intercession of the Mother of God and Saint Nicholas before Christ and was especially attached to the cult of Saint Stephen.
Finally, in the discussion of the origin of the work of art in questions, one must not skip an unusually interesting written testimony. This is the information from the Synaxarion vita of King Milutin, which was probably written in 1380. by the monk of the Banjska monastery, Danilo, the later Serbian patriarch (1390/1391 – 1399/1400). Speaking about the endowments of the holy king, this writer men- tions – in the first place on the list – the Monastery of the Mother of God at Sinai, which the Serbian ruler richly endowed and «decorated». Moreover, Danilo of Ban- jska explicitly claims that in the Sinai «lavra», Milutin «built from the ground and decorated» the church of the «first martyr Stefan». The mentioned information does not exist in the older description of the founding endeavors of King Milutin, the one from the pen of Archbishop Danilo II (1324–1337), so a certain reserve must be kept according to it. In any case, if King Milutin was really the founder, ie the restorer of the church of Saint Stephen, which still exists in the monastery of St. Catherine, then the appearance of the figure of that saint on the Sinai triptych could be explained by some more specific reasons than the knowledge of special significance of his cult in medieval Serbia. In fact, it is not at all inconceivable that the triptych was intended for that Sinai church. However, the above thought, however attractive, is presented on this occasion only as one of the possibilities, which has yet to be validly con- firmed (or refuted). A more comprehensive contextualization of the data from the work of Danilo of Banjska certainly requires a special discussion, in which the his- tory of the chapel in question and the hagiographic data on Milutin’s endowment in Sinai would be studied in more detail.
