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LUCY-AXXE HUNT / BIRMIXGHAM

ETERNAL LIGHT AND LIFE: A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ICON FROM THE MONASTERY OF THE SYRIANS, EGYPT, AND THE JERUSALEM PASCAL LITURGY

With eight plates

An icon of the Crucifixion (figs. 1 – 10) is displayed in the main church of the Virgin at the Monastery of the Syrians (Dayr as-Suriani), in the Wadi Natrun in the Western Desert in Egypt’. Attributed here to a Syrian Orthodox artist in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, its imagery of mankind’s salvation through the Passion of Christ’s suffering and death is expressed in the vocabulary of contemporary Italian art. With the personifications at the top representing the overturn of the darkness of death with the light of renewal, the icon evokes the Orthodox Easter liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This points up a virtually unexplored aspect of medieval Passion iconography. Focusing attention on the Syrian Orthodox role in icon production, the icon is a witness to the development and dissemination of Holy Land imagery in the thirteenth-century eastern Mediterranean. Its interpretation contributes to debate currently centred on the icons of St. Catherine’s monastery, Mount Sinai, and Cyprus.

The icon’s dimensions are 61 x 68 x 2.7 cm. Its construction can be briefly summarised. On the obverse the nails fixing the integral raised frame are clearly visible, together with a patch of linen glued onto the wood, near the lower right corner. A metal loop is attached at the top for suspending the panel. The panel has split vertically in two, just to left of centre. The sections are held together by two transverse planks attached at the back (fig. 2), the upper 3.6 cm thick, the lower 3.5 cm. By comparison with icons at St. Catherine’s monastery Mount Sinai and in Cairo, which have similarly split, it may be assumed that the icon is made of a soft wood, rather than one of the harder imported types’. The pigments, which are muted browns and greens and dark reds shot with passages of bright orange-red, are applied onto the gesso base alongside (as opposed to over) the gilding. The inscriptions are in Greek. One, delicately written in white along the transverse at the top of the cross, declares Christ to be the King of Glory. The others, in red, denote the scene as the Crucifixion with Christ, the Virgin, and John . To the modern eye the imagery at first appears confused and over- loaded with detail. But its logic, attending to mankind’s salvation through the Crucifixion, unfolds with closer scrutiny. The dead Christ suspended on the cross – an immediately recognizable focus – forms with the Virgin and St. John the Evangelist a triangular framework. Other individuals and groups are associated with this: the crucified thieves, lance and sponge bearers, holy women and the centurion. Below, the dead arise from tombs to left and right. At the top are four angels. One half-length pair, flanking the arms of the cross, is in mourning. The other pair, above, is in flight. The angel top left introduces a bright female

personification while gesturing to the sun. Another opposite expels a dark personification on the other side of the moon. This juxtaposition of light and dark, positive and negative, is central to the interpretation of the panel as representing man’s redemption through Christ’s death. Professor A. Dean McKenzie has pointed to the convergence of Byzantine and western elements’. But why were these chosen and how is the icon to be understood within its cultural and historical context of a Syrian monastery?

Christ is shown dead on the cross, head slumped to one side and eyes closed. Dark shading around the eyes and face emphasises his recent suffering. The body sags away from the shaft of the cross, covered by the loincloth which is knotted at the front and drapes down to the left. Blood spurts from the wound at Christ’s side, as well as from the nails piercing each foot. Below, between the rising dead, is the skull of Adam. The Virgin and John on either side share the dramatic shading of face and eyes as they each clasp a hand to the face as a sign of grief. This pivotal group of Christ flanked by the Virgin and John can be aligned with miniature and panel painting currently attributed to Latin (Italian or French) artists working in the middle-to-third quarter of the thirteenth century at Acre and Sinai. The head and lolling body of Christ, half standing on the lateral base (suppedaneum) has much in common with the Crucifixion miniature in a French Missal in Perugia (Biblioteca Capitolare MS 6) made for the cathedral of the Holy Cross, Saint-Jean- d’Acre. The angels at the top, especially that on the left, twisting backwards while flitting from the edge of the panel, are practically identical. The skull of Adam is buried below Golgotha in both. Buchthal pointed to the ”Italo-Byzantine” features of the Missal illumination: the Byzantine formula of Christ’s agony as developed in north Italian art of the second quarter of the thirteenth century. In particular, Buchthal cited Giunta Pisano’s crucifix from S. Maria degli Angeli in Assisi of 1235 – 40 . This is apt, given the strength of the Italian community

in Acre up until its loss in 1291. Italian crucifixes such as this could well have been placed in Latin churches, where they were seen by indigenous as well as western artists. Similar features recur in an icon at Mount Sinai of the Crucifixion framed with busts of saints . Here each of Christ’s feet is pinned separately with nails as on the Dayr as-Suriani icon’. The mourning angels display the same heightened sensitivity, weeping into their garments. But the comparison can be extended. Both panels employ a limited, dark palette shot with bright orange-red and offset by the burnished gold. The same G-reek inscriptions appear. The designation of Jesus Christ as, the King of Glory of Psalm 23:7 – 10, follows the Byzantine formula which asserts Christ’s divine nature in the face of his lifeless form’. The same formula appears in two painted crosses at Sinai of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries respectively’. The painter of the Dayr as-Suriani icon probably had direct access to Italian art. This is particularly apparent both in the extreme angle of Christ’s black eyebrow and the exaggerated dark shading of the face, especially below the left cheek merging into the strands of hair. This dramatic shading was surely derived from the painting technique of the mid-thirteenth century Italian crucifixes, including those painted by Giunta Pisano . The comparison can be extended to the delicate

flecks of white paint highlighting the face, upper body and outstretched arms of Christ. The large scale of Christ’s head relative to the rest of the icon also derives from a crucifix, exaggerated as to be viewed from below. But the generally heavier painting style identifies a Syrian rather than a Latin artist as responsible, working under the influence of Italian art. The Crucifixion in the Syriac Dayr as-Zapharan lectionary, written in c. 1250 by a future Bishop of Hesna de Ziad, the town of Kharput near the Euphrates on the former ByzantineJArmenian border, has a similar Italianate Christ and angels . Like the icon, the rationale to the draperies, John’s in particular, is here disregarded in the hands of a Syrian artist”. This Syriac miniature also elucidates a further feature central to the argument of this paper. The blood of Christ, shed for man- kind, flows copiously onto the skull of Adam, just as in the Dayr as-Suriani and Sinai icons and the Missal Crucifixion”. Adam’s skull is even especially selected for inscription in the lectionary. Thus, while Sinai or Egypt cannot be discounted as the place of production of the icon, a strong case can be made for a monastery in Syria”. Dayr as-Suriani flourished after the mid-thirteenth century with an influx of monks, especially those fleeing from disruption caused by the Mongol invasions. This helped replenish the Library, and may have brought icons too”.

These subsidiary figures are retained from early representations, such as the sixth century Syriac Rabbula G-ospels . In the Rabbula Gospels they surround Christ, who, in accordance with pre-Iconoclastic representation, is open-eyed and dressed in the colobium. The Virgin and John appear together to the left, the sun and moon above, the Holy Women to the right together with the division of Christ’s garments below. The lower register of the Rabbula Gospels makes reference to the Resurrection. The Myrrh Bearers or Myrophores, ”an effective synonym for the Resurrection” in A. Kartsonis’ words, arrive at Christ’s tomb with the front Mary bearing a gilded long-necked flask”. The tomb itself has light exploding from its open door which overpowers the soldiers keeping guard outside. To its right, the risen Christ appears to the Maries”. Several of these features have been ”updated” in the Dayr as-Suriani icon, as comparison with twelfth and thirteenth-century examples shows. This is especially evident in the lance and the sponge-bearers. In his pose and military dress the lance bearer is very close to his counterpart in the Crucifixion amongst the late twelfth century mosaics of the west vault at San Marco in Venice”. But his helmet, which comes to a triangular point on the crown and includes a pointed chin guard, corresponds to those worn by soldiers in contemporary dress who flank the enthroned King Ninus in an illustration of an Histoire Universelle manuscript in London

(B. L. Add. 15268) attributed to Acre in 1286’ . The helmet shape is most likely Italian in origin”. The sponge-bearer also wears armour, in line with western rather than Byzantine iconography”. He strikes a dramatic pose more characteristic of a warrior saint. He wields the stick with the sponge in his left hand as if it were a lance while resting his right on the handle of his sword. A bright red cloak envelops him and flutters behind. His posture, dress and weaponry are reminiscent of the thirteenth-century Sinai icon of St. George made for the monk and priest John of the Iberians (Georgians)”. The crucified thieves both turn towards Christ in anticipation of their salvation, not only the one penitent’4. Together they represent human potential for redemption. Only the right thief now remains in the fragmentary miniature from a Syriac Melkite lectionary formerly in the Kevorkian Collection in New York. But the scene appropriately accompanies the reading for the ninth hour on Good Friday (Matthew 27:46 and John 19:25 – 28)”. In the Dayr as-Suriani icon, too, human salvation at Easter is the key. Holy women stand behind the Virgin in the icon (fig. 5) as they do in the San Marco mosaic, for example. Opposite, they are matched by a single figure behind John, the centurion, who gestures towards Christ. Red flashes of his cloak can be seen, but most striking is his headcovering, reminiscent of both the centurion and the Pharisee in the San Marco mosaic or more particularly, the headwrap of the centurion in the Syriac lectionaries of c. 1220 from Mar Mattai near Mosul .

The Crucifixion scene is transformed from a purely narrative feast scene by the inclusion of the dead rising from their tombs at the bottom and the personifications at the top of the panel, ushered in and out by angels. The dead, both men and women, step out of two polygonal, font-shaped tombs, separated by Adam’s skull. These are the anonymous dead who arose at the time of the Crucifixion (Matt. 27:52 – 53)”. Although – or perhaps because – they represent Every man and Every woman they are given distinctive facial features like individual portraits. Racially these are not Italian like the main triad of Christ, the Virgin and John, but Syrian. The dark, bearded man in the centre of the right tomb for example, is reminiscent of the portraits of indigenous donors on thirteenth-century Sinai icons, praying to their chosen saints”. There is a precedent for the resurrection of women as well as men in the rising dead painted at the early eleventh-century Cappadocian church of St. Barbara, where two couples – inscribed in Greek in accordance with the Matthew text – step out of sarcophagi in the Anastasis scene”. The dead in the icon extract themselves from their grave wrappings as does commonly the risen Lazarus. This is an eager shedding of bindings in an interpretation of the underworld where the dead arise from sleep, not hell and torment”. It shows that Christ died for the salvation of mankind, Adam being associated with Christ. Adam’s skull, buried deep in Golgotha, receives drops of Christ’s blood, enabling his redemption through baptism”. The

concomitant of this is the typological association of Eve with Ecclesia. The font-like tombs bridge the concepts of death and resurrection on the one hand and rebirth and baptism on the other. This is a subtle adaptation of western iconography, which is primarily preoccupied with the typological aspect. The Crucifixion scene in a French mid-thirteenth century manuscript (Paris, Bibl. Xat. 11560) shows the baptism of an infant alongside the typological scene of the birth of Ecclesia from the wound in Christ’s side and the Creation of Eve”. In the icon, the artist has affected a shift of emphasis in accordance with Orthodox belief. The salvation of mankind and womankind is visualized literally and is topographically sited at Golgotha itself.

At the top left of the panel a bright two-thirds female figure in a shell holding a flask is introduced by an angel into the daylight, while her dark counterpart top right, also in a shell, is expelled at night. These are suggestive of three different, but interconnected ideas. Taken together their connotations of light, resurrection and human salvation evoke the Easter liturgy in Jerusalem. 1. The first association is the typological one of the New Testament, represented by the Church top left, replacing the Old Testament, the Synagogue opposite, at the Crucifixion. The Church is clothed in bright orange-red, reflective of the rays of the sun towards whom she is directed by the angel. By contrast the Synagogue is clothed in darkness, looking over her shoulder as she is ejected from the scene”. Actual participation in the Crucifixion by the Church is withheld, however. She holds a flask other than the chalice used to collect the blood of Christ, as commonly elsewhere, including the Mavriotissa in Kastoria, the Church of Abu Ghosh or the Syriac lectionaries of c. 1220.

2. A second association is with the Parable of the Ten Virgins. Ac- cording to this interpretation each personification stands as a single representative of on the one hand the five wise, and the other, the five foolish, virgins. The bright personification’s flask could be conceived as a type of lamp: while in eastern iconography the Wise Virgins bear candles, western imagery varies, with Virgins usually carrying lamps”. Taken in conjunction with the rising dead below, the primary reference is to the Last Judgement, with the Virgins lighting the way to Paradise. Combined at an early date with Paradise imagery – in the Rossano Gospels, for instance – the representation of this parable re-emerges in eleventh- century Byzantine art’”. It achieves prominence in western portal sculpture, notably at St. Denis in the mid-twelfth century and others in its wake”. K. Maxwell has pointed to its Last Judgement significamce in the later thirteenth-century Gospels in Paris (Bibl. Xat. gr. 54) in parallel with that of the Armenian Gospels in Baltimore of 1262 (Walters Art Gallery, W 539)”. In the Armenian Gospels the empty-handed Foolish

Virgins are barred from the door, while the Wise, identified by inscription, are saved. The dual themes of salvation and light are what is important here, as in the icon”. 3. A third association is with the Myrophores. This explains the flask as that held by Mary in the Women at the Tomb, in the scene below, and linked with, the Crucifixion in the Rabbula Gospels. Two women labelled as the ”Myrophoroi” appear in a late twelfth century enamel roundel which is one of a series reset in the thirteenth/fourteenth century as an icon frame. From the Georgian monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, this is now displayed in the Museum of the Greek Patriarchate”. The enamels once comprised an ensemble of the Crucifixion and the roundel still appears next to another enclosing the tomb of Christ, shaped as a sarcophagus. This association hints at Holy Land imagery of Resurrection”. The shells encasing the personifications symbolise death, making the link with the dead below. A second century Roman tomb- stone in the Vatican showing a High Priestess of the goddess Cybele preparing a libation framed in a shell makes this point4’. Its presence here is in keeping with the (not infrequent) recourse made to Greco-Roman sculpture by artists in the Holy Land and Syria during the period of the Crusades43 .

The implications of Resurrection explored in the icon are also at the heart of an illustration to the Easter Homily of Gregory of Nazianzenus in a manuscript in London, dated 1088 (B. L. Add. 24381) . This shows the crowned Church in a rectangular enclosure, carrying a flask. She is accompanied by an angel. Opposite, another angel ushers a personification of the Synagogue out behind a similar enclosed space to beyond the swathed canopy above. Reading these enclosed spaces as sarcophagi, instead of dislocated sections of an altar screen as Galavaris proposed, fits the Easter context: the rise of the Church as the outcome of Christ’s Resurrection. It exactly depicts the text of Gregory’s sermon which concerns the replacing of the Old with the New Dispensation through Christ’s death and resurrection”. The canopy above, which embraces the angels and the Church, in conjunction with the cupola over the sarcophagus, represents the church of the Holy Sepulchre. A final element in the icon, the high crenellated wall behind the Crucifixion, evokes the city of Jerusalem. This serves to endorse the topographical location, which is specified in twelfth century pilgrim accounts. The Russian pilgrim Daniel the Abbot, who visited the Holy Land between 1106 – 8, wrote: ”Jerusalem is a large city with strong walls all round and it has four corners in the form of a cross”, while John of Wiirzburg writing c. 1170 described ”This place, called in Hebrew ’Colgotha’, was in an old stretch of rock, just as everywhere today the most prominent places outside cities are given over to those condemned to punishment””. Theodoric (1169 – 74) refers to its seven gates and its oblong shape, with five angles4’. A close parallel for the high fortification wall-an irony given the fate of Jerusalem in the thirteenth century with the dismantling of its fortifications and then its sacking by the Khwarezmian Turks in 1244 – is a late thirteenth-century mosaic icon in Berlin (Bode Museum), which also features the crenellations in perspective.

I t is, then, within the Easter services in Jerusalem, in the Orthodox Paschal liturgy at the church of the Holy Sepulchre, that all three interpretations for the personifications converge and are reconciled with the rest of the icon. The role of the Syrian Orthodox community and the fabric of the building itself are central to this argument. Figures representing the Church and the Synagogue flanked the altar below the Anastasis mosaic in the main apse of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. This formed part of the programme undertaken under Latin rule and completed by the reconsecration date of 1149, adapting Constantine Monomachos’ scheme of 1036 – 48 . This iconography associated resurrection with the rise of the Church, and this was underlined by the presence of flanking figures bearing scrolls, also in mosaic. These comprised the typological pairings of each of Peter and Paul, with the Old Testament Samson and Job and Solomon and David. Accompanied by Latin texts expressing the dialogue between Church and Synagogue, they establish the replacement of the Old Dispensation with the New”. As M. L. Bulst Thiele has pointed out, this configuration would have been read in conjunction with the Whitsun Pentecost scene in the choir vault”. The founding of the Church was seen as an aspect of the reception by the apostles of the fire of the Holy Ghost. The New Dispensation replacing the Old simultaneously with Christ’s death and Resurrection is expressed in terms of the salvation of humankind. An inscription encircling the chapel at the head of Christ’s tomb declared: ”Mortality is now erased... The Law is now renewed””.

The Holy Sepulchre itself, as the locua sanctus of Christ’s death and resurrection, is the focus for the generation of eternal light and life alluded to in the icon. The Calvary chapel, part of the complex built under the Franks and consecrated in 1140, was at the centre of the Easter office on Good Friday. Theodoric, writing in the late twelfth century, wrote of ”Calvary... which like an eye in the head shines in this church and from which through the son of God’s death and the shedding of his blood, will come to us eternal light and life. Here scenes central to the Paschal liturgy were displayed. Amongst these, to the left of the altar, was a Crucifixion scene, inscribed in Greek. This showed several of the elements of the icon under discussion”. From Calvary pilgrims were taken down fifteen steps to the chapel of Adam below Calvary and shown how the blood of Christ flowed to Golgotha, where, in Orthodox belief, Adam was buried and baptised in the blood of Christ”. The potency of Christ’s blood is a key motif in the Dayr as-Suriani icon. Christ’s blood both flows onto Adam’s skull and falls into the eyes of Longinus, his face upturned”. The life-giving cross on which Christ was crucified was the object of special veneration. At the east end of the church, at a lower level than the chapel of Helena, is the grotto chapel

dedicated to the Finding of the Cross. A partially preserved twelfth-century wallpainting on the eastern wall near the site of the finding of the Cross depicts Christ’s body suspended on the cross, flanked by the intercessing Virgin and John, with Christ’s blood flowing onto not the skull of Adam but a cross”. It must have been through imagery such as this that the Syrian emphasis on the cult of the Cross was adopted by the Latins and transferred to the West . It is important to stress that the Syrians maintained a strong presence in the Holy Sepulchre: Theodoric records that one of the two chapels containing relics of the Holy Cross on the north side of the church was under the guardianship of the Syrians. He also notes that they maintained their own altars throughout the church which were put to use as soon as the Latins had finished celebrating”’. In the day-to-day running of services, as visitors, and probably also as artists, the Syrian Orthodox played a key role vis a vis the Latins.

The highpoint of Holy Week was the Holy Fire or Lucernarium on Easter Saturday. This was the miraculous lighting of a lamp in the Sepulchre itself from which all candles and lamps were lit for the Holy Sepulchre and other churches throughout the city. Documented from the fifth century, the phenomenon reached its peak in the twelfth century, as the accounts of pilgrims, corroborated by a manuscript of the rite of the Holy Sepulchre of 1122 demonstrate”. In the first decade of the twelfth century Abbot Daniel gives a moving, and also precise, account of his experience of the spectacle of the appearance of the Holy Fire during the Liturgy, after the ninth hour. He speaks of incandescence; of a fiery red light, the holy light of God shining in the tomb. ”Then suddenly the holy light shone in the tomb and a fearful bright Flash came from the holy tomb of the Lord... The Holy Light is not like earthly fire for it shines in a different and wonderful way and its flame is red like cinnabar and it shines in a way which is quite indescribable”.” The light is received first by the Latin ruler Baldwin (I), who takes part in the celebrations. Then the light is spread from hand to hand, from candle to candle, through the throng of believers packing the church. The party accompanying the officiating Patriarch or Bishop is, in Theodoric’s later account, headed by a priest bearing a cross containing a relic of the True Cross”. In the Dayr as-Suriani icon, the personification clothed in bright orange-red is illuminated by the golden flask she holds. She is assisting in the ceremony of Easter itself, in the role of one of the Myrophores. The Easter Vigil had the text of the Maries at the tomb, Matthew 28:1 – 20 as its main New Testament reading, after the sacrament of Baptism had taken place”. This was followed the next day, on Easter Sunday, by the Orthros or morning prayer. This included a visit by the Patriarch with the archdeacon into the interior of the tomb, to participate as he emerged in a drama of the meeting of Christ with the Myrophores during which the exact words of Matthew 28:9 were exchanged”. A mosaic over the entry to the marble canopied polygonal structure over the Sepulchre (positioned, Fig. 14, 510) depicted the approach of the three Maries to the

tomb with their phials of ointment, to find the angel and the stone rolled back”. An Orthodox Syriac Praxopostolos from the monastery of St. Panteleimon near Antioch (Vat. Syr. 21) points to the reenactment there of the Holy Fire during the Easter celebrations. While this manuscript dates from the mid-fourteenth century (1353), it has been shown to continue earlier practice’”. The lamps of the monastery church were lit from a candle brought from underneath the altar, in imitation of the Sepulchre ritual. The Syriac Rabbula Gospels’ miniature arguably shows the appearance of the Holy Fire in visual form  as early as the sixth century. The popularity of the Holy Fire in Jerusalem in the twelfth century and the belief in its miraculous character served to sustain the ritual and it is highly likely that this ceremony was practiced in Orthodox monasteries elsewhere. I suggest that the Dayr as-Suriani icon could have been made for this purpose: the reenactment in a Syrian monastery of the Jerusalem Easter service. The icon depicts the salvation of mankind through the Crucifix- ion. The intercessors Mary and John pray for the dead rising below”. The left female personification not only represents the Church, whose Dispensation began at the Crucifixion but is also clothed in the divine light of Easter Saturday. She carries a flask of ointment in commemoration of the Myrophores on Easter morning. This also serves as a sign for the Christian believer to be prepared, like the Wise Virgins, for their own calling to account at the Last Judgement. Western – French and especially Italian art – added scope to the Orthodox artist’s visual vocabulary, enabling him to express this idea. The Syrian Orthodox, in contact with the other indigenous communities, especially the G-reek, the Armenian and Georgian, engaged in conscious

and unconscious cultural exchange with the Latins during the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. The Holy Sepulchre acted as a focus for such exchange. Derived from earlier practice, as the representation in the Rabbula Gospels attests, the liturgical drama of the Resurrection was popularized under the Latins, with the Holy Fire in particular, and the visit of the Myrophores to the Tomb attracting crowds. The crux of the matter is the effect of coexistence, not schematic accounts of the import and export of works of art. After the final loss of Jerusalem from Latin rule in the mid-thirteenth century, after the respite of 1226 – 1244, the Orthodox liturgies continued to be celebrated in the Holy Sepulchre, under Muslim legislative control”. But the religious and artistic energy was diffused, reverting to other centres, especially monasteries in Syria and Egypt. What appears inchoate at first glance to the modern eye in the Dayr as-Suriani icon scene is translating the Crucifixion in terms of Holy Land topography and belief. This stems from the twelfth-century preoccupation, under Latin rule, with the cult centres associated with Christ’s life as a means of celebrating Christ’s humanity”. The central triad of Christ, the Virgin and St. John asserts Christ’s suffering with the clarity of Italo- Byzantine art. The sections of the panel at top and bottom which refer to the worshipper’s own involvement, religious experience and fate, are ”narrative”. This ability to adapt style appropriate to content represents a creative fusion of eastern and western ideas. It is symptomatic of the cultural interaction between indigenous and Latin Christians in the Holy Land and Latin Syria. The likelihood is that indigenous artists were extensively involved in commissions for Latins, as well as their own communities throughout the eastern Mediterranean: at Jerusalem, Acre, Tripoli and Cyprus as well as in production of icons at Sinai. The Dayr as-Suriani icon exemplifies this creative fusion in its depiction of the special features of the Jerusalem Easter liturgy, with its focus on Resur- rection and the salvation of mankind.