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Byzantium
Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557) by Helen C. Evens, et al. Yale University Press, 2004 650 pp., $75 |
Christ of Sinai is directly in front of me, and I can't breathe. I didn't think He would be here. I rounded a corner, absorbed in my own thoughts, certainly not expecting to see Him on this quiet morning, in the hundred-degree heat and dust of a city that has not yet fully wakened; but here He is, and I am suddenly confronted with His image, the image, the oldest icon in existence, the epitome of what an icon is and should be. My hands shake, and I approach Him slowly, in disbelief. The rest of the room evaporates, and all I can see is Him.
He is part of the exhibition titled "A Mystery Great and Wondrous," a title I thought was fitting in many ways: it is drawn from the Megalynarion of Advent, a "magnifying" hymn to the Virgin Mary in the weeks before we celebrate her Son's birth. She is Virgin, yet she gave birth to a son: "In the confines of the manger is laid the infinite Christ our God." He is fully God by nature, fully man by choice. He died in the flesh and conquered Death; he went to Hell, only to take Hell captive. How can we ever hope to understand these truths? They are indeed pure mystery, great and wondrous and dizzying and terrible. And icons, the attempts of man to communicate these astounding and beautiful events, are themselves a mystery. How can the physical materials of wood and pigment and egg yolk and animal skin convey such ethereal truths, and how can the passage of many centuries only intensify the power of these images to captivate Christian eyes and hearts?
Christ of Sinai looks at me with a steady gaze. His eyes-the famed twins, Justice and Mercy-see straight through me, piercing the whitewashed tomb of my exterior, and it hurts. I turn to the guard and ask her, in broken Greek, whether this is the true Christ of Sinai, or one of the copies that the ancients were so fond of. No, she says. This is the only one, and it is the first time it has left its home in Egypt. I look again into His eyes, where there are no highlights, emphasizing Christ's spirituality over human individuality. One eye is dark, foreboding, the shadows between the brow and lid deepening and on the verge of righteous anger; the other eye embraces all, even my own unworthy soul. I stand and pray. My eyes swell with tears, and I cannot look anymore.
Christ's eyes are painted in the encaustic technique, using beeswax mixed with pigment, applied in pure form while hot or emulsified with oil while cool. This is the same technique used for many of the Fayum burial portraits of the same period, several centuries after the birth of Christ. These portraits can be found in the British Museum in great numbers, shown alongside the sarcophagi and weaponry of the Egyptians, and they are similar to this icon in one important aspect: amid the meticulously rendered details of the portraits, it is the eyes, dark and arresting and sometimes frightening, that call out to the viewer. The eyes are the door into something greater than the image's substance. It was the eyes of the icons that Turkish warriors scratched out when pillaging the monasteries of Greece: the presence of the saints did not stop them from looting churches, but even the robbers could not bear to look in the eyes of those saints while desecrating all that was holy to them.
Christ of Sinai is not large-maybe 20 inches by 30-and he is behind a layer of glass, with an extra guard keeping watch a few feet from His face. I am reminded, suddenly, amid my tears and prayers, that I am in a museum, not a church, and that I am looking at a piece of art that is very old and very valuable, like the Attic black-figure amphorae which are so plentiful here, excavated anew each time the Athenians try to build a subway station. But this is not just an ancient object: it is a holy one, an icon, a window into heaven: a screen through which we are allowed to see, as much as we can abide it, the true world that is invisibly present with us. We forget where we are, and even who we are, in the power of the presence of the Almighty God. The thought of worshipping the physical object of an icon itself is ridiculous for anyone who has truly regarded one: in prayer, the substance melts away completely. This is at the heart of what every iconographer is trying to do when he fasts and prays while painting, saturating every brushstroke with intercessions-hoping that, through God's mercy, he may be made worthy of creating an icon so true and beautiful that we forget it is there at all.
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