123
but so was Saint Peter, as conveyed in the remarkable sixth-century icon from the
Monastery itself. There is the very stylish half-life-sized Saint, right out of Acts
5:15: possessed of “…the power to cure by the mere passage of his shadow.”
30
Other enduring qualities of the monastery’s remarkable collection of paintings
can be viewed and compared in the many photographs taken during four research
trips to Sinai by Kurtz Weitzmann and George Forsyth from 1958 to 1965, working
with Fred Anderegg of the University of Michigan. Many were reproduced in the
Weitzmann section on Sinai in the book A Treasury of Icons—Sixth to Seventeenth
Centuries.
31
The very cult of icon “veneration” blossomed at St. Catherine’s
Monastery, first in its utilitarian aspect—the icon as “religious object”—and then
“to a new attitude of greater spirituality stressing the transcendental relationship
between the image and the holy personage depicted.”
32
When I first went to live in a
cave above the monastery for many months one winter in the early 1970s, there
were but a handful of scholarly works serving as stimulus/guides: Weitzmann’s
unprecedented devotion to and widely disseminated knowledge of the icons in
Sinai, John Rupert Martin’s exquisite study of the specific icons and commentaries
portraying “the heavenly ladder,” Colonel Wilson’s four-volume Picturesque
Palestine, the 1688 edition of Arnauld D’Andilly’s translation of the “Ladder to
Paradise” and a Life of Saint John Climacus, from the writings of various Greek
historians, and a smattering of publications excerpting observations by many of the
early travelers to Sinai, as well as the Archimandrite Porphyrius Uspensky’s drawings during his trip to the Monastery in 1857 (Fig. 13.3).
In the early Renaissance, two pilgrims en route to Sinai met up in Jerusalem.
Bernhard von Breidenbach (1440–1497) was a leading political figure in one of the
Holy Roman Empire’s most powerful states, that of the Electorate of Mainz. Felix
Fabri (1441–1502) was an influential Swiss Dominican theologian. Both published
remarkably detailed accounts of their journeys to the Holy Monastery.
33
Such pilgrim’s tales fueled the imaginations of an El Greco, a Breughel….
Of course, there was nothing quite like the biography of Constantin von
Tischendorf himself. I had seen some of the 346+ folios of both the Old and
New Testaments at the British Library. But behind glass. However, nothing could
quite prepare for holding and studying the 1922 Codex Sinaiticvs Petropolitanvs
30 ibid., Nelson and Collins, pp. 122–123.
31 Kurt Weitzmann, Manolis Chatzidakis, Krsto Miatev and Svetozar Radojðic. Harry N. Abrams,
Inc., New York, 1966, Plates 1–36, and p. IX.
32 Breidenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, 1486; and Fabri’s Fratris Felicis Fabri
Evagatorium in Terrae sanctae, Arabiae et Aegypti peregrinationem, first published in 1484 –
https://archive.org/stream/libraryofpalesti07paleuoft/libraryofpalesti07paleuoft_djvu.txt, and
eventually consolidated and published in three volumes.
33 Preserved In The Public Library Of Petrograd, In The Library Of The Society Of Ancient
Literature In Petrograd, And In The Library Of The University Of Leipzig, Now Reproduced In
Facsimile From Photographs By Helen And Kirsopp Lake, With A Description And Introduction
To The History Of The Codex By Kirsopp Lake, Oxford, At the Clarendon Press, Oxford UK,
1922.
13.3 The Incarnation of Fragments
but so was Saint Peter, as conveyed in the remarkable sixth-century icon from the
Monastery itself. There is the very stylish half-life-sized Saint, right out of Acts
5:15: possessed of “…the power to cure by the mere passage of his shadow.”
30
Other enduring qualities of the monastery’s remarkable collection of paintings
can be viewed and compared in the many photographs taken during four research
trips to Sinai by Kurtz Weitzmann and George Forsyth from 1958 to 1965, working
with Fred Anderegg of the University of Michigan. Many were reproduced in the
Weitzmann section on Sinai in the book A Treasury of Icons—Sixth to Seventeenth
Centuries.
31
The very cult of icon “veneration” blossomed at St. Catherine’s
Monastery, first in its utilitarian aspect—the icon as “religious object”—and then
“to a new attitude of greater spirituality stressing the transcendental relationship
between the image and the holy personage depicted.”
32
When I first went to live in a
cave above the monastery for many months one winter in the early 1970s, there
were but a handful of scholarly works serving as stimulus/guides: Weitzmann’s
unprecedented devotion to and widely disseminated knowledge of the icons in
Sinai, John Rupert Martin’s exquisite study of the specific icons and commentaries
portraying “the heavenly ladder,” Colonel Wilson’s four-volume Picturesque
Palestine, the 1688 edition of Arnauld D’Andilly’s translation of the “Ladder to
Paradise” and a Life of Saint John Climacus, from the writings of various Greek
historians, and a smattering of publications excerpting observations by many of the
early travelers to Sinai, as well as the Archimandrite Porphyrius Uspensky’s drawings during his trip to the Monastery in 1857 (Fig. 13.3).
In the early Renaissance, two pilgrims en route to Sinai met up in Jerusalem.
Bernhard von Breidenbach (1440–1497) was a leading political figure in one of the
Holy Roman Empire’s most powerful states, that of the Electorate of Mainz. Felix
Fabri (1441–1502) was an influential Swiss Dominican theologian. Both published
remarkably detailed accounts of their journeys to the Holy Monastery.
33
Such pilgrim’s tales fueled the imaginations of an El Greco, a Breughel….
Of course, there was nothing quite like the biography of Constantin von
Tischendorf himself. I had seen some of the 346+ folios of both the Old and
New Testaments at the British Library. But behind glass. However, nothing could
quite prepare for holding and studying the 1922 Codex Sinaiticvs Petropolitanvs
30 ibid., Nelson and Collins, pp. 122–123.
31 Kurt Weitzmann, Manolis Chatzidakis, Krsto Miatev and Svetozar Radojðic. Harry N. Abrams,
Inc., New York, 1966, Plates 1–36, and p. IX.
32 Breidenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, 1486; and Fabri’s Fratris Felicis Fabri
Evagatorium in Terrae sanctae, Arabiae et Aegypti peregrinationem, first published in 1484 –
https://archive.org/stream/libraryofpalesti07paleuoft/libraryofpalesti07paleuoft_djvu.txt, and
eventually consolidated and published in three volumes.
33 Preserved In The Public Library Of Petrograd, In The Library Of The Society Of Ancient
Literature In Petrograd, And In The Library Of The University Of Leipzig, Now Reproduced In
Facsimile From Photographs By Helen And Kirsopp Lake, With A Description And Introduction
To The History Of The Codex By Kirsopp Lake, Oxford, At the Clarendon Press, Oxford UK,
1922.
13.3 The Incarnation of Fragments