E n c ou n t e r s
Encounter: The Mosaics in the Monastery of
St. Catherine at Mount Sinai
Ja ś E l sn e r   Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford / University of Chicago
I first went to Sinai in March 1987, when I was an MA
student at the Courtauld and wanted to do my master’s
thesis on images of the Transfiguration in Byzantine
art. The palaver of getting it all together was very com-
plicated: applications for travel awards (which, amazingly,
paid off, both from the unfortunately named Worts Fund
in Cambridge, where I had been an undergraduate, and the
Lucas Fund at the Courtauld); letters to the monastery from
assembled Orthodox prelates to whom introductions had to
be arranged through friends of friends in England; and the
personal mediation of Angela and Michael Jones, the daugh-
ter and son-in-law of old friends of my parents who were
Egyptologists in Cairo but followed the spiritual guidance of
one of the Sinai monks. My father came with me for a week
in Cairo to see Egyptian art and for a week in Sinai. We drove
from Cairo and stayed in the cold, very basic guesthouse out-
side the monastery, not far, a monk told us, from where the
Golden Calf had been set up. The next day we were granted an
audience inside the monastery with Archbishop Damianos,
through the good offices of Father Makarios, an American
monk who was then the only English speaker in the mon-
astery. We presented our letters and the gifts we had bought
in Cairo—lukum (Turkish delight), Greek brandy—and were
sent back to the guesthouse.
Visiting hours were very limited and access very restricted.
We could see the fifty or so icons displayed in the narthex
(in authentic conditions of deep darkness), step one pace into
the church nave but not farther, and venture into the monas-
tery streets near the church. The icons were marvelous, but
few were on view beyond what had already been published.
We could and did wander around the Sinai desert and up the
mountain; it was exquisitely beautiful in the spring sun, with
almond blossoms on the trees encircling the monastery. But I
had come to see the apse and the mosaics, and one could not
get behind the iconostasis without special permission (Fig. 1).
Gesta v55n1 (Spring 2016).
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By the third day I was getting worried: we only had four more
before we had to return to Cairo and the flight back home.
Angela and Michael had gone back to the city, and nothing
much was happening. It was Lent, and the food provided for
us was very basic, although I do recall one day with fish.
Good fortune arrived when I fell ill. First there were bed-
bugs that gave me bites all over that swelled, and then I came
down with a fever, due to flu or the food or both. Something
about a father with a sick son stranded in the guesthouse
seemed to arouse feelings of pity, and several monks visited.
The next day was Sunday, and we were invited to the service. I
was handed the Eucharist by a monk who said “artos” (Greek
for bread), and I was surprised to find it leavened and hearty.
On Monday Father Makarios took us into the library for a
tour and a glimpse of a few manuscripts, the prelude to his
tour of the church the following day. We went down the nave,
around the chapels in the back, and finally to the apse and the
great mosaic. The next day, we took a bus back to Cairo.
It is easy to laugh at the romanticism of travel and the
naïve susceptibility of the young for exotic journeys in distant
lands, but it remains a deep bedrock in the empathetic drives
of art history, the supreme discipline of the object fetishist
(myself included). Forms of Orientalist romanticism have
driven Byzantine studies by Westerners since the nineteenth
century. But the bottom line is that the Sinai mosaics—one
of the few major programs of Byzantine art that, at that time,
had hardly been restored beyond cleaning, and so retained
the complex texture of the ways the tesserae were laid at slight
angles to each other and were lit as their makers intended—is
one of the knockout sights for any medievalist, and for any-
one who cares for art at all.
What did I learn? First, the visit to Sinai was important for
me in making imaginative contact with a continuing version
of early Christianity, a still-living sixth-century complex, and
its exceptional Byzantine sacred art. My master’s thesis did
v55n1, Spring 2016    Encounters   1
Figure 1. Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai, view from the nave toward the east, early evening before vespers, 2005 (photo: Robert S.
Nelson). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.

discuss the iconography of the mosaics, but not more than if I
had only looked at pictures.1 A year later, however, in a chapter
written as part of my doctoral dissertation back in Cambridge
in the spring of 1988—mostly working in the wonderful li-
brary of the Warburg Institute in London with its tremendous
resources in all things patristic and art historical—the expe-
rience of Sinai, and that sense of firsthandedness that is an
essential aspect of seeing our objects of study, came into its
own. That was the moment of my major thinking about the
mosaics, about their relationship with the relic of the burn-
ing bush and with the pilgrimage topography of the site as a
whole, a holistic sense that only direct, personal experience
can provide.2 Specifically, the two major mosaic images on
1. This was published in a much revised form as Jaś Elsner,
“Image and Iconoclasm in Byzantium,” Art History 11, no. 4 (1988):
471–91.
2. The discussion of the apse was published in Jaś Elsner, “The
Viewer and the Vision: The Case of the Sinai Apse,” Art History 17,
no. 1 (1994): 81–102, and, in extended form, in idem, Art and the
Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World
to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
chap. 3. I explored the inscriptions of Sinai in Simon Coleman and
Jaś Elsner, “The Pilgrim’s Progress: Art, Architecture and Ritual Move­­
ment at Sinai,” World Archaeology 26, no. 1 (1994): 73–89.
the wall above the triumphal arch—showing Moses before
the burning bush and Moses receiving the tablets of the Law
(both events believed to have taken place at Sinai) alongside
the Transfiguration of Christ in the apse (where Jesus appears
in his divine nature between Sinai’s two prophets, Moses and
Elijah, and above Peter, James, and John)—united a hierar-
chy of visions that presents a complex theological argument.
It is an argument about vision in which Moses progresses
from the sight of the bush (where he learns God’s name) to
the mountain peak where he receives the Law (and sees what
the Douay-Reims and King James Bibles call the “back parts”
of God but not his face; Exod. 33:23–30). These visions are
surpassed by the Transfiguration of Christ, where Moses and
Elijah see God incarnate face to face for the first time, and
their seeing is witnessed by the three apostles, so that the vi-
sion of God becomes a matter for the assembly, the ecclesia,
of the chosen (Fig. 2). This argument cannot be found in this
form in any existing patristic text. That is, the Sinai mosaics—
admittedly very fine works, probably imperially sponsored,
for an elite and educated religious audience of monks and
pilgrims—constitute a major document of visual theology
that is an original intellectual contribution in its own right
and not a gloss on, or an illustration of, an earlier text. The in-
sight that this kind of theological thinking through the visual

2    Gesta  v55n1, Spring 2016

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Figure 2. Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai, apse, 2005
(photo: Robert S. Nelson). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a
color version of this image.
continued in the Sinai icons thereafter (such as the Klimakos
Ladder icon or the great twelfth-century Annunciation or the
invention of the type of the Virgin of the burning bush), fol-
lowing the visual instantiation of a paradigm for such theol-
ogy in images in the apse, has spurred some of my later work.3
3. Jaś Elsner and Gerhard Wolf, “The Transfigured Mountain:
Icons and Transformations of Pilgrimage at the Monastery of St
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More subtly, the difficulties of seeing the apse on that ini-
tial trip—its occlusion by the iconostasis and its protection by
the monks from all but chosen visitors—have provided, per-
haps not fully consciously, a stimulus for a long project. I have
become concerned with covers, veils, shutters, and the culture
of sacred concealment as a theme of fundamental importance
in the history of art, one that has been profoundly suppressed
in the modernist regime of the art gallery and the copious
image culture of the internet.4 It is not only sacred works from
the Middle Ages that have operated under a frame of covering
and revelation but also many prize pictures, from portraits to
erotica (arguably related to religion when deliberately blas-
phemous) in periods that postdate the ancient and Byzantine
worlds.
We cannot easily trace the unconscious drives that govern
our choices of career or interest, but lived experience, beyond
the library or the classroom and especially in the context of
travel beyond one’s normal environs, cannot be discounted.
Autopsy, as Herodotus knew when he went to Egypt and wrote
about it in the fifth century BCE, remains fundamental.5
Catherine at Mount Sinai,” in Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art
and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, ed. Sharon E. J.
Gerstel and Robert S. Nelson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 37–71.
4. Jaś Elsner, “Closure and Penetration: Reflections on the Pola
Casket,” Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia
26 (2013): 183–227; idem, “Green Curtains and Picture Covers:
Towards an Archaeology of the Pictorial Closet,” in Interdisciplinary
Encounters: Hidden and Visible Explorations of the Work of Adrian
Rifkin, ed. Dana Arnold (London: Tauris, 2015), 219–58; and idem,
“Relic, Icon and Architecture: The Material Articulation of the
Holy in East Christian Art,” in Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult
of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. Cynthia Hahn and Holger A.
Klein (Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Collection, Harvard University Press, 2015), 13–40.
5. François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation
of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 261–73.
Encounters   3