CURSOR MUNDI

Cursor Mundi is produced under the auspices of the Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles.

Christopher Baswell, Columbia University and Barnard CollCU

General Editor

Blair Sullivan, University of California, Los Angeles

Executive Editor

Editorial Board

Michael D. Bailey, Iowa State University

William Bodiford, University of California, Los Angeles
Peter Cowe, University of California, Los Angeles
Florin Curta, University ofFlorida
Elizabeth Freeman, University of Tasmania
Yitzhak Hen, Ben-Gurion University ofthe Negev
Geraldine Heng, University of Texas at Austin
Lauren Kassell, Pembroke College, Cambridge
David Lines, University of Warwick
Cary Nederman, Texas A &Μ University
Teofilo Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles
Zrinka Stahuljak, University of California, Los Angeles

Volume 11
 Approaching the Holy Mountain
Art and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai

Edited by

Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Robert S. Nelson

BREPOLS
 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Approaching the Holy Mountain : art and liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, -
(Cursor mundi; 11) 1. Saint Catherine (Monastery : Mount Sinai) - Congresses. 2. Christian
art and symbolism - Egypt - Sinai, Mount - Congresses. 3. Icons, Byzantine - Egypt - Sinai,
Mount - Congresses. 4. Illumination of books and manuscripts, Byzantine - Egypt - Sinai,
Mount - Congresses. 5. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in art - Congresses. 6. Christian
pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature - Congresses. 7. Christian antiquities - Egypt - Sinai,
Mount - Congresses. 8. Sinai (Egypt) - Antiquities - Congresses.
I. Series II. Gerstel, Sharon E. J. III. Nelson, Robert S., 1947-
704.9'482'0953 l-dc22

ISBN-13: 9782503531274

© 2010, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

D/2010/0095/1H
ISBN: 978-2-503-53127-4

Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

 Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Archbishop’s Preface xxv

Acknowledgements xxvii

List of Abbreviations xxix

Sinai Studies: An Overview and an Introduction 1

ROBERT S. NELSON

Paving the Road to Sinai: 15

Georgios and Maria Soteriou on the Holy Mountain
IOANNA CHRISTOFORAKI

Place

The Transfigured Mountain: Icons and Transformations 37

of Pilgrimage at the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai
JAS ELSNER AND GERHARD WOLF

Excavations on the Holy Summit (Jebel Musa) at Mount Sinai: 73

Preliminary Remarks on the Justinianic Basilica
SOPHIA KALOPISSI-VERTI AND MARIA PANAYOTIDI
The Architecture of the Justinianic Basilica on the Holy Summit 107
PETROS KOUFOPOULOS AND MARINA MYRIANTHEOS-KOUFOPOULOU

Painted Skins: The Illusions and Realities 119

of Architectural Polychromy, Sinai and Egypt
ELIZABETH S. BOLMAN

Liturgy

Worship on Sinai in the First Christian Millennium: 143

Glimpses of a Lost World
ROBERT F. TAFT, SJ.

Late Byzantine Cathedral Liturgy and the Service ofthe Furnace 179
ALEXANDER LINGAS

Manuscript

Manuscript Production on Mount Sinai 233

from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century
NANCY P. SEVCENKO

Sinai, MS gr. 2: Exploring the Significance of a Sinai Manuscript 259

HIEROMONK JUSTIN SINAITES

Icon

Visualizing the Divine: An Early Byzantine Icon 285

of the ‘Ancient of Days’ at Mount Sinai
KATHLEEN CORRIGAN

Regarding Prayer: Contemplating an Icon of John the Forerunner 305

CHARLES BARBER

Archive and Atelier: Sinai and the Case of the Narrative Icon 319
PAROMA CHATTERJEE

Mural and Icon Painting at Sinai in the Thirteenth Century 345

GEORGI R. PARPULOV
Sinai, Acre, Tripoli, and the ‘Backwash from the Levant’: 415
Where Did the Icon Painters Work?
REBECCA W. CORRIE

Sinai and Cyprus: Holy Mountain, Holy Isle 449

ANNEMARIE WEYL CARR

Space

Three East Slavic Pilgrims at Sinai 481

TRANSLATED BY GEORGI R. PARPULOV

Turning Holy Mountains into Ladders to Heaven: 505

Overlapping Topographies and Poetics of Space
in Post-Byzantine Sacred Engravings of Mount Sinai and Mount Athos
VERONICA DELLA DORA

On the Painted Ancestry of Domenikos Theotokopoulos ’s 537

Sacred Land scapes of Mount Sinai and the Monastery of St Catherine
CRISTINA STANCIOIU

Plates 563

Index 587
 The Transfigured Mountain:
Icons and Transformations of Pilgrimage at
the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai

Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

Introduction: Travelling Icons, Moving Mountains

cons from Mount Sinai have begun to travel. Recent shows in New York, St

I Petersburg, Athens, Genoa, Bari, and at the Getty’s monographic exhibition

of2007 raise the question what do these icons stand for.1 The Sinai icons were
rediscovered in the 1930s by the expeditions of George and Maria Soteriou,2 and
brought to international attention after the expeditions in the 1950s and 1960s of
George Forsyth and Kurt Weitzmann.3 The corpus of about three thousand icons,
of which relatively few have been restored or catalogued, is known only through a
small number ofprominent pieces, omnipresent in illustrations, and in the selections

The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture ofthe Middle Byzantine Era, /1.1). 843-1261, ed.
by Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997);
Sinai, Byzantium, Russia: Orthodox Art from the Sixth to the Twentieth Century, ed. by Yuri
Piatnitsky and Oriana Baddeley (London: Saint Catherine Foundation, 2000); Eaith and Power·,
Pilgrimage to Sinai: Treasures from the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine — Προσκύνημα στο
Σινά- Θησαυροί από την Ιερά Μονή της Αγίας Αικατερίνας, cd. by Anastasia Drandaki
(Athens: Benaki Museum, 2004); Mandylion: Intorno al ‘Sacro Volto’, da Bisanzio a Genova, ed.
byGerhard Wolf, Collette Dufour Bozzo, and Anna Rosa Calderoni Masctti (Genoa: Museo Dio-
cesano, 2004); San Nicola: Splendori d'arte d’Oriente e d’Occidente, cd. by Michele Bacci (Milano
Skira, 2006); Holy Image, Hallowed Ground.
1 Soteriou, Εικόνες, pp. 7-8.
■’ The Monastery of St Catherine at Mt Sinai: The Church and Fortress ofJustinian, ed. by
G. Forsyth and K. Weitzmann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973).
38 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

published by Soteriou and Weitzmann.1*4 Hans Belting has commented on that

corpus: ‘The chance discovery in the Sinai desert has now put scholars in aposition
to write a history of Byzantine icon painting. The catalogue of the Mount Sinai icons
will provide a compendium of Byzantine panel painting.’5 Since Weitzmann’s time,
the corpus of Sinai icons have become something of a playground for exercises in
style analysis, focusing on questions of production and origin.6 In the Byzantium
exhibitions in the Metropolitan Museum of 1997 and 2004, loans from Sinai played
a double role: on the one hand, the icons represented the apex of Byzantine painting
in their epoch; on the other hand, their display drew deliberately on the ‘magic’ of
the site itself. In the show Faith and Power a basilica-like structure was built to evoke
the church of St Catherine’s, and in fact numbers of museum visitors were seen
praying at the exhibition as if in a sacred space. In t\xcByzantinm 330-1453 exhibi­
tion at the Royal Academy in London, in 2008-09, the show’s last room of icons
from Sinai (as well as two from Kiev which were once in Sinai) again formed the
final climax — the culmination and spiritual triumph of Byzantine art. With the
temporary transfer of a good number of icons from Mount Sinai to Mount Getty
in an exhibition wholly dedicated to Sinai rather than to its place in Byzantine art,
this dimension became even more obvious — moving the icons came also to mean
moving the mountain. For the icons are asynekdoche of Sinai itself; they incorporate
the site they have belonged to for centuries, with many of the paintings probably
made there and the earliest images having been there for about 1400 years.
The aim of this paper is to put forward the fundamental question ‘why this
there ?’ and to resist the traditional model of Sinai as a repository for someone else’s
goods. Looking at the emphasis on localism, evidenced by a number of the Sinai
icons, allows us to remark on some of the issues suppressed by the provenance and
patronage models usual in discussions of medieval art.7 The Sinai icons, as a corpus

1 Soteriou, Εικόνες, and K. Weitzmann, The Monastery of St Catherine at Mt Sinai: The Icons
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
5 H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 25. (Orig. published as H. Belting, Bild und Knit: Line
Geschichte des Bildes vor dem 7,eitalter der Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990).)
6 Many of Weitzmann’s discussions are collected in Kurt Weitzmann, Studies in the Arts at
Sinai: Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and of course the approach informs
Weitzmann, Monastery ofSt Catherine at Mt Sinai: The Icons.
/ For varieties of provenance as a main theme of discussion for the Sinai icons, see Monastery
of St Catherine at Mt Sinai, ed. by Forsyth and Weitzmann; Ernst Kitzinger, On Some Icons of
the Seventh Century’, in The Art ofByzantium and the Medieval West, ed. by Eugene Kleinbauer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 233-55; George Galavaris, ‘Early Icons at
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 39

and a collection, were no less a material-cultural set of prompts to the monastery’s

overall self-construction as a pilgrimage site than were the buildings, inscriptions,
and mosaics? That self-construction is itself an extraordinarily interesting phe­
nomenon since it was liable to remarkable change during the Middle Ages when
the site moved from being a major paradigm of scriptural pilgrimage (that is,
pilgrimage to a landscape of scriptural happenings, where topography and material
culture vindicated text) to a prime exemplar of charismatic pilgrimage (that is, in
the case of Christianity, pilgrimage to the body ofa saint, where the ideal Christian
life is embodied and made tangible in relics available for worship and display).9 Our
argument will be that many Sinai icons of the Middle Ages, from the twelfth cen­
tury onwards, were used to mediate that shift in the nature and self-construction
of Sinai (from the Monastery of the Virgin at the site of Moses’ epiphanies to the
Monastery of St Catherine) and to retain or reformulate some aspects of the old
scriptural pilgrimage model within the site’s new dispensation.

Localism

The great pair of images of Moses and Elijah, painted by or paid for by a man called
Stephanos either from the eleventh century or the thirteenth,10 with inscriptions

Sinai’, in Sinai: Treasures ofthe Monastery of St Catherine, ed. by Konstantinos Manafis (Athens:
Ekdotike Athenon, 1990), pp. 91-101 (following Weitzmann).
8 In general the anthropological literature on pilgrimage (focusing onpeople rather than objects
or sites as such) has been weak in granting material culture its full place as central to constructing
the nature and experience of pilgrimage centres. For an argument against this position (focusing
on Sinai), see Simon Coleman and Jas Elsner, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress: Art, Architecture and Ritual
Movement at Sinai’, World Archaeology, 26 (1994), 73-89. On the beginnings of Sinai pilgrimage,
see Daniel Caner, ‘Sinai Pilgrimage and Ascetic Romance: Pseudo-Nihrs’M?mzftozi«in Context’,
in Travel, Communication and Geography in Late Antiquity: Sacred and Profane, ed. by Linda Ellis
and Frank Kidner (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 135-47.
9 On these models clearly Christian pilgrimage, a typology to which must be added the journey
to no particular site (travel simply for the sake of God), see Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubies,
‘Introduction’, in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. by J. Elsner and
J.-P. Rubies (London: Reaktion, 1999),pp. 1-56, esp.pp. 15-20. The charismatic model may itself
be divided into various subforms such as pilgrimage to living saints, to body-relics, and to images
or icons; see Jas Elsner and Ian Rutherford, ‘Introduction’, to Pilgrimage in Graeca-Roman and
Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, ed. by J. Elsner and I. Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 1-38, esp. pp. 28-30.
10 G. Parpulov proposes an eleventh-century date in ‘28. Prophet Elijah Fed by a Raven’ and
‘29. Moses Receiving the Law before the Burning Bush’, in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground, pp.
40 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

in Greek and Arabic, and the thirteenth-century biographical icon of St Catherine

are all pieces which evoke the very specific local conditions of piety in Sinai,
alluding to the monastery’s own saints and holy spots (Figures 4, 5, 6).11 All three
icons not only direct attention to holy intercessors with a special Sinai link, but go
further in directing worshippers to visualize sites within the sacred terrain
connected with these holy figures: the peak where Moses received the tablets; the
cave where God’s ravens fed Elijah in Horeb; the peak to which St Catherine’s
body was miraculously transposed. Once a pilgrim or monk had come to Sinai
these sacred spots were all accessible, and indeed were marked out by paths with
small shrines and niches for prayer.
The traditional model for the arrival of such icons to Sinai — requiring com­
plexproblems of transportation through Muslim territory — allows Stephanos for
example to be a painter living in Constantinople who ‘did not wish to forego the
opportunity of having an everlasting votive inscription at a world famous cult
site’.12 It fails however to explain the use of Arabic in his votive inscription. More­
over it fails to recognize that other entirely Byzantine cultural products and
phenomena which were created in areas of Muslim control show little influence
from the local Islamic context. For instance, the writings of the eighth-century
theologian John of Damascus are only dependent on Islam in that he had the
political freedom to write in a way that opposed the theology of the current regime
in Constantinople. The alternative view to Sinai as recipient of votive icons is that
images so specifically related to the spirituality of Sinai as the Stephanos pair or the
icon of St Catherine were themselves products of that spirituality — painted by
artists resident in the monastery or its outposts (some perhaps itinerant and some
probably trained elsewhere). 13 A plethora of provenances for and influences on

191-93 against the traditional thirteenth-century date. Further discussion is in Byzantium

330-1453, ed. by Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki (London: Royal Academy of Arts
Exhibition Catalogue, 2008), pp. 361-62, 460-61.
11 These are items 28 (Parpulov, ‘Prophet Elijah Fed by a Raven’, p. 191), 29 (Parpulov, 'Moses
Receiving the Law before the Burning Bush’, p. 193), and 55 (Paroma Chatterjee, ‘Saint Catherine
and Scenes from her Life’, p. 265) in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground (each with bibliography ad
loc.). Other medieval examples at the exhibition with strongly localizing subject-matter include 47
and 48 (John Climacus); 51, 52, and 53 (Moses); 56 (St Catherine).
I“ Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 260.
1J For some nuanced thoughts on issues ofprovenance, see Doula Mouriki, ‘Icons from the 12th
to the 15 th century’, in Sinai: Treasures ofthe Monastery ofSt Catherine, ed. by Konstantinos Mana-
fis (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 1990), pp. 102-24, esp.pp. 102-04, and David Jacoby, ‘Christian
Pilgrimage to Sinai until the Late Fifteenth Century’, in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground, pp. 79-93,
I'HE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 41

Figure 4 (left). Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law before the Burning Bush, icon given or
painted by Stephanos, with inscriptions in Greek and Arabic, perhaps eleventh century. Getty cata­
logue, no. 29 (EX.2006.3.32). Reproduced with permission of the Holy Monastery ofSt Catherine,
Sinai, Egypt. Photograph: Bruce White.
Figure 5 (right). Elijah Fed by a Raven, icon given or painted by Stephanos, with inscriptions in
Greek and Arabic, perhaps eleventh century. Getty catalogue, no. 28 (EX.2006.3.33). Reproduced
with permission of the Holy Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai, Egypt. Photograph: Bruce White.

Sinai’s artists helps explain the range of kinds and styles of icons in the monastery.
But it must also be said that at Sinai there is no reason why these artists should not
have taken on a specifically Sinaiatic identity — just as it is absurd to deny a version
of ‘Englishness’ to such significant emigre artists who worked for many years in
England as Holbein, Van Dyck, Händel, or Zoffany.

esp.p. 80; for icons and the construction of local identity, sec Kristen Μ. Collins, ‘Visual Piety and
Institutional Identity at Sinai’, in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground, pp. 95-119, esp. pp. 106-09.
42 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

We need to be clear
here that Sinaiatic local­
ism, while being specific
to the very particular
scriptural and liturgical
character of the mon­
astery, need not be re­
stricted specifically to
that one place. It is a way
of being, perhaps even an
ideology — or better a
spiritual identity —
adopted by those (wher­
ever they may be) with a
special connection to
Sinai. That includes most
obviously the monastery’s
outposts in Acre, Crete,
Cyprus, and Constan­
tinople (especially its
connected monasteries
and estates), but also may
encompass individuals
(monks elsewhere with a
strong link to Sinai) and a
large potential network
i of (ex)pilgrims. Indeed,
Figure 6. Biographical Icon ofSt Catherine with Scenes from her
Life Flaming the Main Image, twelfth or thirteenth century. the promulgation of
Getty catalogue, no. 55 (EX.2006.3.72). Reproduced with per­ Sinai-specific themes
mission of the Holy Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai, Egypt. would have been of par­
Photograph: Bruce White. ticular interest and value
to adherents of a Sinai-generated identity, since images, icons, and other material
tokens were a direct link to the site.
This visual localism of religious evocation — itself placed at the end-point of
a significant pilgrimage for the likely medieval viewers of these icons — is therefore
further enhanced by the probability that these icons (and so many others of
remarkable quality still in the monastery’s collection) were very likely made on
Sinai or made for it at one of its dependencies. What is so exceptional about this
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 43

site is that we have not only the architecture and structure of a sixth-century
monastery along with its various alterations over the centuries, but we also possess
a number of the liturgical artefacts — crosses, books, and icons — which were used
by monks and worshippers in fulfilment of the great monastic mission so elegantly
described by Procopius (perhaps not entirely without an element of high camp) in
these terms:
On this mount Sinai live monks whose life is a kind of careful rehearsal of death, and they
enjoy without fear the solitude which is very precious to them. [...] These monks have
nothing to crave — for they arc superior to all human desires and have no interest in
possessing anything nor caring for their bodies, nor do they seek pleasure in any other thing
whatever. (De aedificiis 5. 8. 4-5)

These icons, books, and liturgical artefacts surviving at Sinai may be described as
the technologies necessary for the kind of sacred life so eulogized by Procopius,
who as a layman was of course spared this careful rehearsal of death himself. Some
obviously came from elsewhere — brought as part of the original imperial donation
as Weitzmann argued for the major sixth-century icons, offered by visiting pilgrims
or monks as votives perhaps as Belting suggested, or acquired by some other means
(as must surely have been the case with the famous fourth-century biblical manu­
script, Codex Sinaiticus, which was made before the monastery was founded).14
But others — not least the three icons with which we began — can be most
satisfactorily explained as having been made at the monastery or its dependencies
as a result of its sacred life and to foster the practice of that way of life. One might
cite numerous other Moses and Elijah icons, the theme of the Virgin of the
Burning Bush (which was to develop a cache beyond the monastery, Figure 7, and
cf. Figure 19 below), and such highly learned icon types as the wonderful Climacus
image whose subject matter celebrated one of the monastery’s most famous saints
(Figure 8). All these examples again focus on the localism with which we began,
though of course the monastery’s painters certainly also made icons of themes and
saints with a broader resonance.
If one glances through Kurt Weitzmann’s publication of the earliest Sinai icons
(down to the tenth century) it is striking that very few represent the concern with
Sinai’s local saints and sites in the ways demonstrated by a substantial group of the
later icons. It is the case that some of the early icons appear to reflect local rather
than cosmopolitan styles and saints — for example, the double icon of St Platon

14 Weitzmann, Studies in the Arts at Sinai: Essays, y>. 6; Belting, Likeness and Presence, <p. 25. For
Codex Sinaiticus, see S. McKendrick, In a Monastery Library: Preserving Codex Sinaiticus and the
Greek Written Heritage (London: British Library, 2006) (with further bibliography).
44 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

of Ancyra (probably, the

inscription can be read to
yield the even more ob­
scure St Pambon) and an
unidentified female mar­
tyr which Weitzmann
dates to the sixth or sev­
enth century and which
was taken from Sinai to
Kiev in the nineteenth
century.1'1 Weitzmann
wished to deny this piece
a Constantinopolitan
provenance (largely be­
cause he didn’t like its
style) and postulated
Palestine or even Egypt.
Likewise the icon of St
Mercurius killing Julian
the Apostate, which
Weitzmann attributes to
a Coptic workshop of
Figure 7. Virgin of the Burning Bush with Jesus and Saints, from roughly the tenth cen­
the chapel of St James, main church at Sinai, fifteenth century.
16 However, none of
tury.15
Getty catalogue, fig. 98. Reproduced with permission of the Holy
Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai, Egypt. Photograph: Bruce
these objects shows any
White. stronglikelihood of being
manufactured at Sinai in
that none has a special affinity with the site and its holy places. By contrast a couple
of rather fragmentary pieces that Weitzmann ascribed to the seventh century
appear to show the Prophet Elijah. One is certainly Elijah, since the image is
inscribed with his name to the left.17 The book he holds has the inscription ‘I have
been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts’ from I Kings 19.10 and 14 — the very
words spoken by Elijah in response to God when God granted him an epiphany in

15 Weitzmann, Monastery ofSt Catherine at Mt Sinai: The Icons, no. B15, pp. 38-40.
16 Weitzmann, Monastery ofSt Catherine at Mt Sinai: The Icons, no. B49, pp. 78-79.
7 Weitzmann, Monastery of St Catherine at Mt Sinai: The Icons, no. B17, pp. 42-43.
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 45

Horeb, on the peak near

Sinai. This looks dis­
tinctly like a work
painted for the mon­
astery.18 Another frag­
ment was dated by
Weitzmann to the sev­
enth century (following
Soteriou) and was be­
lieved by him also to
represent Elijah.19 But if
we want to look back
from the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries to a
major monument from
Sinai’s past and on the
site as an influence or
inspiration for the local­
ism of the high-medieval
body of objects with
localistic themes, we need
to look less at the early
icons and more at the
other visual decorations
provided as part of the Figure 8. The Heavenly Ladder of St John Climacus, twelfth
century. Getty catalogue, no. 48 (EX.2006.3.56). Reproduced
Justinianic refoundation.
with permission of the Holy Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai,
The project sponsored Egypt. Photograph: Bruce White.
by Justinian was effec-
lively a fundamental reformulation of a sacred site which was already a major
centre ofmonastic and pilgrimage activity when Egeria visited the monastery in the
later fourth century.20 The Justinianic programme consisted of a walled monastery

18 As even Weitzmann wondered, Monastery ofSt Catherine at Mt Sinai: The Icons, p. 43.
11 Weitzmann, Monastery ofSt Catherine at Mt Sinai: The Icons, no. B25, p. 49.
20 Egeria’s full account of Sinai in the fourth century opens what survives of her manuscript
1.1-5.15; •seMtinerarium Egeriae, ed. by O. Pring (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1960); Egeria, Itine-
rarium Egeriae, trans, by John Wilkinson (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999), pp. 107-14. On
Egeria in general, see e.g. J. Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University
46 Jas Elsner Mid Gerhard Wolf

and a church at the traditional site of the burning bush (which happened, by divine
providence one supposes, to possess a well). A small chapel was also built at the top
of Mount Sinai at the traditional site where Moses had received the tablets of the
Law (see Plan 4 on p. 111).21 One takesit that other scriptural events were similarly
located and demarcated within the landscape — marked perhaps by crosses,
chapels, or prayer niches, many ofwhich have left some archaeological remnants.22
Egcria’s account from the 380s is an extremely rich transposition of scripture onto
the terrain, in which her monastic guides effectively rearranged and retold a series
of narratives (not only from Exodus but also from Numbers and Kings) in the
topographic order through which they directed her across the landscape. Many of
these must have become traditional and canonical within the pilgrimage culture of
Sinai by the time of Justinian’s imperial intervention (between 548 and 560) —
not least the site of Elijah’s cave where Egeria already describes a church. Her
account is worth repeating since it shows how a complex liturgical tradition of
crisscrossing and ritually marking a very wide sacred landscape was already well
developed by the time of her visit around Christmas 383. Egeria writes:
When we had done all we wanted and climbed to the summit of the Mount of God, we
began the descent. We passed on to another mountain next to it which gives the church
there its name ‘On Horeb’. This is the Horeb to which the holy prophet Elijah fled from
the presence ofking Ahab, and it was there that God spoke to him with the words, ‘What
doest thou here, Elijah ?’, as is written in the Book of Kingdoms. The cave where Elijah hid
can be seen there to this day in front of the church door, and we were shown the stone altar
which holy Elijah set up for offering sacrifice to God. Thus the holy men were kind enough
to show us everything, and there too we made the Offering [i.e. Eucharist] and prayed very
earnestly, and the passage was read from the Book of Kingdoms. Indeed, whenever we
arrived anywhere, I myself always wanted the Bible passage to be read to us. (Jtinerarium
Egeriae, IV. 1-3, trans, by Wilkinson)

of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 88-94; M. B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 20-33; Hagith Sivan, ‘Holy Land Pilgrimage and Western
Audiences: Some Reflections on Egeria and her Circle’, Classical Quarterly, 38 (1988), 528-35;
Sivan, ‘Who Was Egeria? Piety and Pilgrimage in the Age of Gratian’, Harvard Th eological Review,
81 (1988), 59-72; R. L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and
Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 111-14; A. Palmer, ‘Egeria the Voyager’,
in Travel Fact and Travel Fiction, ed. by Zweder von Martels (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 39-53.
21 See the essay by Sophia Kalopissi-Verti and Maria Panayatodi in this volume.
22 For the archaeology ofthe site, see Israel Finkelstein, ‘Byzantine Prayer Niches in the Southern
Sinai’, Israel Exploration Journal, 31 (1981), 81-91; Finkelstein, ‘Byzantine Monastic Remains in
the Southern Sinai’,D OP, 39 (1985), 39-80; Uzi Dahari, Monastic Settlements in South Sinai in the
Byzantine Period: The Archaeological Remains (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2000).
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 47

This account wonderfully illustrates the intense interconnection between liturgy,

scripture, and landscape in the context of Sinai pilgrimage. Not only does Egeria
tie the terrain into the sacred (and, to her, historical) narrative which serves as her
guidebook, in many ways as modern guidebooks do today, but she also signals her
own re-evocation of the scriptural past by making it present through the special
quality of the site. The holy men who guide her are the successors of Moses and
Elijah (who would indeed, like John the Baptist, both later come to be regarded as
a special model for monks). The site of Elijah’s altar and offerings to God is now
the site of contemporary offering, including the one Egeria specifically records
herself as making.
There is an inherent tension in early Christian pilgrimage (but not only in that)
between site specificity and the ubiquity of the Christian mystery. Mount Sinai is
here, this single place, visited by Egeria, and Mount Sinai is everywhere at the same
moment as a fundamental aspect of Christian doctrine and belief. There is the desire
for the ‘real’ place which can be fulfilled in pilgrimage, and Egeria’s religious tourism
stands for that. But in the very same period we encounter Gregory of Nyssa’s fa­
mous and influential critique of the idolization ofpilgrimage.23 It is not impossible
that behind Gregory’s scepticism lies a political conflict, a reaction to the claims of
the Bishop ofJerusalem for the superiority of the Holy Land against the local shrines
of Cappadocia.24 Nevertheless Gregory’s argument (shared by Saint Augustine) is
a serious one, namely that pilgrimage must be an inner, spiritual process.25 Yet

25 Discussions include B. Korting, ‘Gregor von Nyssa’s Wallfahrtskritik’, Studia Patristica, 5

(1962), 360-67; B. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pil­
grimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 48-62. On the
receptions of Gregory’s letter 2, sec esp. W. Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French
Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford LJniversity Press, 1998), pp. 94-131.
2' See Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, pp. 51-62. Further on the persistent eccle­
siastical politics inseparable from Holy Land pilgrimage, see Jas Elsner, ‘Piety and Passion: Contest
and Consensus in the Audiences for Early Christian Pilgrimage’, in Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman
and Early Christian Antiquity, ed. by Elsner and Rutherford, pp. 411-34.
25 See G. Frank, The Memory ofEyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Late Antiquity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), pp. 87-89, 113; W. Pullan, ‘“Intermingled Until the End of
Time”: Ambiguity as a Central Condition of Early Christian Pilgrimage’, in Pilgrimage in Graeco-
Roman and Early Christian Antiquity, ed. by Elsner and Rutherford, pp. 387-409, esp. pp.
400-07. On Augustine and pilgrimage, see e.g. G. Clark, ‘Pilgrims and Foreigners: Augustine on
Travelling Home’, in Travel, Communication and Geography in Late Antiquity, ed. by Ellis and
Kidner, pp. 149-58 with bibliography.
48 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

Gregory of Nyssa is also the author of the remarkable Life of Moses,26 where he
deals directly with Sinai in a striking combination of spatial detail and luminous
imagination that continuously shifts between and yet juxtaposes the universal Sinai
(according to its role in the history of salvation) and the site itself, in its uniqueness
and specificity.2 As Egeria confirms, the site works as a spatial incarnation of the
biblical narrative, transforming the landscape into a sacred topography, a mnemo-
topos in the sense coined by Maurice Halbwachs,28 but transcending it in the
spiritual re-enactments of which we hear in Egeria’s account.
We have seen that Egeria was primarily interested in the cartographic view, the
mapping ofsacred history that makes present the locus of scripture (‘locus de libro’,
as she puts it)29 within the locus sanctus in the topography wherein she moves. She
was interested above all in the borders of the oecumene: Sinai and Edessa are
among her favoured places. In her account, the identification of the Sinai moun­
tains remains somewhat unclear (this has its base in a biblical ambiguity about the
double tradition of Mount Horeb and Mount Sinai). She calls the mountain of the
law the highest peak and talks about her view of the world from that point: she
looks down to Egypt and Palestine, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean up to
Alexandria, and notes the endless territories of the Saracens, as she names the
Arabian nomads of the Sinai.30 She adds that to see all that below oneself is hard
to believe (‘ut credi vix possit’), and in fact the mountain of Moses cannot possibly
afford such a view to the normal human eye; but the panoptic scope tells us much
about Egeria’s approach to the site. Perhaps Egeria mistook the peak that was later
called ‘Dschebel Kathrin’ for the mountain which has been traditionally regarded
as the site of Moses’ receipt of the Tablets of the Law. The more significant point,

26 Gregory of Nyssa, Vita Moysis, edn in Greek and French: La Vie de Moise, trans, by Jean
Danielou, 2nd edn (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1955); edn in English: The Life ofMoses, trans, by
Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
2 On the development of the ideology of the particularity ofplacc in fourth-century Christian
pilgrimage, see Smith, To Take Place, pp. 74-94; R. A. Markus, ‘How on Earth Could Places
Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2
(1994), 257-71, esp. pp. 264-65; Pullan, ‘“Intermingled Until the End ofTimc’”, pp. 398-400.
~ M. Halbwachs, La Topographic legendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte: etude de memoire
collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941).
For example in Itinerarium Egeriae, IV. 3, 4, and 8.
20 ‘Egyptum autem et Palestinam et mare Rubrum et marc illut Parthenicum, quod mittit
Alcxandriam, nec non et fines Saracenorum infinites ita subter nos inde videbamus, ut credi vix
posit’: Itinerarium Egeriae, III. 8.
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 49

however, is that she looks not up to heaven, but down in her desire to map the
Bible, as she docs again and more extensively on Mount Nebo. There, after Holy
Mass in the church, our pilgrim goes out and looks out into the dispensation of the
cartographic gaze: ‘we saw where the Jordan runs into the Dead Sea and the place
was down below where we were standing. Then, facing us, we saw Livias on our
side of the Jordan, and Jericho on the far side [...]. In fact from there you can see
most of Palestine, the Promised Land and everything in the area ofJordan as far as
the eye can see’.31 Nebo, however, is a different place: the church was built on the
site, not of Moses’ tomb (which was unknown),32 but as a monument to his gaze
towards the promised land — a vision granted him as a last boon by God before he
died. Egeria performs this gaze in her own right and in imitation of Moses, but
then descends the mountain towards Jerusalem, as the Prophet could not.
Turning to Justinian’s monastery we can observe that what it added to this
culture of pilgrimage (apart from imperial patronage, military protection, and high
art) was to transpose the scriptural and topographic dimensions onto the level of
visual and epigraphic injunctions.33 This is a fundamental transformation con­
stituting the institutionalization of patterns of scriptural pilgrimage and liturgy
already well established by Egeria’s time. There may have been very significant
effects in many areas of the monastery’s life and practices — from the pragmatic
(such as the reception and treatment of pilgrims and itinerant monks) to the ideo­
logical (from the kinds of liturgy performed to the uses of specific visual and textual
injunctions now displayed on the site) — in the Justinianic project that turned a
lavra-type monastery of associated hermits which had grown naturally and infor­
mally into the complex we find in Egeria and had developed beyond that time into
whatever was present at Sinai before Justinian, and finally into a grand fortress and
church building backed by the institutional patronage of the Emperor in Constan­
tinople. What changed above all were the dynamics of the sacred topography itself,
and the relation between inner and outer space. On the one hand, Sinai offers the
‘dwelling garden in the valley’,34 where the monastery was built and which included
the ‘relic’ of the burning yet still flourishing bush. Here we enter the sacred space

,l Itinerarium Egeriae, XU. 4-5.

3i Itinerarium Egeriae, XII. 1-2.
33 On the inscriptions, see Ihor Sevcenko, ‘The Early Period of the Sinai Monastery in the
Light of its Inscriptions’, DOE, 20 (1966), 255-64, with discussion by Coleman and Elsner, ‘The
Pilgrim’s Progress’; and Robert S. Nelson, ‘Where God Walked and Monks Pray’, in Holy Image,
Hallowed Ground, pp. 1-37, esp. pp. 8-9.
31 See also Itinerarium Egeriae, III. 6.
50 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

of the church in its iconic and liturgical hyper-density: apluriform emanation of

the divine henosis, spiritually appealing to all senses. On the other hand there is the
desert, an emptiness, a world destitute of almost any vestiges of culture, an almost
extraterrestrial site made of rocks and stones, leading to the peaks of the mountains
which offer a view of heaven and earth. One may recall here Petrarch’s celebrated
account of his ascent of Mont Ventoux, when he overlooks the world, the cities,
the valleys full of grain, the rivers, and so forth. He describes an intense feeling of
self-consciousness as an individual, before entering immediately into a crisis of
humility as he falls on his knees in a reprise of Saint Augustine’s Confessions.^ The
ascent of Mount Sinai offered a different experience to its pilgrims, with the poten­
tial for annihilation (in the divine kenosis) — the body exposed to extreme forces
of Nature (such as the ‘constant crashes of thunder and other terrifying manifesta­
tions of divine power [that ...] strike terror into man’s body and soul’ explicitly
mentioned by Procopius, De aedificiis, 5.8.7), and the possibilities for a penitence
whose ideal is to overcome the ego and the differences between self and other.
Entering the monastery, the pilgrim passes the main gate where the following
words from Psalm 118 are inscribed: ‘This is the gate of the Lord and the righteous
shall enter by it’, an epigraph repeated on the horizontal face of the wooden lintel
over the main entrance to the nave ofjustinian’s church inside the narthex. On the
perpendicular face of the lintel over the main entrance to the church itself (that is,
into the narthex) was a more specifically local inscription comprising a conflation
of texts from Exodus:
And the Lord spoke to Moses in this place saying, I am the God of your fathers, the God
of Abraham, the God oflsaac, and the God ofjacob. I am that I am.

This of course points directly to the church’s main relic — at least in the sixth cen­
tury — namely, the burning bush in the little court behind the apse, from which
God proclaimed his ineffable name to Moses in Scripture (Exodus 3. 1-4. 17).
Less certain in its original placing than these inscriptions is the great sixth­
century bronze cross over a meter high, which Weitzmann and Sevcenko specu­
lated may have originally adorned the Justinianic iconostasis (Figure 9).30 On the

35 Francesco Petrarca, Familiäres, IV, 1. For discussion, see e.g. R. Dueling, ‘The Ascent of
Mount Ventoux and the Crisis of Allegory’, Italian Quarterly, 18 (1974), 7-28, and for some later
ramifications of the Petrarchian account of Mount Ventoux, see J. Carillo, ‘From Mt Ventoux to
Mt Masaya: The Rise and Fall of Subjectivity in Early Modern Travel Narrative’, in Voyages and
Visions, ed. by Elsner and Rubies, pp. 57-73.
See Kurt Weitzmann and Ihor Sevcenko, ‘The Moses Cross at Sinai’, DOP, 17 (1963),
385-98; repr. in Weitzmann, Studies in the Arts at Sinai, pp. 81-104; with Coleman and Elsner,
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 51

Figure 9 (above left). Cross with Scenes of Moses and Extensive Inscriptions, bronze, sixth century.
Getty catalogue, no. 35 (EX .2006.3.53). Figure 10 (above right). Cross with Scenes of Moses, detail
of the incised image of Moses loosening his sandals. Figure 11 (below right). Cross with Scenes of
Moses, detail of the incised image of Moses holding up his hands to receive the Tablets of the Law.
All images reproduced with permission of the Holy Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai, Egypt. All
photographs: Bruce White.

left and right arms of the cross are respectively images ofMoses receiving the tablets
of the Law and standing before the burningbush (Figures 10 and 11). These allude
directly to the great Mosaic associations of the site — not just of the monastery as
built by Justinian but of the whole sacred topography of Sinai. On the front of the
cross is a long inscription combining texts from Exodus 19 with a series of votive
invocations:
And it came to pass on the third day; about dawn there were voices and lightnings and dark
clouds on Mount Sinai, and the voice of the trumpet sounded loud, and all the people in

‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, pp. 79-80, and Sharon Gcrstel, ‘35. Cross with Scenes of Moses’, in Holy
Image, Hallowed Ground, pp. 210-13 with further bibliography.
52 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

the camp were terrified. And Moses led forth the people out of the camp to meet God, and
they halted at the foot of the mount. And the whole mountain Sinai issued forth smoke,
since God had descended upon it in fire. Thine own of Thine own, we offer unto Thee,
O Lord. For the salvation of Theodora the Christ-loving and for the repose of Proclos and
Dometia. Amen Lord, Remember the engraver.

Given the emphasis here on the people of the camp coming out to meet God, it is
no coincidence that this cross and this church were sited at the ‘foot of the mount’.
The next step for Sinai’s contemporary people of God would be to climb the
mountain as Moses had and confront the space of his own vision of the Lord.
Should the worshipper not be equipped with the literary skills to read all these
inscriptions (and we must assume most secular pilgrims and some monks to have
been illiterate), then the church’s spectacular apse mosaics provided the message
in a still more complex but entirely visual manner. On the wall above the triumphal
arch to the left of the apse mosaic, the decorators had placed a panel representing
Moses before the burning bush (Figure 12). On the facingpanel, to the right, they
depicted Moses receiving the tablets of the Law (Figure 13). These are the two major
epiphanies in the whole life-story of Moses in which he was vouchsafed visions of
God, and they also happen to be the two key elements in Moses’ story associated
with Sinai. While the visual order of the scenes reverses that of the bronze cross,
both sets of Moses scenes refer to the site of the church itself and to that of the
chapel at the top of the mountain at the site of the reception of the tablets. In an
act of sheer exegetical, theological, and artistic genius, the mosaicists completed this
implied narrative of Mosaic visions with a final vision in the apse (Figure 14). This
depicts not only Moses but also Elijah — Sinai’s two key Prophets — in receipt of
the vision of God in the form of Jesus from the New Testament scene of the
Transfiguration. This was the single event of Christ’s life where Jesus’s divine form
shone forth in his human form to the witness of the three chosen apostles, Peter,
James, and John, and the two chosen Old Testament Prophets, Moses and Elijah.
No theological text to our knowledge puts all these narratives together in this way,
but the combination is so ‘natural’ and so effective at Sinai that one cannot but
expect a theologian of the school which would shortly produce John Clim acus to
be responsible for this theological formulation in visual form.37

37 On the interpretation of the mosaic, see Jas Elsner, ‘The Viewer and the Vision: The Case
ofthe Sinai Apse’, Art History, 17 (1994), 81-102, somewhat expanded in Jas 'EEs\\ex,Artandthe
Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 99-124, and now Nelson, ‘Where God Walked and
Monks Pray’, pp. 10-19, emphasizing light.
 , HE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN

Figure 12 (left). Moses before the Burning Bush, mosaic panel to the viewer’s left of the window above the trium phal arch over the apse of the
main church at Sinai, sixth century. Getty catalogue, fig. 117.
Figure 13 (right). Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law, mosaic panel to the viewer’s right of the window above the trium phal arch of the
main church at Sinai, sixth century. Getty catalogue, fig. 118.
53

Both reproduced through the courtesy of the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expedition to M ount Sinai.
54 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

The mosaic for the

first time formulates the
diptychal structure of the
theophanies of Moses;
showing him in front of
i the burning bush in the
left panel and receiving
the law in the right —
which is to say, at the foot
and on the top of the
mountain (Figure 15, for
a view of all the mosaic
panels in context). It has
been argued that the
viewer’s attention is
guided from the left panel
(bush) to the right (law)
and from there to the
central image of the apse,
the transfiguration of
Christ.38 On this inter­
Figure 14. The Transfiguration, apse mosaic, main church at
Sinai, view from the lower left, sixth century. Getty catalogue, fig.
pretation, the structure
31. Photograph: Robert S. Nelson. Reproduced with permission. would be a chronological
passage from the Old to
the New Testament, from the aniconic theophanies of Moses to the shining figure
of Christ in a progressive process (as a pilgrim path, starting at the monastery,
ascending the mountain, and returning to the church, transcending one’s
experience in and beyond the site’s specificity). This is a pathway of looking, which
in effect also exposes the process oflookingitself. However, the mosaic programme
also offers a synchronic or bipolar dynamics of looking: the apse is placed between
the panels, which flank the lamb of God and the substance oflight pouring into the
church from the windows, as itself an emanation of the divine, which both the
Moses panels address — that is, the light from the bush and the mountain. There
is a subtle balancing of the two scenes. On the left panel (Figure 12), Moses puts
his foot on the rock before the mountain which his body partially covers and which
towers behind him; he does not look to the flames of the bush but upwards to the

38 Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, pp. 118-20.

THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 55

hand of God, displayed above in the right-hand corner of the panel. On the right
panel (Figure 13), Moses is highlighted on the gold ground between the peaks of
two mountains to which his body offers a parallel in the form — as it were — of a
third peak: he is a mountain for his people. Fie avoids looking upwards at the hand
of God (in the left-hand corner of the panel), but turns his face down towards the
spectator. The apse conch is the mountain in between, opening a temporal breach
between the theophanies in which both are fulfilled: the mountain now is Christ
himself, or to put it another way, Christ as he appears on the rock of Peter, the
awakening church (Figure 16).3940 Effectively the positioning of Peter’s body evokes
the rock formation associated with the translation of his name. Consequently,
there is no rock or mountain represented in the apse image of the Transfiguration,
by vivid contrast with the insistently rocky landscape of the two Moses scenes.'10
A constant theme of these images is metaphor and metamorphosis: it is the
faith (and wc may add, the grace) that moves mountains. Mount Sinai and Mount
Tabor become one and the same by an iconic revelation or unfolding of the divine
light, in a christological axis that reaches from the altar where the Eucharist is per­
formed to the window at the upper end. In fact, this window is itself a diptych,
divided by a column that is crowned by a cross in a circle.41 And Moses appears
again in the Transfiguration, together with Elijah, the other prophet who had
encountered God on Sinai (l Kings 19. 8-14). The rays of light originating from
Christ’s body reach the bodies and names of the prophets and the feet or legs of the
apostles. Through all this, in a visual and iconic dispensation, it becomes obvious
that the Transfiguration as narrated by the Gospels (and by Luke above all)42 is
itself modelled on Sinai. Mount Tabor is a new Sinai, where mysteriously Moses
and Elijah appear. The mosaic consequently brings back the Tabor theme of the
Transfiguration to the site of origin, the Mosaic epiphanies, but transfigures the
origin and the visions vouchsafed there at the same moment.

39 Elsner, ‘The Viewer and the Vision’, pp. 94-96.

40 One might add that Peter, as the name saint ofEmperor Justinian (see Thomas E Mathews,
‘Early Icons of the Holy Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai’, in Holy Image, Hallowed
Ground, pp. 39-55, esp. p. 52), appears directly above the image of David in the medallion frame
around the apse. David, represented in the imperial robes of a Byzantine emperor, is the royal
forerunner of Justinian, and so one might argue that the rock on which Christ stands is also the
rock of the Christian empire ruled by the Church’s patron.
11 If Nelson, ‘Where God Walked and Monks Pray’, pp. 16-18, is right, there was another
round window above that column which is no longer visible from inside the church but would have
served as a culminating point for the visual theology of light in the chancel scheme.
42 Luke 9. 28-36.
 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf
Figure 15- Triumphal arch with mosaic decoration, east wall above the apse of the main church at Sinai, sixth century,
catalogue, fig. 15. Reproduced through the courtesy of the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expedition co Mount Sinai.

■
[।
|g TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN
58 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

Figure 17. Moses Removing

his Sandals before the Burning
Bush, tempera and metal leaf,
traditionally dated thirteenth
century. Getty catalogue no.
51 (EX.2006.3.66). Repro­
duced with permission of the
Holy Monastery of St
Catherine Sinai, Egypt.
Photograph: Bruce White.

One can hardly overestimate the mosaic’s significance. It was the main visual
focus ofworship on the site, from the sixth century until the iconostasis that covers
it was put up, the current example dating from the seventeenth century.43 It is
surely the mosaic that established the visual culture of local celebration at Sinai as
itself something specific to the monastery. While the later icons of Moses and
Elijah (e.g. Figure 17) are not in themselves necessarily derived from the mosaic
(nor the images of Moses on the Moses Cross), nonetheless the need for such
images in other chapels and perhaps also in some sites of private devotion was
fundamentally established by the presence of the mosaic.

43 Elsner, ‘The Viewer and the Vision’, p. 81.

THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 59

Moving Mountains

Let us open a parenthesis with a short glimpse at the relation of Mount Sinai to
other mountains: we have already mentioned Mount Tabor and Mount Nebo, the
place where Moses died, but we may also think of the unnamed Mount of the
Sermons, where the law ofgrace substituted the old covenant, the Mount of Olives
where Christ ascended to heaven ordering the apostles to walk through the world,
and finally — perhaps most important — Mount Zion which stands for Jerusalem
(and hence the Holy Land) as a whole. Given that we cannot discuss the relation
of Sinai and Jerusalem at length, let us concentrate on a legend that appears in
pilgrim accounts of the twelfth to fifteenth century and is symptomatic of the
phenomenon.'4
Niccold da Poggibonsi in the fourteenth century recounts his visit to Mount
Zion: ‘We find [...] a stone in the ground beside a section of a wall, and it is red; the
angels took it from Mount Sinai and they placed it before the virgin Mary, who
desired to have something from that holy mount, where God gave Moses the holy
law.’ According to this account, the stone was brought to Mary who could not
45 The Russian pilgrim Zosima the Deacon visited the site in 1419/20, and
travel.44
his fifteenth-century account substantially corroborates Niccold: ‘From here I
walked to Mount Zion. There stands the Holy Zion Church [...]. Two stones are
placed here, and they are called the Burning Bush, on them spoke the Lord with
Moses on Mount Sinai. The Virgin wanted to see these stones, and they were
brought by the angel.’46 The move from one stone to two in the fifteenth century

44 Yamit Rachman-Schrirc, The Hebrew University, is writing a Phil. Diss, on this material.
We thank her for sharing her sources and insights with us on which the following considerations
are based.
45 Fra Niccold da Poggibonsi, A Voyage Beyond the Seas (1346-1350), trans, by T. Bellorini
and E. Hoade (Jerusalem: Franciscan Press, 1945), Studium Biblicum Franciscanum·. Collectio
Maior; 2, Cap. LIII: ‘On the Stone which the Angel Carried from Mount Sinai to the Holy
Sepulchre’, 31.
46 For Zosima, see K. D. Seemann: Die altrussische Wallfahrtsliteratur: Theorie und Geschichte
eines literarischen Genres (Munich: Fink, 1976), s.v.; G. P. Majcska, Russian Travelers to Constan­
tinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection, 1984), pp. 166-70 and s.v.; T. G. Stavrou and P. R. Weisensel, Russian
Travelers to the Christian East from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Century (Columbus: Slavica,
1986), pp. 11-13 and 21-23. The quotation follows Rachman-Schrire’s translation from the
Hebrew edition in Russian Travel Accounts on Palestine, ed. by Joel Raba (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi,
1986), p. 102.
60 Jas Elsner and Gerhard WolJ

is confirmed by Felix Fabri, who arrived in the Holy Land in 1480 and writes in his
description of the church of St James on Mount Zion ‘In the wall of this church,
on the outside, is an opening, or blind window, or closet, in which lie two great
round stones, which were brought from Mount Sinai, and they say that angels
brought them to the Virgin for her spiritual consolation, to the end that, as it was
not fitting that the Virgin should make so long a pilgrimage, or should leave
Jerusalem, she might nevertheless worship the holy Mount Sinai in these stones’.47
The many ramifications of this legend converge in the explanation that the
transfer of the stone or stones from Sinai was in response to the Virgin Mary’s de­
sire to visit the site of Moses’ revelation. There is a fundamental difference between
this account and the traditional detaching of pieces of stone by pilgrims where the
stone serves as a synekdochic memento of a sacred rock or place. Here, we have a
case of the transfer of stones from one holy place to another, which is not less holy.
The stone, in these narratives, embodied the essence of Mount Sinai. Even if the
juxtaposition or fusion of the two mountains in these legends does not work in pre­
cisely the same way as in the apse mosaic, it has certain analogies to it and implies
no less complex or theological an argument expressed through material means. The
red stones brought to Mary refer to the site of the burning bush (with its mario-
logical dimensions, especially by the period when these legends were popular). And
given that in their fifteenth-century form the legends speak of two stones they also
allude elliptically but potently to the other two pieces of stone brought from Sinai
to Zion in Scripture. These were the tablets of the law enshrined in the Ark of the
Covenant that was housed in the holy of holies in the Temple of Solomon at
Jerusalem — a building which, at least according to Gregory of Nyssa’s discussion,
was itself effectively the human rendition of the heavenly tabernacle shown to
Moses on Mount Sinai in an archetype not made by human hands.48

The Law ofIcons

In Christian thought (following the spiritualization of the Temple in Saint Paul),49

the incarnation of Christ transformed the stone diptych of the old Convenant’s

*' The Book of Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri, trans, by A. Stewart, 2 vols, PPTS, 8, 10
(London: Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1896). I, part 2, p. 322.
48 See the Gregory of Nyssa, Vita Moysis, I, 51, II, 167-70, 173-74, 229, 245 (ed. La vie de
Moise, pp. 23, 83-85, 106, 111).
49 Cf. G. Wolf, Schleier and Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes and die Bildkonzepte der
Renaissance (Munich: W. Fink, 2002), pp. 4-5, 58.
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 61

tablets of the law into an imprint in the heart of believers or into the iconic tablets
of grace, as shown in an ingenious miniature of the late eleventh or early twelfth
century. This is an illustration from a manuscript of the Divine Ladder, composed
by the Sinai saint John Climacus who lived at the monastery in the later sixth
century (and certainly participated in the divine liturgy under the mosaic in the
chancel of the monastery church).50 In the miniature, the tablets have been trans­
formed into two of the most venerated images of Christ in the Byzantine world,
the Mandylion (an imprint of the Saviour’s face on cloth) and its arch-copy, the
Keramion, a miraculous reproduction on a tile. They are entitled ‘plates pneuma-
tikai’, tablets of the spirit, in an inscription above the miniature. Again what is
shown is a transfiguration, the metamorphosis of the stones into the living face of
Christ which can also be seen behind and between the Mandylion and Keramion
in a ghost-like sketch on the blue ground — a brilliant and remarkable attempt to
render the invisible in paint.5) There is an intriguing analogy to this rendition of
the invisible in the famous Annunciation icon from Sinai,52 which shows the
transparent and phantomatic form of Christ projected on the body of the Virgin
in a subtle visu alization of the process of incarnation.53
Here we enter an argument that we might call the law of icons of Mount Sinai.
Take the famous tenth-century diptych showing the disciple Thaddaeus and King
Abgar who receives the Mandylion, represented in the features of Constantine
Porphyrogennetos, who had transferred the Mandylion from Edessa to the
imperial Palace in Constantinople in 944 (Figure 18).54 A row of monastic saints
below makes it probable that the two wings of what may once have been a triptych
are again to be seen within the ‘localism’ characteristic of Sinai. The central panel
has disappeared, if it existed at all. Nonetheless, this absence of the centre seems
symptomatic if we look at the icons of Mount Sinai in general. First, one may note

511 The manuscript is Rossianus 251 in the Vatican Library: Cod. Ross. gr. 251, fol. 12v.
51 See esp. Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face’, in The
Holy Face and the Paradox ofRepresentation, ed. by Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna: Nuova
Alfa, 1998), pp. 129-52, esp. pp. 147-48; Herbert L. Kessler, ‘La Scala celeste di Giovanni
Climaco’, in Mandylion, ed. by Wolf, Bozzo, and Masetti, p. 91.
52 Annie Labbatt, ‘13. Annunciation’, in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground, p. 153 with
bibliography.
53 Sec Gerhard Wolf, ‘From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the “Disembodied” Face and
Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West’, in The Holy Face, ed. by Kessler and
Wolf, pp. 153-79, esp. pp. 160-62.
54 Annie Labbatt, ‘6. Presentation of the Mandylion to King Abgar’, in Holy Image, Hallouwd
Ground, p. 135 with bibliography.
62 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

the fundamental paradox

that the world’s oldest
and richest collection of
icons is to be found at the
place where the second
commandment was given
to Moses, the prohibition
against graven images,
and where the Israelites
fell first into idolatry. Far
from wonderingwhether
St Catherine’s was an
idolatric site, one might
argue that the abundance
of icons on Mount Sinai
constitute a post-
Iconoclast commentary
on (past) idolatry and at
the same time build a
protective wall against
idolatry in the present or
future. The desert itself
was not only a sacred
landscape but was also a
privileged dwelling for
Figure 18. Two side panels of what was once a triptych with
demons and idols, begin­
Thaddaeus, Paul of Thebes, and Anthony on the left and King
Abgar receiving the Mandylion, Basil, and Ephrem on the right, ning with the time of
tempera and metal leaf, tenth century. Getty catalogue, no. 6 Moses and the erection of
(EX-2006.3.10). Reproduced with permission of the Holy Mon­ the Golden Calf. Ps-
astery of St Catherine, Sinai, Egypt. Photograph: Bruce White. Antoninus of Piacenza,
an Italian sixth-century traveller, tells us about the idolatrous religion of the
Saracens who venerate a snow-white marble statue which turns black once a year
on its feast day (from nix to pix to use the Latin pun) — in a play of trans­
figurations of light and shadow in the desert, so to speak.55 As far as anti-

55 ‘Et in parte ipsius montis habent Sarraccni idolum suum positum, marmorcum, candidum
tamquam nix. [...] Et quando venit tempus festivitatis illorum praecurrente luna, antequam
egrediatur, a die festo ipsorum incipit marmor iile mutare colourem et, quando coeperint adorare
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 63

idolatrous icons are concerned, one may observe that the cult of images in the
monastery was a strongly regulated one. Thomas Mathews, in the catalogue of the
Getty exhibition, and others before him have argued that the earliest icons arrived
in the monastery as imperial gifts, while others were painted at Sinai itself or
brought by pilgrims, making it a place of encounter between East and West.56
Many of these are spiritual tablets with an inherent reflection on their own nature.
And certainly, some of these icons may have performed miracles. We are, however,
above all confronted with a spiritual treasury, a collection on sacred ground — and
it is the sacred site and not its icons that is the primary focus of all pilgrimage
journeys and accounts to Sinai. These hardly ever mention an icon or any story of
a holy image. There is no documentary notice in our sources of a Virgin painted by
St Luke or of images not made by human hands, as there are in so in many local
shrines, even though the great icons and their legends were well known. Sinai
boasts copies of the most venerated icons of the Greek world, but — as in one
twelfth-century painting — these are shown as a series.57 No metal revetment, of
the kind typically used for highly venerated icons throughout the Christian world,
has been preserved at Sinai. In effect, at Sinai, we are confronted with the spiritual
art of the icon rather than its miracle-working and magical typologies. In that sense
the ‘ontology’ of Sinai icons is not comparable to the sacred topographies built by
the miracle-working icons of Rome and Constantinople which operate by an
entirely different dynamic. Rather, icons at Mount Sinai seem less in danger of
idolization than elsewhere, not only by virtue of their sheer numbers, but also by
their highly regulated use and display (or storage) in the church or monastery. The
icon collection at Sinai is not to be understood as a museum but as a sacred
storehouse — icons which help to reinforce the site’s spiritual energy and make
accessible its divine protectors. It does not isolate them into a single object of
veneration which might threaten the order to which they belong. This argument
effectively negates the traditional observation with which this paper started, by
proposing that the corpus of icons is not a depository of the ‘Byzantine icon’ in

idolum, fit marmor iile niger velur pix’: Itinerarium Antonim Piacentini, cap. 38, 2-4 (recensio
altera), in Itinerarium Antonini Piacentini: Un viaggio in Terra Santa del 560-570 d.C., ed. by
Celestina Milani (Milan: Vita e pensicro, 1977), p. 209.
56 Mathews, ‘Early Icons of the Holy Monastery’.
57 See Belting, ‘Likeness and Presence’, p. 49, fig. 13.
64 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wi

general, but is a complex phenomenon deeply bound into and contributing to the
identity of the site itself, as it changed over the centuries.58

From Scriptural Pilgrimage to Charisma

What the site of Sinai from the fourth century to the Justinianic building and
beyond demonstrates is the superlative complexity of the particular liturgical and
pilgrimage pattern of tying scripture to topography. This is a pattern that was
special within Christendom to those places which had been mentioned in scripture
— above all to Palestine as well as to Sinai. We already find a topographic dispensa
tion for reporting and re-evoking scripture in the Bordeaux Pilgrim’s account of
his journey to Palestine, written as early as 333 AD during the reign of Constantine
himself,59 and again, with a good deal of liturgical addition, in Egeria’s travel-diary.
By the time of Justinian’s intervention at Sinai — itself the finest surviving exam­
ple of this pattern of scriptural topography, the complex interlacing of landscape,
biblical text, and ritual had reached a truly spectacular florescence. Yet we need to
remember that this was far from being the only or even the normative pattern of
early Christian pilgrimage activity. In those places where Christendom had no
scripture to sacralize its terrain — that is, everywhere except Palestine, Rome, and
Sinai — what was needed was a different sort of piety.60 In the fourth century, not

58 In support of this one might also mention the fact that even when St Catherine arrived at
the Monastery and became one of its principle sacred possessions, her cult seems never to have
taken over entirely the traditional patterns of Sinaitic piety —we hear of no miracles, no healing
practices such as incubation on the site, no miraculous appearances by the saint. Any miracles took
place far away from St Catherine’s by means of the blessed oil which pilgrims procured from the
saint’s relics. See Nancy Sevcenko, ‘St Catherine ofAlexandria and Mount Sinai’, in Ritual and Art:
Byzantine Essays for Christopher Walter, ed. by Pamela Armstrong (London: Pindar, 2006), pp.
129-43, esp. pp. 142-43.
59 See e.g. Glenn Bowman, ‘“Mapping History’s Redemption”: Eschatology and Topography
in the Itinerarium Burdigalense’, in Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity
and Islam, ed. by Lee I. Levine (New York: Continuum, 1999), pp. 163-87, and Jas Elsner, ‘The
Itinerarium Burdigalense: Politics and Salvation in the Geography of Constantine’s Empire’,
Journal of Roman Studies, 90 (2000), 181-95, esp. pp. 190-94.
60 Even in the context of scripturalpilgrim age in Palestine, the construction ofmaterial connec­
tions through relics (not body relics and bones, but e.g. fragments of the True Cross or oil from the
holy places) constituted an important aspect of the piety and dissemination of sites. See the
excellent discussion of A. Wharton, SellingJerusalem: Relics, Replicas and Theme Parks (Chicago:
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 65

long before Egeria made her journey from Spain to the Holy Land, Christian writ­
ers were inventing a particular hagiographic trope of pilgrimage to living saints,61
while bishops resorted to an extraordinary strategy of discovering bodies of
martyred saints — in short to the cult of relics.62 Pilgrimage to the saints was not
a case of imitating the scriptural footsteps of the prophets and apostles. Rather it
involved direct access to the divine through the material form of a body imbued
with holiness. Rather than being mimetic (as was Sinai pilgrimage, in that the
pilgrim imitated the spiritual path of Elijah or Moses) it was metonymic. Whereas
in Palestine or Sinai one approached a site to which access was ultimately textual,
in the cult of the saints one could go to a site and touch the actual bones, commune
with a living presence embodied in a tangible memento rather than one that had
once been there.
There are many problems here, given what we do not know. For example, the
cult of relics is relatively well explored and understood for the med ieval West, but
the precise nature of how relics were regarded and used in Byzantium has not been
established. Nor whether there were substantive changes in attitudes to relics
through the span of Byzantine history (Iconoclasm is an obvious moment of
potential transformation) .Nor the extent to which the cult of relics in the East was
homogeneous or differentiated throughout the lands under Byzantine control or
within the larger Orthodox communities looking to Byzantium for leadership, and
to what extent these phenomena were similar or different to the attitudes to relics
in the West.
We do not know a great deal about Sinai after Justinian.63 We do not even
know when the monastery acquired the body and the cult of the saint for which it
is now named — St Catherine. Nor do we know how her cult was established in

University of Chicago Press, 2006), on issues such as fragmentation, replication, fabrication, and
reproduction.
61 See e.g. Frank, The Memory ofEyes, esp. pp. 1-34 and 171-81.
62 See e.g. P. Brown, 'I ’he Cult ofthe Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). On
the fourth-century interventions ofDamasus of Rome and Ambrose of Milan, see C. Pie tri, Roma
Christiana, 2 vols (Rome: Ecole franpaise de Rome, 1976), I, 529-57, and N. McLynn, Ambrose
ofMilan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),
pp. 211-17, 230-35, 347-50, 363-64. For a recent discussion of the cult of relics, cf. Philippe
Cordez, ‘Die Reliquien, ein Forschungsfeld: Traditionslinien und neue Erkundungen’, Kunst-
chronik,hM2iM7'),2M~‘i'l.
63 The best archaeological assessment of the paucity ofmaterial is Dahari, Monastic Settlements,
pp. 21-112.
66 Jas' Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

Sinai, what its liturgical interventions were in the dynamic of the topographic and
scriptural cult we have been discussing. Our earliest textual evidence of Western
pilgrims to St Catherine is from the twelfth century, while the first entry referring
to the celebration of St Catherine in the Sinai liturgy belongs to a Typikon of
1214.64 We do not know when the saint finally arrived in the position she now
occupies at the high altar, although the peregrinatio of Thietmar (who came to
Sinai from Ulm in 1217) certainly confirms veneration and display of the relics in
the early thirteenth century in the chancel of the church where the saint’s tomb is
now.6’ But what is clear is that at some point in the Middle Ages — we take it
between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries — the monastery needed clientele,
and its extraordinary scriptural/topographic paradigm ofpilgrimage was perceived
as no longer sufficient. So it conducted a brilliant form of innovation by acquiring
a bona fide saint, sending some fragments of her relics out into the west and
fundamentally transforming the internal dynamics of its church and the church’s
decorative injunctions to worshippers to visit the outlying sites of Moses and
Elijah. In addition to these, and to the burning bush, there was now a body on site
to be venerated, just like the normative pattern of the cult of the saints elsewhere.
Again much is uncertain. If we take the typikon entry, Thietmar’s account of
1217, and the increase of icons with localistic themes in the thirteenth century
(though the dates of these icons arc at best likely on current stylistic assumptions
and criteria rather than certain or secure) as evidence for the full-blown cult, we
might assume St Catherine to have arrived at the altar in the late twelfth or very
early thirteenth century.66 But her body may have been venerated at the monastery

64 Jacoby, ‘Christian Pilgrimage to Sinai until the Late Fifteenth Century’, p. 83; A. Drandaki,
‘Through Pilgrims’ Eyes: Mt Sinai in Pilgrim Narratives of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
Centuries’, AXAE, 4th set., 27 (2006), 491-504, esp. p. 493 — this last with much information
on medieval pilgrimage to Sinai.
65 ‘in eadem ecclesia iuxta chorum in eminenti versus meridiem tumba bcate Katerine est
locata’: Thietmar, Peregrinatio, 19. 1-2. The whole ofThietmar’sVArejp-OTzZft« 19-20 is very inter­
esting for the early thirteenth-century cult: see Peregrinatores medii aevi qua.ttu.or, ed. by J. Laurent,
2nd edn (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1873), pp. 42-45, w'ith some discussion by Sevcenko, ‘St
Catherine of Alexandria and Mount Sinai’, pp. 136-41. For an extended account of the tomb and
the display of St Catherine’s relics in 1484, see The Book oj Wanderings ofBrother Felix Fabri, trans,
by Stewart, II.2, 599-604.
6<’ The case is well argued in Sevcenko, ‘St Catherine of Alexandria and Mount Sinai’, and N.
Sevcenko, ‘The Monastery of Mount Sinai and the Cult ofSaint Catherine’, in Byzantium: Faith
and Power (1261-1557): Perspectives on Late Byzantine Art and Culture, cd. by S. Brooks (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), pp. 118-37.
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 67

for some years — perhaps even several centuries — before that. We know that her
relics came to Rouen in France about 1030,67 and were certainly associated during
the eleventh century with a provenance from Sinai. So we might assume a long and
slow gestation of the charismatic cult of the saint from at least the early eleventh
century alongside the topographical-scriptural cult of Moses and Elijah, leading up
to the final transformation of the church by placing St Catherine’s body in the
chancel.68 This would imply a slow transition from the dominance of the scriptural
cult in its landscape (whose apogee is the Justinianic foundation) to the charis­
matic model of the body of St Catherine. Indeed how much the developed
Sinaiatic cult of St Catherine owed specifically to Western demand, after the cult
of the saint had taken off in Normandy in the eleventh century and especially in
the complex politics of the years after the fall of Constantinople in 1204, is impos­
sible to determine. But it is by no means inconceivable that the move of the body
of the saint to the chancel of the church (where the German pilgrim Thietmar
appears to have seen it in 1217) was a direct response to Western demand.69

67 See R. Fawticr, ‘Les Reliques rouennaises de sainte-Catherine d’A Icvaiulric’, Bollan-

diana, 41 (1923), 356-68; C. W. Jones, ‘The Norman Cults of Sts Catherine and Nicholas, saec.
Xi’, in Hommages a Andre Bouterny, cd. by Guy Cambier (Brussels: Latomus, 1976), pp. 216-30;
Christine Walsh, ‘The Role of the Normans in the Development of the Cult of St Katherine’, in
St Katherine ofAlexandria: Texts and Context in Western Medieval Europe, ed. by Jacqueline Jen­
kins and Katherine J. Lewis, Medieval Woman: Texts and Contexts, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003),
pp. 19-35, esp. pp. 21-26; also Sevcenko, ‘The Monastery of Mount Sinai and the Cult of Saint
Catherine’, pp. 118-37. What is unclear is whether the relics were a gift from Sinai, a case offurta
sacra, or only associated with Sinai ex post facto on the basis of their relations with St Catherine.
68 Fawtier, ‘Les Reliques rouennaises de sainte-Catherine d’Alexandrie’, gives 1031-54 as the
terminus ad quem for the inventio of the body ofSt Catherine at Sinai; Katherine J. Lewis, ‘Pilgrim­
age and the Cult of St Katherine in Late Medieval England’, in St Katherine ofAlexandria, cd. by
Jenkins and Lewis, pp. 37-52, assumes alate tenth-century date for Sinai becoming‘the focal point
of the cult of St Katherine’ (p. 38); cf. also Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine J. Lewis, ‘Introduction’,
in ibid., pp. 1-18, esp. p. 9. In hagiography, we have references to a lost Latin passio of the ninth
century and to possible Greek sources from as early as the seventh and eighth centuries, but the
surviving Greek and Latin vitae appear to depend on the Life composed by Symeon Metaphrastes
in the 960s: see J. Viteau, Les Passions des saints Caterine et Pierre dAlexandrie, Barbara et Anysia
(Paris: Librairie Emile Bouillon, 1897), pp. 5-65; G.Bronzini,‘LaleggendadiS. Caterina d’Alessan­
dria: Passioni grcche e latine’, Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei: Memorie. Classe di scienze
morali, storiche e fdologiche, 8th set., 9.2 (1960), 257-416; Jenkins and Lewis, ‘Introduction’, pp.
7-8; Scvccnko, ‘The Monastery of Mount Sinai and the Cult of Saint Catherine’, pp. 118-37.
69 For it being ‘the crusaders who created a demand for oil [from the relics of St Catherine] at
Sinai, which then began to flow’, see Jones,‘The Norman Cults of Sts Catherine and Nicholas’,
p. 230.
68 Jas Elsner and Gerhard IVoJ

The monumental nature of this transformation of the church’s subtle material

and visual injunctions or signposts to a pilgrim’s spiritual journey should not be
underrated. This is also evident in its relation to the surrounding sacred topog­
raphy. As we have seen, for good reasons the Mount of Moses was not identified
with the highest point in the landscape, in order not to offer an invitation to look
down to the earth, but rather it was placed on a spot where one remains enclosed
by the solitude of the surrounding mountains. The pilgrim was not to admire a
panorama, as a romantic tourist might, but encouraged to become empathetically
involved in the spiritual loneliness of the second theophany, when God passed by
as Moses stood in the ‘cleft of rock’. In the Middle Ages, with the rising of the
legend that angels deposited the body of Saint Catherine on the highest peak, this
point, too, was inscribed into the sacred topography, counterbalancing the sites of
Moses and Elijah. In this way the mountain itself became iconized by means of the
relics of St Catherine, to be celebrated in late and post-medieval topographical
icons, which include two paintings by El Greco (see Plates 23, 24) ,70 In the same
moment, the relic reconstituted the site within the church. Thus, into the dynamic
of inscriptions and mosaics pointing to a topographical encounter with the actual
sites of Moses’ epiphanies at the Burning Bush and Mount Sinai, a new and
entirely different form of mediation and religious presence was inserted within the
chancel space immediately in front of the apse. The difference is now that the
church and its images no longer point mimetically outward to a spiritual presence
and experience open to the pilgrim in the wilderness of Sinai beyond the walls of
church and monastery in actual sites of divine intervention on earth. Rather, now,
the body and all the attendant charisma of the saint were made available in the
church building itself, with St Catherine’s mountain, beyond the monastery, play­
ing the role of echo, witness, and material testament to a sanctity whose primary
availability was in the monastery and church itself.
In short, the appearance of Saint Catherine combines the theophanic dimension
of the monastery with the tradition of a relic shrine. As we have seen, the construc­
tion of the walled monastery had already favoured the re-presentation or re­
enactment of the theophanic dimension of the holy site within the church. It had
created a differentiation between the topography of the desert outside the walls,
on the one hand, and — on the other — the sacred space enshrining the burning
bush and superimposing Mount Sinai with Mount Tabor in the apse mosaic,

70 For El Greco’s paintings, see R. S. Nelson, ‘61. Triptych with Scenes of the Old and New
Testaments’, in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground, pp. 279-81 with bibliography, and the paper by
Cristina Stancioiu in this volume.
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 69

within a metamorphosis
of light. With the shrine
of Saint Catherine on the
right side of the altar,
offering a tangible body
within the sacred space,
and the remodelling of
the chapel of the Virgin
in the burning bush on
the left, a new polarity or
diptychal structure was
born. Icons like the thir­
teenth-century panel
showing Saint Catherine
and Mary in/as the burn­
ing bush expose, rein­
force, and comment on
this bipolar nature (Fig­
ure 19). It is important to
note that the image of
Mary in the bush is itself
a new feature, iconizing
the bush, which is the site Figure 19. St Catherine and the Virgin of the Burning Bush, with
of the invisible voice of diminutive figures of Moses to cither side of her, tempera and
metal leaf, thirteenth century. Getty catalogue, no. 56
the old Covenant,71 a
(EX .2006.3.68). Reproduced with permission of the Holy Mon­
transformation of the astery of St Catherine, Sinai, Egypt. Photograph: Bruce White.
coral-like burning bush
into Mary, becoming an iconic counterpart to St Catherine. In the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, a screen may already have weakened the visual impact of the

71 For Gregory of Nyssa the voice in the burning bush was the intensity oflight which could
not only be perceived by the eyes but in a remarkable instance of synaesthesia could also be heard.
Gregory was among the first to offer a mariological reading of the virginal bush, but the first iconic
representations date much later and may originate at Mount Sinai. See Gregory of Nyssa, Tita
Moysis, II, 21 (ed. La vie de Moise, p. 37). See also N. Zchomelidzc, ‘Das Bild im Busch: Zu Theorie
und Ikonographie der alttestamentlichen Gottesvision im Mittelalter’, in Die Sichtbarkeit des
Unsichtbaren: Zur Korrelation von Text und Bild im Wirkungskreis der Bibel, ed. by B. Janowski
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2003), pp. 165-89, esp. pp. 178-79.
70 Jas Elsner and Gerhard Wolf

apse mosaic on the spectator, while new pairs of icons showing the theophanies of
Moses and Elijah were displayed in the church to reconfirm that tradition. In fact,
it is interesting that the majority of icons of Sinaiatic localism emerge after the
arrival of Saint Catherine. In terms of its patterns of pilgrimage and processional
liturgies, the monastery proved extraordinarily adaptable and creative in incorpo­
rating the relic cult of a martyr into its more ancient topographic cult of scriptural
remembrance and repetition. These are radically different forms of pilgrimage in
the ways they developed and in the model of relationship to the divine that they
envisage. The emergence of icons with a strongly localistic emphasis and the appro­
priation of the Virgin cult to that of Moses in the creation of the type of the Virgin
of the Burning Bush represent, one might suggest, a strategy of bolstering the
topographic cult alongside and in response to the new martyr cult.
At first sight it seems odd that iconic types absolutely tied to Sinai should be
found there (where one might have expected them not to be needed) rather than
elsewhere in the Byzantine world (where they might refer to a famous holy spot).
But if we are right about the importance of preserving the traditional scriptural/
topographic form of piety at the monastery in the face of the arrival of the full-
blooded cult of the saints and alongside it (in fact both appear side by side in the
medieval pilgrimage literature),72 then the presence of such icons as the re­
enforcement of the monastic tradition on site seems entirely understandable.
Indeed, this phenomenon of localist icons side by side with the relics of a charis­
matic saint contributes to the specific and perhaps even exceptional status of icons
at the Sinai monastery, and potentially to an unusual process of iconization itself.
Like the apse-mosaic’s visual equation of Sinai and Tabor in the rock of Peter and

72 For the cult of the saint, see esp. St Katherine ofAlexandria, ed. by Jenkins and Lewis, and
K. Lewis, The Cult ofSt Katherine ofAlexandria in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2000). On the other hand, one could insist on the universalization of the Sinai tradition in the
Western spirituality of the later Middle Ages. To mention only one artistic example: The great
fifteenth-century altar piece of Maitre Enguerrand Quarton preserved in Avignon shows the man
of sorrows, in the form of the image of pity, in a miraculous visualization of the Eucharist, flanked
by Mount Sinai with Moses receiving the law: an iconic fulfilment of the Sinaitic prophesies on a
universal level, defined from a Catholic point of view. It is also interesting to note that the
‘prototype’ of rhe image of pity (imago pietatis} is a small mosaic icon venerated in Santa Croce in
Gerusalemme in Rome, which dates to the fourteenth century and was most probably brought to
Italy by a pilgrim from Puglia. On the back of this Eucharistic image, the figure of Saint Catherine
was painted. Cf. H. C. Evans, ‘Mosaic Icon with the Ahra Tapcinosis (Utmost Humiliation) or
Man of Sorrows’, in Faith and Power, pp. 221-22; and Mandylion: Intorno al ‘Sacro Volto’, da
Bisanzio a Genova, pp. 163-70, figs 60 and 62.
THE TRANSFIGURED MOUNTAIN 71

the medieval legend’s transposition of Sinai stones into Zion, the new ‘female’
diptych of the Virgin of the Burning Bush and Saint Catherine — created at the
Monastery and designed to fuse its Mosaic ancestry with Marian devotion and the
cult of its adopted saint — could be ‘exported’ to places which were bound to the
monastery elsewhere. Such icons served visually not only to reinterpret an ancient
paradigm of theophanies in new ways but to construct Sinai anew in their own
right and thence to evoke the complex tradition of the site elsewhere.73

73 See the contribution of Annemarie Weyl Carr in this volume.