6th-century icons to be shown in London

Two of the world's oldest icons are to go on show in "Byzantium", which opens at the Royal Academy on 25 October. Both probably date from the 6th century. Although painted in Constantinople for St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, they are coming on loan from the Ukraine.

The icons are Virgin and Child and Christ with Saints Sergios and Bacchos. It was originally planned to display the image of the two saints at the Getty Museum's major exhibition of Sinai icons in 2006 and it is reproduced in their catalogue. However, the loan never went ahead since there were concerns that the monks of St Catherine's would be offended if the Ukrainian works hung in the same gallery with their own icons. This was because the icons now in Kiev had been removed from Sinai in questionable circumstances.

It's good to see that public attention is belatedly being drawn to works such as these, whose importance and rarity cannot be overstated -- both as extremely early examples of Christian image-making, and as successors to a long and almost entirely effaced tradition of pagan icon painting.

Posted by David on September 28, 2008 4:49 PM