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Pastor's
Page
By
Fr. George Welzbacher
November 19, 2006
An Exhibition of Icons
Interest in the sacred icons of the Byzantine world has
grown exponentially in recent years. No wonder then that this past
Tuesday, November 14th, one of America's leading museums, the John Paul
Gtty museum in Los Angeles, opened an exhibition of forty-three
magnifient icons from the ancient Monastery of St. Catherine at the
foot of Mount Sinai. This is the first time that most of these icons
have ever left the monastery. The exhibition, entitled
"Holy Image, Hallowed Ground.- Icons from Sinai", will be open to the
public for many weeks. I thought you might be interested in the
background account that appeared in the Fine Arts section of last
Sunday's New York Times, November 12, 2006. I reprint excerpts from
Jori Finkel's long article here:
After 15 Centuries, St.Peter Finally
Leaves Home
By Jori Finkel
It was a standoff in the desert heat between
two kinds of authority: a Greek Orthodox monk and a group of Egyptian
military officers. The monk, dressed in a long black robe and rugged
gray vest, was clearly out-gunned, but he was not afraid to raise his
voice. Nor were the officers who stood in his way.
The soldiers had stopped the monk, Father Porphyrios, and
his small caravan of cars and trucks at a checkpoint just before the
Suez tunnel as the convoy made its way from the holy Monastery of St.
Catherine at Mount Sinai to the airport in Cairo. Their cargo could not
have been more valuable: crates of centuries-old icons, devotional
paintings that are as delicate as they are rare, destined for an
exhibition 8,000 miles away in Los Angeles.
First the officers asked to see the customs paperwork,
which the drivers quickly supplied. Then they demanded that the crates
be opened. "There was a lot of shouting," Father Porphyrios said,
speaking through an interpreter in a recent interview. "There was no
way I was going to let them open the boxes."...After an intense hour of
negotiation and some well-placed calls to the Culture Ministry in
Cairo, Father Porphyrios prevailed. And the icons resumed their journey
to the Cairo Airport and their ultimate destination: the J. Paul Getty
Museum.
Starting Tuesday the museum will display these paintings
along with a few other rare liturgical objects as part of "Holy Image,
Hallowed Ground. Icons from Sinai . . ..... The Getty is undergoing
something of a makeover for the occasion The museum is dimming the
lights and designing its main exhibition galleries to evoke the
magisterial look and feel of St. Catherine, believed to be the oldest
continuing operating Christian monastery in the world....
Said Kristen Collins, the Getty curator who organized the
show with the Yale art historian Robert Nelson: "We did want to try to
evoke the experience of being there--the whole sensory experience of
hearing the chanting and just being wrapped by, surrounded by, these
beautiful images."
For starters they decided to build a streamlined version
of a church's iconostasis, the screen laden with icons that separates
the bema of the clergy from the nave of the laity. Behind that they
raised an altar, complete with treasures like a sixth-century bronze
cross. And they have piped music into the room, hymns that will be
heard in neighboring galleries and will blend with chants from a short
film, screened nearby, on the sights and sounds of the Monastery of St.
Catherine at Easter.
Most of all though, what promises to transform the space
of the museum is the presence of the icons themselves. Richly colored
paintings on wood panels that depict saints and other holy figures,
icons play a very central and visible role in the Orthodox church. The
icon serves as a window onto the spiritual world.
"I like to think of icons as reflections: in the classical
sense where a mirror image was considered real, not illusory. It's like
a presence of the figure depicted," said Father Justin, another monk
from St. Catherine's who, with Father Porphyrios, is staying in Los
Angeles for most of the show. "To be surrounded by icons is to be
surrounded by the saints themselves."
Even in the secular space of a museum? "Yes, even in a
museum, " said Father Justin, who in his long white beard and flowing
black robe cut a dramatic figure against the empty gallery on the first
day of unpacking. "I'm positive once everything is installed, this will
be a spiritual experience for those who seek it. We're not making the
museum into a church, but we are creating a reverential space...."
The Monastery of St. Catherine is located at the foot of
Mount Sinai, where it is believed that Moses saw the burning bush and
received the Ten Commandments. The earliest written account of the
monastery, dating from the fourth century, describes a small church and
garden. In the sixth century the Byzantine emperor Justinian built a
more impressive basilica on the same site.
Today that basilica remains the heart of the monastery.
And its collection of Byzantine icons now numbers around 2,000, the
world's largest. Some were painted on the site by iconographers, monks
trained in the symbol-rich and convention-heavy tradition of how to
represent a saint. Others were brought as gifts.
Together they blanket the monastery. There are icons
covering the walls and columns of the main basilica. ("Newer icons are
within arm's reach, older icons are on higher shelves," Father Justin
said). Icons fill the 20 small chapels outside the main basilica. And
there are icons, modern copies if not originals, hanging in the monk's
cells. The monks have even turned the treasury of the church into a
small museum, catering to the hundreds of thousands of visitors who
make the pilgrimage each year.
It is not an easy trip. For
centuries traveling to the remote reaches of Sinai from Europe meant
sailing to Alexandria and journeying inland by camel for maybe 15 days.
Today the trip usually means flying to Cairo and driving six or seven
hours from there. But this isolation has served the monastery well,
especially during the heyday of iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth
centuries.
During this period the Byzantine Emperor Lea III issued
his 730 edict banning the worship of religious imagery, declaring it a
blatant violation of the Ten Commandments' prohibition of "graven
images. " Many early icons were seized and destroyed. Not the paintings
at St. Catherine, which had by then come under Muslim rule and was thus
exempt from Byzantine laws.
The severe desert atmosphere has also played a role in
preserving the icons. Because they are painted on wood, icons are
susceptible to warping or splitting with changes in humidity. While
some have been damaged that way, most have been preserved by the
extreme aridity of the desert.
And, it almost goes without saying, by the monks
themselves, who assume personal responsibility for safeguarding the
icons. For many centuries they did not allow the paintings to travel at
all....
But over the last decade, Fr. Justin said, another desire
grew to outweigh that concern: "The objections were overcome by the
feeling that we have an obligation to share our heritage with
people--especially these days, when so many people are looking for
spiritual inspiration. This is a way of reaching people who might not
ever enter an Orthodox church."
The monks' test case was the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
which borrowed about a dozen icons for its big Byzantium surveys of
1997 and 2004. It was a good experience. "They treated the objects very
carefully and respectfully," Father Justin said, "and we have had
visitors to Sinai telling us that they were inspired to make the trip
after seeing the show in New York."
Father Porphyrios said the Getty has gone to even more
extraordinary and costly measures, "to the point that we were even able
to include some icons that are fragile, in borderline condition." For
transportation the museum designed special airtight cases that sit
within a crate that sits within a larger crate, with high-tech
insulation at every level and plastic sheets, of the sort usually used
for medical tents, wrapping the icons. For display the museum created
airtight plexiglass cases set at 30 percent relative humidity, equipped
with data loggers to monitor this level.
After arriving in Los Angeles on Oct. 12, the crates were
placed in "dry" storage at the Getty, set to near-desert levels of
humidity. They remained sealed until two weeks before the show, when a
Getty team began opening the boxes within boxes in an elaborately
choreographed routine designed to minimize the amount of time each icon
was exposed to the California air.
"I've been calling it a pit crew," Ms. Collins said. "Our
goal is to remove each object from its case and install it in the
display case within 15 minutes."
One of the first icons installed was the 13th century wood
panel "St. John the Baptist with Scenes From His Life," done in
tempera, or egg yolk mixed with pigments. As is the tradition with
icons, the painting has flat, stylized figures--- easy to recognize
through emblematic dress or gear --- floating against a gold ground.
The wood of the upper left comer is chipped, but the colors are
surprisingly bright. "A conservator at the Metropolitan Museum once
told me that it's difficult to date our icons," said Father Justin.
"They are always older than they appear to be."
Oldest of all is the sixth-century painting of St. Peter
the Apostle, one of thefive earliest known icons in existence. It is
the icon's first trip awayfrom the monastery....
"These images move," Mr. Nelson said. "they move even if
you stand still, but definitely if you make the smallest motion. And
the gold is the most lively part of the image. It really comes to life
with the flickering of candlelight in the church."
By night a profusion of candlesticks, candelabra and lamps
illuminate the basilica of St. Catherine, and their interaction with
the icons is dazzling. But lighting at the Getty consists mainly of
more subtle fiber-optic rails attached to the vitrines....
The curators anticipate some intense viewer participation.
Ms. Collins says she got a preview of this while staying at a friend's
house in Egypt. She was editing the catalog for the show and had page
proofs spread out on the coffee table, when two of the housekeepers,
both Coptic Christians, spotted an image of the Virgin Mary. "They
lifted up a page and kissed the picture," she said. "We're talking
about page proofs, and yet they had this overpowering response to
the image."
She expects to see more signs of personal devotion in the
galleries.
*****
A final comment from Fr. Welzbacher
God's plans often startle us with paradox. The
most ancient icons of St. Catherine's Monastery provide an example. The
principal reason for their survival is that, beginning in the 630's,
the Sinai peninsula was ruled no longer by the Christian emperors
residing in Constantinople, but rather by Muslim Arabs. Though they
were themselves forbidden to depict in art either animals or the human
figure, the Muslim Arabs did not interfere with the devotional
practices of the Christian monks. In the century and more from 726 to
843 A.D., the heyday of the iconoclast heresy, it was the policy of the
Byzantine emperors, a policy condemned by the Popes and vehemently
opposed by the Greek-speaking monks and by many of the laity, was to
destroy all sacred images within the emperors' reach on the grounds
that the veneration of such images was tantamount to idolatry.
Fortunately St. Catherine's Monastery was no longer within their reach.
The Catholic and Orthodox confessions hold that since God
the Son assumed a human body that could be seen and heard and touched,
a picture of Christ (or of any saint) simply prolongs in time what was
accessible to men's senses during Christ's (or the saint's) lifetime
here on earth, and that the material icon is not itself adored but
serves simply as a reminder of the Divine Person Whom we adore or the
saint to whom we pray but whom we can no longer see. "Out of sight/out
of mind " is a basic fact of human psychology. The veneration of icons
provides a remedy. Accordingly at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787
A.D. (the Seventh Ecumenical Council) the proper veneration of sacred
images was solemnly proclaimed as a legitimate practice that is
eminently useful in fostering devotion to Christ and to the saints.
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