The Louvre has accepted Byzantine icons of the 6th-7th centuries for safekeeping

The director of the Louvre, Laurence de Cars, said that the main French museum accepted for temporary storage sixteen exhibits brought from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Art in Kyiv. Eleven immediately went to the restoration workshops, the remaining five should soon be shown to the general public. These are Byzantine icons, among which are the most unique monuments of the 6th-7th centuries, extraordinarily famous and precious in the historical and cultural sense. Tells about their edifying story Sergey Hodnev.

Four of the five monuments that are now promised to be exhibited in the Louvre are among the most ancient Christian icons in the world – not frescoes, not mosaics, not carved or stucco images, but prayer images painted on wood. The number is terribly small: all over the world there are only a few icons of this age. In the West, these are quite crumbs – like the throne of Our Lady from the Roman Santa Maria in Trastevere, which, in addition, is sometimes dated to later times, and the VIII, and even the X century. But even in the East, everything in this sense is completely disappointing. Under the iconoclast emperors in Byzantium (this is just the 8th – early 9th century), even the mosaic decoration of temples was systematically destroyed, to say nothing of the icons that were burned in absolutely unimaginable quantities.

But on Sinai, in the remote and impregnable monastery of St. Catherine, at least twelve icons survived, which survived both the iconoclasts and the Muslim conquest of Egypt. The icons are small, and yet, in their own way, this corpus is as priceless as Pompeii and Herculaneum put together: a transitional link between late antique painting and mature Byzantine sacred art, from which, in turn, a lot of things came down to the traditions of Russian icon painting. The selection, as usual, is random, somewhere you can see a firm hand and the metropolitan school, somewhere – deeply provincial timidity, but here everything is like with Faiyum portraits – especially since the technique is the same: encaustic, beloved by the ancient Greeks, painting with paints , in which pounded mineral pigments were kneaded on a mixture of gum and melted beeswax. The technique is demanding (wax hardens instantly, it’s not oil or even egg tempera for you), but grateful: in a dry, hot climate, encaustic is well preserved, as we see, for thousands of years.

And out of these twelve Sinai icons, four were once in Kyiv. The naive “Martyr and Martyr”, “John the Baptist” with an almost expressionistic modeling of the face and draperies (it is sometimes even dated to an earlier time, the end of the 5th century, which makes the icon contemporary with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire), the large-eyed “Our Lady with Child” and, finally , Saints Sergius and Bacchus. The bust of two young martyrs, once incredibly revered throughout the Christian East from the Libyan deserts to Ararat, who were patrons of the imperial army until they were replaced by the cults of St. a world-famous monument, which is an honor for any museum, even such as the Louvre.

But how did they get into the Kiev museum? It’s a pretty instructive story. In the Sinai, they were discovered in the middle of the 19th century by Porfiry (Uspensky, 1804–1885), an archimandrite by church rank, and then a bishop, by secular scientific vocation, an archaeographer and archaeologist, one of the first professional Russian orientalists, founder of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem. About the “old icons hidden in the tower above the porch of the cathedral church” of the Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, Porfiry wrote in horror: “almost all of them are stabbed and mutilated.” Those same four pre-iconoclastic icons, along with other, later images, Porfiry received from the Sinai monastery, as it was officially considered, “as a gift”: this is similar to the average colonial movement of cultural values, but it must be admitted that monasteries like the same Sinai or the Palestinian Lavra of St. . The Savvas do not yet demand the return of the invaluable handwritten treasures exported in the 19th century (for example, the Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Bible of the 4th century), and even more so about the icons of demands.

In his declining years, Porfiry bequeathed four icons to the museum of the Kyiv Theological Academy; after the revolution, they, miraculously surviving, ran around until they got into the collection of the Museum of Western and Eastern Art (in 1999 it was named the Khanenko Museum after the pre-revolutionary patrons, whose collection formed its basis). It was precisely as museum property that they were beautifully restored in Soviet times and given them wide world fame, just like with Rublev’s Trinity, but at the same time there is an eloquent answer to the ingenuous lovers of the slogan “the icon should be in the temple.” These icons were painted, perhaps for temple use, but it did not spare them; an archimandrite came and laid a hand on them, but the most learned archimandrite assigned them to a museum with the same hand, and by no means under the Bolsheviks, but under the most pious and most autocratic Alexander III.