1500-year-old icons for Royal Academy

Works were stolen from Sinai monastery in 19th century by Ukrainian priest

By Martin Bailey | Web only
Published online 25 Sep 08

Christ with Saints Sergios and Bacchos

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.

Both icons had been taken from St Catherine’s by a Russian priest, Porphyrij Uspenskij, in around 1850. A recent study of his diaries suggests the works may have been stolen or acquired for money paid to a lowly monk. Uspenskij later became a bishop, and eventually bequeathed his icons to the ecclesiastical academy in Kiev. Following the Russian Revolution, they passed to what became the Khanenko Museum of Art. However, the Royal Academy has established that the monks of St Catherine’s are now content for the Ukrainian icons to hang with their own.

Originally it was hoped to borrow around forty icons from Sinai, but a very substantial financial sum was demanded, both for the monastery (for conservation of its buildings and artworks) and the Egyptian authorities (for overseeing security protection throughout the exhibition). At one point a sum in excess of $10m was mentioned. Reluctantly, the RA decided to reduce its loan requests to nine, for a very considerably lower payment.

Even now there remain some difficulties over the loan from Egypt, although the expectation is that the nine icons will arrive. The UK-based St Catherine Foundation is being particularly helpful over facilitating the arrangements. All nine icons are from the 12th and 13th centuries. The most of important is of the Heavenly Ladder of St John Klimakos, a unique representation of this subject in a Byzantine icon.

The St Catherine’s icons will be displayed in climate-controlled cases, keeping the humidity down to 25 per cent, close to that of the Sinai desert. “Byzantium”, which runs until 22 March 2009, will include 300 objects, such as ivories, detached wall paintings, micromosaics, enamels and metalwork.