Icons

Although in Greek eikon means ‘‘image,’’ the term is often used to refer specifically to small-scale painted devotional panels. A tradition of ‘‘pagan’’ icons has been proposed in reference paintings like the third - and fourth-century examples of Harpokrates described above, painted wooden panels with similar subjects, and mummy portraits dating from the first to the third centuries (Rassart-Debergh 1990). Although mummy portraits were painted on wooden panels, they were inserted over the faces of the deceased within their mummy cases, portraying regular people, whose only claim to divinity was their transformed state after death. Panel-painted icons may be distinguished from mummy portraits by their use, method of construction, and subjects (Mathews 2006). There is, however archaeological evidence that the icons were buried with their owners, and placed in domestic shrines as votive gifts, similar to the above-mentioned Christian wall painting in Kom el-Dikka. Small donor figures are sometimes included in these compositions as in the chapel in Kom el-Dikka. Wooden frames surround the main panels. Some of these icons had movable side panels for concealment and revelation of their divine subjects. From the GraecoEgyptian pantheon, these are haloed gods usually represented in human form, as halflength or full-length figures in fairly static poses with little or no indication of setting. About half of the known examples represent military deities, such as Heron. The next most commonly represented divinity is Isis, depicted as in the wall paintings at Amheida and Karanis.

Panel paintings, wall paintings, and mummy portraits all rely upon asymmetry, a device from the Graeco-Roman repertory to approximate naturalism and animation. As in life, eyes are not entirely level or the same size, nor is frontality absolute. Representations of divinities are unusually undistinguished in other ways, approaching the generic in their avoidance of representational formulas like those of contemporary mummy portraits, which achieve a documentary realism by use of such features as the wrinkles and moles capable of describing a person’s appearance visually in much the same way as their mention in a written description in a legal document. Divinities are identified instead by their pose, dress, or other attributes: Isis by the tiered curls of her black hair and distinctively knotted mantle, for example, or Heron by his plated cuirass armor (covering chest, or chest and back) and double-headed ax. Such portrayals seem to have been designed to encourage prayerful dialogue between gods and humans in much the same way as the earliest Christian panel-painted icons, most of which are preserved in the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai. None of these earliest Christian icons can be securely dated before the middle of the sixth century. Despite that gap of several centuries between the latest of the panels of savior gods and the earliest of the Christian icons, common stylistic features and methods of construction suggest shared artistic traditions and, perhaps, affinities beween devotional practices (Mathews 2006).

Sixth - to seventh-century developments of Christian devotional images in Egypt were linked to developments within the Byzantine realm especially as concerns associations to patterns of worship for the cult of saints as well as, during the turbulent eighth and ninth centuries around phases of state-sponsored iconoclasm, the development of a theory of icons. Much of an icon’s effectiveness came to depend upon a transparency of the sacred image providing immediate devotional access to the holy person, who was made recognizable by likeness to known features, attributes, or even inscriptions. The survival of a series of icons dating from perhaps as early as the sixth century until the present day at the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai may have been possible because the monastery was not subject to imperial iconoclastic decrees and because the monastery has remained in use until today.