Research Catalog

Title

Approaching the holy mountain : art and liturgy at St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai / edited by Sharon E.J. Gerstel and Robert S. Nelson.

Publication

Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols, c2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Gerstel, Sharon E. J.
• Nelson, Robert S., 1947-
• J. Paul Getty Museum
• University of California, Los Angeles
• Icons of Sinai (2007 : J. Paul Getty Museum and University of California, Los Angeles)

Description

xxx, 608 p. : ill. (some col.), plans; 24 cm.

Summary

"The first comprehensive study of the monastery of St Catherine at Mt Sinai in its full historical, art historical, and religious dimensions, the nineteen collected essays in Approaching the Holy Mountain provide a unique view of the longest continuously inhabited Christian monastery. As an important pilgrimage site, Sinai enjoyed an international reputation in the Middle Ages. The monastery also benefited from regional connections to Egypt and the Holy Land. The essays in this volume examine the pilgrims, monks, artists, builders, and scholars who came to the mountain and left their marks on the monastery and its holdings, as well as the image of the monastery that was promoted outside of Sinai. Because of its dry, isolated location in the Sinai desert, the monastery possesses the world's greatest collection of Byzantine icons. Although these icons have been celebrated in highly popular exhibitions in Athens, London, St Petersburg, New York, and Los Angeles, few longer studies of the icons have been attempted. In this volume authors investigate icons from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries and offer new interpretations of their meaning, provenance, and function. Essays also explore celebrated illuminated Byzantine manuscripts in the library of St Catherine's, pilgrims' accounts of the monastery, a recently excavated early church on the summit of Mt Sinai, liturgy at Sinai during the first Christian millennium, the influence of Sinai on later paintings and engravings, and the recent history of Sinai studies. The result is a significant advance in our understanding of one of the most important centres of early Christianity."--Page 4 of cover.

Series Statement

Cursor mundi ; v. 11

Uniform Title

Cursor mundi (Turnhout, Belgium) v. 11.

Alternative Title

Art and liturgy at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai

Subject

• Saint Catherine (Monastery : Mount Sinai) > Congresses
• Orthodox Eastern Church > Egypt > Sinai, Mount > Liturgy > Congresses
• Christian art and symbolism > Egypt > Sinai, Mount > Congresses
• Icons, Byzantine > Egypt > Sinai, Mount > Congresses
• Illumination of books and manuscripts, Byzantine > Egypt > Sinai, Mount > Congresses
• Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in art > Congresses
• Christian antiquities > Egypt > Sinai, Mount > Congresses
• Sinai (Egypt) > Antiquities > Congresses

Genre/Form

• Conference papers and proceedings
• Conference papers and proceedings.

Note

• "The papers of this volume derive from the symposium "Icons of Sinai", held at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the University of California, Los Angeles, on 26-27 January 2007"--P. [xxvii].

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

• Sinai Studies : an overview and an introduction / Robert S. Nelson -- Paving the road to Sinai : Georgios and Maria Soteriou on the Holy Mountain / Ioanna Christoforaki -- The transfigured mountain : icons and transformations of pilgrimage at the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai / Jaś Elsner and Gerhard Wolf -- Excavations on the Holy Summit (Jebel Mūsā) at Mount Sinai : preliminary remarks on the Justinianic basilica / Sophia Kalopissi-Verti and Maria Panayotidi -- The architecture of the Justinianic basilica on the Holy Summit / Petros Koufopoulos and Marina Myriantheos-Koufopoulou -- Painted skins : the illusions and realities of architectural polychromy, Sinai and Egypt / Elizabeth S. Bolman -- Worship on Sinai in the first Christian millennium ; glimpses of a lost world / Robert F. Taft -- Late Byzantine cathedral liturgy and the Service of the Furnace / Alexander Lingas -- Manuscript production on Mount Sinai from the tenth to the thirteenth century / Nancy P. Ševčenko -- Sinai MS gr. 2 : exploring the significance of a Sinai manuscript / Hieromonk Justin Sinaites.
• Visualizing the divine : an early Byzantine icon of the 'Ancient of Days' at Mount Sinai / Kathleen Corrigan -- Regarding prayer : contemplating an icon of John the Forerunner / Charles Barber -- Archive and atelier : Sinai and the case of the narrative icon / Paroma Chatterjee -- Mural and icon painting at Sinai in the thirteenth century / Georgi R. Parpulov -- Sinai, Acre, Tripoli, and the 'backwash from the Levant' : where did the icon painters work? / Rebecca W. Corrie -- Sinai and Cyprus : Holy Mountain, Holy Isle / Annemarie Weyl Carr -- Three east Slavic pilgrims at Sinai / translated by Georgi R. Parpulov -- Turning Holy Mountains into ladders to heaven : overlapping topographies and poetics of space in post-Byzantine sacred engravings of Mount Sinai and Mount Athos / Veronica Della Dora -- On the painted ancestry of Domenikos Theotokopoulos's sacred landscapes of Mount Sinai and the Monastery of St Catherine / Cristina Stancioiu.

ISBN

• 9782503531274
• 250353127X

OCLC

• 491905910
• SCSB-12899692

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library