You have probably seen this face before. Christ looks out from a gold halo, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a Gospel thick with jewels. The panel is quiet, and it is also one of the oldest icons of the Lord still in the world. It has hung for centuries at the Monastery of Saint Catherine, on Mount Sinai.
Ruler of all
Pantocrator means ruler of all. In this icon Christ is not only the gentle teacher of the Galilean roads. He is the one who holds heaven and earth, merciful savior and righteous judge in a single person. The right hand opens outward in blessing. The left gathers a heavy book, the Word by which every life is measured. Later icons of the Pantocrator would become sterner and more fixed. This one is younger in the face, calmer, and already complete.
He wears a tunic and a cloak of the same deep purple, the color of an emperor, the folds turned in darker and lighter shades of that purple rather than in bright highlights. The cross in the halo is gold. Behind him a shallow niche gives the body a little room, and then stops. He is almost life-size, and he stands very near the front of the panel, close enough that the gaze feels personal. The eyes are large. They rest on you kindly, and they do not quite meet you straight on.
A face from the sixth century
The icon was painted around the middle of the sixth century, most likely in Constantinople, in the years when the emperor Justinian was building Saint Catherine’s Monastery and sending gifts into the desert. The medium is encaustic: pigment bound in hot wax, laid on a thin wooden panel. Wax painting of this kind became rare in Byzantium after the iconoclast controversies. Sinai is the place where a real group of these early wax icons still survives.
For a long time the panel was thought to be much later. In the thirteenth century it had been painted over almost completely, and that later surface was what people saw. When the overpaint was taken off in 1962, a sixth-century face came back. The top and the sides of the board had been cut down, which is why Christ sits a little off center. A bare strip along the bottom suggests the panel once slid into a grooved frame. One area needed a major repair, along the left side of the head. Apart from that, the original surface is in extraordinary condition for an object this old. It measures about 84 by 45.5 centimeters, and it was once larger.
Why it is still here
In the eighth and ninth centuries, icons were ordered destroyed in the empire. The famous image of Christ at the Chalke Gate in Constantinople was torn down twice, in 726 and again in 814. Some scholars have wondered whether the Sinai panel echoes that lost icon, or another revered image of Christ. The link cannot be proved. What can be said is simpler, and more moving: this is one of the very few icons from before iconoclasm that we can still stand in front of.
Sinai kept it because Sinai was already outside that storm. By about 640, Arab rule had reached Egypt and the peninsula, and the monastery’s tie to Constantinople was cut. When the bans began in the capital, Saint Catherine’s had lived under Muslim governance for nearly a century. It was not swept up in the imperial decree. The monastery also sits in high desert, off the roads that armies used. Distance became a kind of mercy. Icons continued to be made there while they were being broken elsewhere. The monastery now keeps more than two thousand of them, from the sixth century to our own.
Two sides of one face
Look long enough and the face refuses to be symmetrical. The hair, the nose, the beard, and especially the brows and the eyes are drawn differently on each side. Cover one half, then the other, and two expressions appear inside the same person.
Mercy
One side softens. The brow eases. You meet a gentler, humbler Christ, the Savior who blesses.
Judgment
The other side gathers. The gaze is sterner. You meet the righteous judge, the Ruler of all.
That difference is not a flaw in the drawing. Art historians have read the frontal stillness as a sign of His divinity, and the living unevenness of the features as a sign of His humanity. The century before this icon was painted had argued, at Ephesus and at Chalcedon, that Christ is fully God and fully man, without confusion and without division. The painter did not write a treatise. He made a face in which those two truths stay together. Mercy and judgment are not two Christs. They are the one Lord, seen from either side.
A face for a home
An icon this old is not a relic you merely admire and walk past. It teaches the same thing a new icon is for: to be prayed before. The blessing is still being given. The book is still open. The two sides of the face still ask for an honest look, the kind that can receive mercy and can also bear the truth.
A limited number of this icon, in different sizes and woods, is in the Exclusive Gallery. Each one is set in solid wood so the Sinai face can be kept where ordinary days happen.
