Representations of the visible
"Arab Icons: Christian Art of the Levant", an exhibition at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, presents 80 icons from Syria and Lebanon painted between the 16th and 19th centuries, together with various religious items and manuscripts from the Christian communities in the Levant. Brought together from collections held by Syrian and Lebanese religious communities, as well as from private and public collections in Europe, the exhibition draws attention to the post-Byzantine tradition of icon painting in the region, which went through a renaissance following the Ottoman conquests of the 16th century, becoming progressively more Occidental in character as a result of growing exchanges between Eastern and Western Christianity.
Icons are associated particularly with the Eastern Christian churches, there being traditions of icon painting in Russia, Georgia, Greece, the Levant, Egypt and elsewhere, but the relationship between Christianity and image making was not always a smooth one. The Early Church frowned on icons for reasons that recall the destruction of religious images during the European Reformation: though useful as a means of instruction, and having roots in popular religion, it was thought that images of Jesus, the Saints and of the Virgin, all familiar subjects of icons, could give rise to superstition, or to the veneration of images.
Following a period of iconoclasm the Eastern Churches established a theory of the icon, which, as Olivier Clément recalls in the catalogue to the present exhibition, borrowed from Jesus's words, as recorded in St John's Gospel, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (14.9). From the fact of the Incarnation it was possible to argue, as did St John of Damascus in the eighth century, that "in former times, God having neither body nor form, he could not in any fashion be represented. However, now that he has appeared in the flesh and lived among men, what is visible of him can be represented."
In the theory of icons that subsequently developed, the images depicted were venerated as the visible representations of the divine, explaining the fixed canons of icon painting and the images' special, non- naturalistic intensity.
The earliest icons displayed in the present exhibition date from the late 16th century; a school of icon painting establishing itself in Aleppo in Syria at this date. According to François Zabbal, writing in the exhibition catalogue, the Ottoman conquests of the 16th century reunified the Mediterranean world and gave new prominence to Levantine towns such as Aleppo that now found themselves part of a larger empire and important centres on regional trade routes.
"With the disappearance of political and military frontiers, and the expansion of commerce between Europe and Asia, this great North Syrian urban centre [of Aleppo] became a strategic and commercial crossroads for caravans leaving for Iran via Mosul and for Mecca via Damascus," Zabbal writes. The region's Christian communities benefited from this flourishing economic environment, commissioning new churches, monasteries and religious buildings, as well as the icons to fill them, and traditions of icon painting that had flourished in the Balkans and the Greek islands following the fall of Constantinople were reintroduced to Syria and the Levant, the cosmopolitan character of the Ottoman Empire serving to re-establish links between far-flung Christian communities and fostering their expansion in a common Ottoman space.
In the 17th century, a school of icon painting of a dynastic character emerged in Aleppo. Led by Yusuf Al- Musawwir, and continuing through his son Nehmet Al- Musawwir, grandson Hanania and great grandson Girgis, the productions of this school record the changing style of Levantine icons as trade patterns changed and as Western Christian influence in the area increased. While the earlier icons are painted in a traditional, Byzantine style, many of them being imported to the Levant from Greece or Crete, later examples show the influence of Western religious art on Eastern icon painting.
Typically painted in egg tempera on wood, the religious figures set against a field of worked gold, Byzantine icons show highly stylized, hieratic figures of the Saints, the Virgin and Jesus, with repeated figures, including those of Christ Pantokrator (all powerful), the Virgin Hodigitria and the apotropaique Saints (those having special powers of intercession). Faces are elongated with special prominence given to the eyes, as the icon and its human venerator catch one another in a mutual regard. Earlier icons signed by Yusuf Al-Musawwir, Nos.7 to 13 in the exhibition, preserve many features of this tradition, while later icons signed by Nehmet Al-Musawwir show the influence of the so-called "italo-byzantine" manner, Nehmet's compositions having a marked "taste for the anecdotal" and the picturesque when compared to the hieratic Byzantine originals. Icons signed by Hanania and Girgis introduce naturalistic features to the faces depicted in the icons, as well as new subject matters.
Such changes continued in the 19th century, with early and late 19th- century icons from the Jerusalem School, painted by artists such as Michel le Cretois and Mikhail Al-Qudsi, showing these professional icon painters adopting a naturalistic Western style of painting and "giving it an iconic look". Icon No.57 in the present exhibition by Michel le Cretois, for example, depicts, according to the Arabic inscription, "the gentle Jesus Christ, condemned by Pilate". While the icon's subject, "Great Humility", is familiar from 19th-century Catholicism, it is at some distance from the images of Christ Pantokrator of earlier Byzantine icons.
Similarly, the catalogue tells us, Jerusalem School icons such as Nos.68 and 71 in the present exhibition show the influence of Russian icon painting, while No. 76, painted in the late 19th century by Mikhail Al-Qudsi in Jerusalem, shows the Holy Family of Joseph, the Virgin and the infant Jesus in an arrangement that has been "taken from Latin Christianity and shows the influence of Catholic missionaries".
In addition to the icons the exhibition also includes a selection of religious items from the Levantine Christian churches, as well as various religious manuscripts written in Arabic and Syriac. The religious items mostly date from the 19th century and include vestments, chalices and processional and devotional crosses. The manuscripts, many of them gorgeously illuminated, include a 12th century copy of the Gospels written in Arabic and Syriac from the Balamund Monastery in Lebanon, as well as a 19th century illuminated Syriac grammar.
A Semitic language related to Arabic but written in a different script, Syriac survives today as a liturgical language in use by Levantine Christians. The exhibition also includes an illuminated copy of the Gospels made in the 14th century in Egypt for the use of the Egyptian Coptic Church and now kept at the Holy Saviour Convent in Lebanon.
The exhibition catalogue, containing essays on the religious background to the icons as well as on the Christian communities that produced them, will be particularly useful to visitors to the exhibition unfamiliar with the traditions and iconography presented. The catalogue also contains a useful commentary by Mother Agnes-Mariam de la Croix of the Saint-Jacques-le-Mutilé Monastery in Qara, Syria, on each icon included in the exhibition. Each icon is reproduced, and while the reproductions are good enough they cannot do justice to the gorgeous aspect of the icons themselves nor to the worked textures of their surfaces.
This is a problem, since the gold used as background to the figures portrayed in the icons comes across in reproduction as a dull yellow field. However, the fact that these images do not reproduce well also says something about their unique status as religious objects having a special place in veneration and ritual.
