Annemarie Weyl Carr

This article has two aims. One is to offer a bird’s-eye view of the Byzantine icon as it evolved from the sixth century to the thirteenth, when the great icon collection at the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai saw its medieval apogee. The other is to assess one thirteenth-century icon that exemplifies that apogee. It is an icon of the great martyr Marina of Antioch in Pisidia smiting Beelzebub and belongs to the group of close to two hundred ‘crusader icons’ that survive almost exclusively on Sinai itself. Just what the ‘crusader icons’ were has been debated since they were first given that name in the 1960s. The article argues that the icon of St Marina, though appearing at first to be Byzantine, was most probably made for a Latin owner, and brings out one of the most fundamental ways in which the purposes assigned to the image by the Greek Church were distinct from those assigned to it by the Roman one.

The monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai harbors one of the world’s largest preserved legacies of panel-painted icons from the Byzantine era. Thousands of color photographs of them taken during the research expeditions of the Universities of Michigan, Princeton, and Alexandria between 1958 and 1965 are now being made available online by the Visual Resources Collection at Princeton University.¹ The icons date from the sixth century onward, but they cluster especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, partly because panel-painting seems to have escalated in Byzantium itself in this span, but at least as signifi- cantly because of historical conditions in the eastern Mediterranean region to which Sinai belonged. Crusades, pilgrimage, and escalating commerce spurred a surge of cultural dynamism in the Christian communities, which crested in the thirteenth century.