ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relationship between the verbal and the visual in late antique art through an examination of a pre-iconoclastic icon of John the Baptist from the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai now in the Khanenko Museum of Eastern and Western Art, Kiev. Since its removal from Sinai in the nineteenth century, scholarly discussion of the image has circled around questions of date and provenance. Using the tools of formal and iconographic analysis, studies have proposed dates ranging from the fifth century through the seventh, and have seen the icon as the product of workshops in Alexandria, greater Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Although necessary and important, these discussions also restrict understanding of the image by focusing on modern art historical concerns. The purpose of this chapter is to consider the icon from a different vantage point. Specifically, it applies categories of aesthetic analysis from verbal traditions of poetry and rhetoric to the visual forms of the image with the aim of understanding how style might enhance meaning and in so doing, the devotional experience of the late antique viewer.
