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be of untold value.
SHORTER NOTICES
BYZANTINE
ICONS.
By
D.
Talbot
Rice.
Shortly before the war a " find " of the very first
importance regarding the history of Byzantine panel
painting was announced by Prof. Sotiriou, Director of
ShorterNotices
between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries. The
Professor had hoped to put the first fruits of his study
before delegates attending the congress of Byzantine
studies which was to be held in Algiers in I939. The
congress, however, was postponed, and Professor
Sotiriou's material still remains unpublished except for
a very brief notice which appeared in Byzantion(XIV,
1939, fasc. I, pp. 325-327).
Recent improvements in the war situation and
announcements of happier prospects for Greece suggest
that this is an appropriate moment for calling the
attention of art historians as a whole-as opposed to
Byzantine specialists-to Sotiriou's " find."
The superb quality and outstanding value of Byzantine
mosaics has long been recognised by art lovers as a
whole: the great importance of Byzantine manuscript
illuminations of all periods was well known even
in the last century : the great merits of Byzantine
wall-paintings, both the " primitives " of early sixth and
seventh century date and the later "Renaissance"
compositions of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries,
were rapidly coming to be generally realised as a result
of the researches of the last thirty years or so. Byzantine
panel painting, however, had remained very much an
unknown field, owing to the scarcity of examples. True,
in Russia Rublev's Old TestamentTrinity,and a number
of other panels, had shown that in that country at least
icons had been produced which were definitely great
works of art and not merely cult paintings, and from
Constantinople itself the superb eleventh century panel
of OurLadyof Vladimirhad come down to us, standing
out as unquestionably one of the world's greatest religious
paintings. But other early examples of the Byzantine
school were extremely rare and the majority of icons that
were known, dating mostly from the sixteenth century
or later, though sometimes fine or even superb, were
more often of very secondary importance.
Professor Sotiriou's announcement of the discovery of
200 icons, all of pre-fifteenth century date, is thus of the
very first importance. He mentions paintings of the
sixth century, in the encaustic technique,' panels of the
twelfth century, and others of the fourteenth; some
appear to be small, others are as much as a metre high,
thus constituting major works in size as well as in
quality.
To those who had read of the monastery of Sinai
but not visited it, the discovery of fine icons there does
coloured wax by means of a hot needle. The
technique was used mainly in Egypt for mummy portraitsof the
first centuriesof the Christianera, but from there spread to the
Byzantineworld, where it was used for small icons. A very few
examples of sixth century date have been preserved; the most
importantwere beforethe war in the theologicalacademyat Kiev.
1 Painting with
Number:
LETTERS
THE HAUGHTON COLLECTION OF
GANDHARA SCULPTURE
SIR,-I have read Dr. Buchthal's article on "The
Haughton Collection of Gandhara Sculpture" in the