A woman’s prayer to St Sergios in Latin Syria: interpreting a thirteenth-century icon at Mount Sinai

Abstract

Amongst the collection of icons at St Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, is a small panel depicting a woman wearing a black veil kneeling before the equestrian saint Sergios (fig. 1). The icon is one of a group of thirteenth-century Sinai icons, many of equestrian saints, whose date and provenance has been a matter of debate. But lacking from this debate has been interpretation of the icon as an indicator of a particular social, religious and political field. The intrusion of the material world of the viewer in this icon, through the gesture of the kneeling woman, enables it to be interpreted as a personal prayer, an act of supplication for protection at the critical period before the final loss of Latin Syria to the Mamluks. It was arguably commissioned from one of the Syrian Orthodox artists whose work can be seen displayed in the churches to the east and south of Tripoli. This identifies an intense period of activity in wallpainting and icon production in Syria during the middle to second quarter of the thirteenth century of which work at the end of the century in Cyprus was the continuation. Looked at from the perspective of the woman herself, the icon raises issues of the role of women in the patronage and veneration of icons in the Latin East.

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