cover image SINAI, BYZANTIUM, RUSSIA: Orthodox Christian Art from the Sixth to the Twentieth Century

SINAI, BYZANTIUM, RUSSIA: Orthodox Christian Art from the Sixth to the Twentieth Century

, . . ARRAY(0x274af98), $100 (456pp) ISBN 978-0-295-98027-0

This massive book was published to accompany an exhibit that traveled earlier this year from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg to London's Courtauld Gallery. Based on works at the Russian Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert, the book includes religious art both ancient and modern, right up to the kitschy Easter eggs of the last czars. The show was by all evidence a blockbuster, but the present book, by far too many hands, is a real mess in the bad old tradition of Soviet publishing, complete with unscholarly catalogue entries and tacky, sometimes fuzzy quality reproductions. Editor Piatnitsky is curator of Byzantine icons at the Hermitage, Baddeley is director of the Camberwell–Saint Catherine's Conservation Project and Brunner is head of London's Saint Catherine Foundation. Despite their assembled expertise and a number of previously unpublished and undisplayed objects of obvious interest, this book is unsatisfying. There are promising but ultimately disappointing chapters on "Byzantine Art and the Holy Land" and "Sinai: the Construction of a Sacred Landscape." The fine line between art history and religious propaganda is crossed all too often, while the goggle-eyed worship of royals focuses attention on sub-Faberge-quality porcelain Easter eggs that are a real anticlimax after excellent works like the medieval enamels and ivories from the Hermitage. And the eternal controversy—little discussed here—of icon forgeries and overpainting makes generalizations about the icons from St. Catherine's even more difficult. Kurt Weizmann's 1976 The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai remains the unsurpassed examination of this collection. (June)