José Coralli @JoseCoralli - Twitter Profile

This is the oldest surviving icon of Christ, the oldest painted portrait of the face of Jesus that has come down to us. It was made around 1500 years ago, and if you cover one half of the face, then the other, you are looking at two different men... It's called Christ Pantocrator, a Greek title meaning "Ruler of All," and it was painted in the sixth century, around the year 550, most likely in a workshop in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. It was almost certainly sent as an imperial gift to a remote new monastery being built in the Egyptian desert. It has hung there, in the Monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai, ever since. For roughly 1,500 years, it has never left. That it survived at all is remarkable. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Byzantine Empire went through a violent period called Iconoclasm, in which religious images were condemned as idolatry and destroyed by the thousands. Almost every icon of this age in the empire was burned. But Saint Catherine's lay far out in the desert, beyond the reach of the emperors and their decrees, so this one was spared. It is one of the very few images of its kind on earth to come down to us intact. But the truly haunting thing is the face. Look at it, and the two sides do not match. On the side where Christ holds the Gospel, his features are harder, sterner, the brow raised, the eye larger and more severe, the face of a judge who sees everything. On the side where he raises his hand in blessing, the expression softens, calm and merciful, the face of a savior. One half is divine authority. The other is human compassion. Most scholars believe this was entirely deliberate. The icon was painted not long after the Church had formally defined that Christ was at once fully God and fully man, two natures joined in one person. And so the artist, it is thought, built that doctrine directly into the face, splitting it in two so that the same man could be, in a single gaze, both merciful and just, both human and divine... I started my newsletter because our past is extraordinary, and fewer and fewer people are showing us how to truly see it. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.