Indian Antiquary Vol 03

Author(s): Jas Burgess
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 62

50
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[FEBRUARY, 1874.
ing the tenacity with which the Gæco-Russic Church has in so many points clung to Old Byzantine types, I asked my honoured friend Schief- ner in St. Petersburg for information with regard to some Græco-Russic representations of the "Madonna Lactans." By his kindness I received general information on this point from the Kais. russ. Staatsrath Wladimir von Stasow, to whom I offer my heartiest thanks. The purpurt of it is that such representations of the Madonna with bared breast are in Russian art, as well as in the Old Byzantine, on which exclusively the former is based, extremely rare, and almost always of very late date, -the 17th or 18th century,--and due to Western influence. To the kindness of Herr von Stasow also I am indebted for a copy of a picture of the kind from the cloister Karyais on Mount Athos, painted on a wooden tablet executed by Herr Prochorow, member of the Archeological Society in St. Petersburg, after a copy taken on the spot with the help of photography by one whose early death we have to deplore-Sewastjanow, well known as tho photographer of the Athos MS. of Ptolemæus. Herr Prochorow remarks that this picture bears traces of a Western Catholic influence, in opposition to the Madonnas of the Rnssian Church, which fixes it for the second half of the 16th century in Russian pictures, namely, the Madonna does not bear on her head a crown supported by angels: and the sequence of the letters ó (he that is) in the nimbus round the head of Christ is different in Russian pictures, being in them
name-son of his should visit the cloister, to whom they should give the picture to protect him on his journey. This he takes from a letter of the Servian archbishop, the original of which is apparently still preserved at Karyais, of which Wesmin had only read a copy. Domenique Papety (Revue des Demu Mondes, 1847, XVIII, 769-89) compares the holy pictures of Mount Athos only with the oldest Italian mosaics, as old as those of S. Maria in Trastevere, that is, he considers them as Old By zantine (he is not, of course, speaking expressly of our picture). In whatever way the question of the antiquity of this picture may be decided (and Hotho and Waagen, who have kindly communicated their views to me, agree with Von Stasow and Prochorow that it cannot be earlier than the 19th century, adding that it is apparently much later), there is in the picture itself nothing marked enough to provę Raoul Rochette's (and Mrs. Jameson's) derivation of the "Byzantine type" of the Madonna Lactans from the Egyptian group "Isis nursing Horus." The arrangement in the two subjects is completely different. We must aid that Raoul Rochette is of opinion (p. 34) that the picture of "the Virgin with the Child" was proposed by the Council held at Ephesus against the Nestorian heresy "for the adoration of the faithful under a specific form," but he denies that the representation originated with the council, since more than one of the Christian sarcophagi of the Vatican are of an earlier date, though he adds that our group is extremely rare in the pictures of the Catacombs.
Strangely enough, there have recently been found among these some representations of the Madonna with the Child, and especially of the Madonna Lactang, which claim a date much earlier than any controversy between Nestorius and Cyril. In the Imagines Selectæ Deiparce Virginis from the Catacomb pictures published by De Rossi, there is, among several groups where the Madonna holds the Child in her lap, a fresco in which where it is feeling for her breast, which, however, is covered. This comes from the Cemetero di Priscilla, and is ascribed by De Rossi, vide 14-19 of the French text that accompanies the tables (Images de la T. S. Vierge Choisies dans les Catacombes de Rome), and his remarks in the Bulletino di Archeologia Cristiana, 1865, pp. 25ff. (there is an engraving of the group on p. 27), for manifold reasons, "tolti dalla stile, dall' arte, dalla storia, dalla topografia, dalla epigrafia del | luogo," to the first decade of the second century.
Nay, he thinks it may be contemporary with the hand. This too remained in the cloister Mar Saba from the 8th to the 13th century.) A copy of this kind may be seen in Beard's Historical and Artistic Illustrations of the Trinity (London, 1846), to which it is the frontispiece, with the title "Mary with three hands holding the infant Jesus, with a nimbus of three raye-types of the Trinity."..
while here it is o »). The Athos tradition, it is true, as Schiefner kindly tells me, puts the picture as early as the 6th century (Schewyrew, p. 3). In a Russian work, The Life of the Most Holy Madonna (St. Petersb. 1860; 270), we are told that it canne from the cloister Már Saba at Jerusalem, whence it is said to have been brought by the Servian Archbishop Saba to Karyais, the chief town on Athos. Further details with regard' to it are given by Simon Wesmin, who died as a monk on Mount Athos in 1843, in the new edition (St. Petersb. 1865) of his collected writings published under the title" Collection of the Writings and Letters of Swjätogorez to his Friends about the holy Mount Athos, Palestine, and the Russian holy placer" (IL. 138). According to him the picture existed in the lifetime of the holy Saba himself (in the fourth year of the reign of Justinian) in his cloister, and he prophesied that one day a
And along with it a three-handed figure of the Madonna. (St. John of Damasius, who had taken the sacred images under his protection against the Emperor Leo, was reft of his hand by the Emperor's order; it was cut off, but grew again at night after he had prayed to the mother of God. Out of gratitude John gave the image silver