The evidence is overwhelmingly Greek. The panels are Greek in style, in materials, in composition, and in painting methods. The language too, in Egypt’s Fayyum under Roman rule, was Greek. The dedicatory inscriptions were in Greek, especially the very common “ep’agatho,” or “for a benefit.” Further, the religious ritual itself of employing paintings as “votive” or thank offerings was a Greek practice. Thus icons belonged not to the world of mummies, but to the world of Hellenistic art, the world of Apelles and Zeuxis. And the use of egg tempera in Egyptian panel paintings is fully a thousand years earlier than its use in the Italian Renaissance. Reinforcing the material evidence are important literary sources. Already in the second century, we have three independent literary accounts—two in Irenaeus and one in the Acts of John—that describe icons employed in Christian rites, in Rome, Asia Minor, and Egypt, some 500 years earlier than the earliest icons discussed by Brubaker and Haldon (Brubaker and Haldon 2011).

Syncretism

To understand the formalities of Christian icons it is essential to start with their pagan precedents. The single most important panel painting of antiquity is the Septimius Severus and Family, purchased in Egypt in 1932 by the Antikensammlung of Berlin. Excluded from Rondot’s survey as being non-Egyptian, simply a Roman portrait (Rondot 2013), this work is thoroughly Egyptian and profoundly religious in three ways: first, its iconography identifies the emperor with Serapis, the ancient god of fertility and rebirth. Second, it is a temple offering designated as anathema “untouchably holy” (papyrus Oxy.1449). The term derives from the Greek verb “anatithemi,” meaning “I dedicate, or I make an offering of something”; the presentation of an icon in church marked its dedication, referred to in the Second Council of Nicaea of 787 ce, precisely by this term. And third, it redefines the pantheon by the eradication of the younger divine prince Geta who was executed by his brother. The theological term “syncretism” is important in understanding the spiritual dimension that is essential to Late Antique art. The common Greek word “kerannumi” refers to mixing or blending ingredients, most frequently the diluting of wine with water, but in theology it is the correct term for the sharing of properties among the “divinities,” whether pagan or Christian. This is most strikingly illustrated by a panel depicting HarpocratesDionysus in the Cairo Egyptian Museum. The god’s right index finger to his lips identifies him as the child Horus, also called Harpocrates, who in myth is the child of Isis and Serapis and founder and protector of the royal Pharaonic line. In his left hand, however, he makes the very non-Egyptian gesture of grasping a large bunch of ripe grapes. This makes him Dionysus, a Greek god of Thracian origin, the god of the vine and horticulture.

1. Alexandrian theologians saw the affinity of the two gods and proposed their syncretism, so that the “combination god” could be worshipped as one dynamic deity. Syncretism also allowed the theologians of Alexandria to identify gods with the emperors of planet earth. McCann explains the divine connotations of Septimius Severus’ iconography, the separate “cork-screw” curls hanging over his forehead and his medium-length divided beard, which were copied from cult statues of Serapis in Alexandria (McCann 1968).
2. According to Greek and Roman law, if one deposited an offering for the god in a temple, it became legally the property of that god, and the temple staff had to record it and carefully preserve it. According to the distinguished papyrologist Bagnall, if the commissioning of imperial portraits in these nine minor temples was carried out the length of the Nile, as it is reasonable to expect, it would have amounted to about four thousand paintings (Bagnall 2009). In other words, there were plausibly thousands of examples denoting the syncretism of the Roman emperor with the Egyptian god Serapis.

The Triptych

The three-part folding icon is a new invention. In Early Christian art, statuettes of sacred figures, such as those carried about in the Egyptian naos shrine, play no role whatever. Christians preferred two-dimensional paintings, and the Sinai collection in Egypt has numerous pintle-hinged doors that have come detached from their triptych center panels (Weitzmann 1976). Triptych paintings were a way of theologizing to explore the implications of syncretism. Already in the second century, Irenaeus was familiar with a joining of Jupiter-Christ, of which the catacombs present examples. The triptych continues down the centuries with great success.

The Cult of Mary

Modern scholarship has tried to connect the cult of Mary to abstract and abstruse Christian dogma, crediting the introduction of the Marian cult to the bishops gathered at Ephesus in 431 ce who introduced the title of theotokos or “Mother of God” as they tried to explain the unity of natures in Christ. This theological explanation has recently been given a new twist by Pentcheva, who attributes the growth of Marian devotion to the success of her icon in the military defense of Constantinople (Pentcheva 2010). She has invented a succinct formula in which Mary embodied power rather than maternal tenderness. Neither does public veneration of Mary start with the Council of Ephesus, a common mistake of art historians and theologians alike. Re-examining the Gospel of Luke, theologians McGuckin and Maunder demonstrated that the gospel borrowed from a well-established Christian liturgy a litany of repeated invocations of “Blessed are you” extolling Mary’s fertility (McGuckin 2008).

The invention of the Marian cult was not the work of celibate clergy searching for terms for the mystery of the Incarnation, but the work of women, whose concerns were of an entirely different nature. They were the pressing and intimate female concerns of conception, birthing, lactation, and childrearing. These female concerns were also very important in the cult of Isis and Hathor, Aphrodite and Artemis, not to mention Harpocrates and Dionysus. It is often remarked that when Mary was given the title theotokos in 431, it was already in wide use for Isis. The many fertility images from the shrine of Abu Minas just outside Alexandria must be counted among the earliest images of Mary, their Christian character guaranteed by their find spot in the very popular Christian shrine and by their unique haloes. In these repeated images, the woman’s gesture to her swelling belly should be interpreted as an invocation of the blessing of Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, as recounted in Matthew, Luke, and the Protevangelium of James (Egypt, second century). The earliest surviving wood panel icon of Mary is a pregnancy image, the Louvre’s Annunciation icon, dated by Rutschovscaya to the fifth century (Rutschovscaya 2000). It should be noticed that early representations of Mary show her with a stool rather than a throne. While a regal throne for Mary has biblical authority in Luke 1:32, in which Mary’s Child is said to inherit through her “the throne of his father David,” the jeweled Pharaonic throne seen first at Sta. Maria Maggiore is borrowed from the Late Antique Isis. Another instance of syncretism is seen in the iconography of Mary nursing her Child. This was an activity for the privacy of women’s quarters, not for exhibition in public, and it was unthinkable that a woman would have her portrait painted doing so. This motif is not intended as a portrait motif but as a joining of Mary with the divine Isis nursing Harpocrates.

Early Iconography

In the course of the sixth century, icons went from being single, separate offerings to an assembly on the templon barrier around the altar. The evidence of this “icon architecture” in three churches of Constantinople is a major contribution of British archaeologists and a turning point in the history of icons, largely ignored. St. Artemios survives only in its literary source of the saint’s life, dated before 668 (but very likely mid-sixth century). The earliest physical remains of a Constantinople templon are the elements of a marble icon screen at the church of the martyr St. Polyeuktos, 520–527 (Mango and Sevcenko 1961).