The journey
An icon is not free illustration. It repeats a model that exists, that was painted once in a specific place and has been copied unchanged ever since. This is the map of where every piece in the catalogue comes from.
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Mount Sinai
The oldest surviving Pantocrator has been at the monastery of Saint Catherine, at the foot of Sinai, for fourteen hundred years. It survived the war on images because it was too far away for anyone to reach it.
1 piece from this place
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Vladimir
This gesture has its own name in the Christian East and one panel that fixed it for good: the one that travelled from Constantinople to Vladimir in the twelfth century and that the whole of Russia took as its own.
1 piece from this place
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Cappadocia
George was a Roman officer from Cappadocia, and his cult travelled from there to Lydda and then across the Mediterranean. He is patron of Catalonia, Aragon, Georgia, England and Moscow at once.
1 piece from this place
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Nazareth
The house where it happened lies under the basilica of Nazareth, and you can still go down to it. The icon does not depict a past moment: it sets it in front of you again.
2 pieces from this place
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Jerusalem
Just inside the Holy Sepulchre there is a slab of rose stone where tradition places this moment. Pilgrims kneel to touch it before they look at anything else.
3 pieces from this place
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Ephesus
The line on the book is from the gospel of John, and John wrote it in Ephesus, where he spent his final years. Of that city there remain a marble street and a ruined basilica.
1 piece from this place
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Rome
It is the oldest surviving Christian image, painted in the catacombs of Priscilla when Christ could not yet be shown openly. A shepherd with a lamb on his shoulders raised no suspicion.
2 pieces from this place
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Gethsemane
On the slope of the Mount of Olives eight olive trees still stand whose roots have been dated at more than two thousand years. They are, literally, the same trees.
1 piece from this place
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Paray-le-Monial
The devotion is born in a Burgundian convent in 1673 and spreads from there across half of Europe and all of Latin America. Few images have so precise a date of birth.
1 piece from this place
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Fatima
The sword comes from a sentence spoken to her by old Simeon in the temple when she brought the child to present him. The devotion as it is known today takes shape in Portugal in 1917.
1 piece from this place
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Constantinople
The brocade of the mantle and the crackled ground remember the imperial workshops of Constantinople, where gold was beaten so thin that a leaf weighed less than the air that moved it.
1 piece from this place
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Assisi
Assisi sits on an Umbrian hillside and can be seen whole from the plain. The son of a cloth merchant stripped in its square to give his father back his clothes, and everything else follows from that.
1 piece from this place
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San Damiano
The little church of San Damiano is a ten minute walk down from Assisi among the olive trees. She lived there forty years without leaving, and the wooden choir of her nuns is still in place.
1 piece from this place
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Syracuse
Lucy was from Syracuse in Sicily, and her name comes from lux, meaning light. Her feast falls on 13 December, which in the old calendar was the longest night of the year.
1 piece from this place
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San Giovanni Rotondo
He spent fifty years in a friary on the Gargano, in Apulia, and hardly ever left. Today it is the second most visited shrine in Italy and the whole town lives off those who climb to see him.
1 piece from this place
