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.
2 pieces 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.
2 pieces 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.
12 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.
10 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.
2 pieces 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.
8 pieces 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
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Bari
Bishop of Myra in the fourth century, his relics reached Bari in 1087 and East and West have shared him ever since. After the Virgin, he is the saint with the most churches dedicated to him in the Orthodox world.
1 piece from this place
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Bethlehem
Every Nativity points to the same spot: the grotto of Bethlehem, where a fourteen point silver star has marked the floor for centuries. This panel does not copy a museum piece: it gathers the scene as the West prays it, with the star falling straight down upon the Child.
4 pieces from this place
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Moscow
The panel repeats the late Russian model of the Resurrection over the tomb, spread by the Moscow school from the seventeenth century onwards, blending the Greek icon with Western engraving. It is the Easter image presiding over Russian iconostases of that period.
6 pieces from this place
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Tenerife
Born a shepherd in Vilaflor in 1626, he crossed the Atlantic and founded in Guatemala the first school and the first convalescent hospital for the poor in the Americas. He is the first saint of the Canaries, canonised in 2002, and his cave at El Médano still receives pilgrims on foot.
2 pieces from this place
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Sea of Galilee
The scene is not painted at the moment of the miracle but at the moment of failure: Peter is already sinking and has already called for help. The icon always chooses the instant when something is decided, not the instant when something is displayed.
1 piece from this place
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Sebastea
He was a physician before he was a bishop, and he died in the persecution of Licinius at the start of the fourth century. His feast, the third of February, is one of the most widely kept in Spain, and in nearly every town throats are blessed and ring shaped cakes are handed out.
1 piece from this place
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Lourdes
The eleventh of February 1858. Bernadette was fourteen and gathering firewood. There were eighteen apparitions, and at the sixteenth the figure gave her name in the local dialect, not in French: that I am the Immaculate Conception.
1 piece from this place
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Calcutta
Canonised in 2016. This is not an icon in the strict sense and we are not going to call it one: it is a painted devotional portrait, with no tradition behind it, because of a twentieth century saint there are photographs and there is no need to invent a face.
1 piece from this place
