"Where the world did not walk" : the desert as sacred space on the Klimax painting at Sinai

How did medieval art frame the desert as a sacred space? The twelfth-century Klimax panel, today at St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, offers insight into this question. Inspired by John of Sinai's Klimax (or Ladder), the work depicts monks in a cosmic struggle unfolding in the desert. It has long been associated with a site-specific "Sinai style", even as a depiction of the St Catherine's surround itself. This essay reconsiders the relationship between both the painting and John of Sinai's text, as well as the desert landscape. It shows that the work is a product not of Sinai but of Constantinople, and that it was meant to serve as an encomium of a monastic founder from the city. The work's initial audience were urban monks who likely never engaged in monasticism in the desert. Why, then, did the panel pose so anachronistic adepiction of desert monasticism? The painting was not just encomiastic but also exemplary: the desert's vast space served as a meditative model for the monastic mind.