Icons from Svaneti in the context of Byzantine painting

A portion of the icons among the ecclesiastical antiquities of Svaneti now kept in museums at Mest'ia and Ushguli, as well as in churches, display the Byzantine context particularly vividly. Most of these icons have their closest parallels in the Treasury of the St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. Among them the staurotheke of Svipi Tskhumari and a group of icons from Lekhtagi are especially interesting, because they prove the presence of a Georgian icon-painting workshop in the monastery, the production of which makes the Sinaitic collection particularly important for Byzantine and Georgian art history. From the Early Christian period to the fifteenth century, the Georgian clergy considered the monastery erected at the site of the Burning Bush to be one of the most appropriate places for worship. The reason for this is that the evidence of this preference is provided by the hundreds of Georgian manuscripts, as well as yet-uncounted number of icons kept in the Sinai monastery with either bilingual (Greek-Georgian) or just Georgian texts. Comparative analysis of the Svanetian artifacts among the Sinaitic icons shows that the former come from the eleventh to the thirteenth century and are inspired by the best known and most distinguished pieces of the Sinai treasury. None of the Svanetian icons, however, is an exact replica of an original. Each one represents a freely and creatively treated prototype, thus displaying many iconographic and stylistic features characteristic of Georgian art. Comparative research concludes, also, that, while some of the Svanetian-Sinaitic icons were painted on Sinai and brought to Georgia, others were produced in Svaneti under the influence of examples conveyed from Sinai.