127 Remains of a Mural Painting of The

ARAM, 18-19 (2006-2007) 127-151. P.doi: FIGUERAS 10.2143/ARAM.18.0.2020725 127 REMAINS OF A MURAL PAINTING OF THE TRANSFIGURATION IN THE SOUTHERN CHURCH OF SOBATA (SHIVTA) Prof. PAU FIGUERAS1 (Ben Gurion University) Few sites in the present State of Israel are capable of arousing the emotions of a Christian archaeologist as do the remains of the three Byzantine churches of the ancient town of Shivta, located in the heart of the Negev desert. The town, which was known as Sobata in the Byzantine period,2 has remained practically intact since the time it was finally abandoned towards the end of the eighth century A.D. The first travelers to report on the remains of the mural painting I discuss here were the two distinguished British visitors to the site in 1914, the archaeologist C.L. Woolley and his young voyage companion T.E. Lawrence (later better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”). In their famous book The Wilderness of Zin, which includes a rather detailed description of the southern church, they paid attention to the fact that “the church was singularly barren of stone-carving; on the other hand it showed more traces than remained elsewhere of the tempera painting which must have been the commonest form of church decoration… In the southern apse alone could any coherent design be distinguished, and here the colours had faded under exposure to the light, most of the surface had been scraped away by iconoclasts, and rain-water had brought down lime from the upper ruins and left a thick white deposit over the whole wall-face. Only by wetting the stone were we able to make out and roughly to sketch the original painting. The subject was the Transfigura- tion” (Woolley – Lawrence, 1914-1915, 105). Ninety years have elapsed since the time of Woolley and Lawrence's description, but those traces are still visible, though who knows for how long (Fig. 1). Strangely enough, however, the remains of the mural painting have rarely been mentioned by other archaeologists who later on worked on the site or described this church. Arthur Segal did not report on them in any of his monographs on Shivta (Segal, 1983; 1988; 1988a), neither did the late Joseph Shereshevski, who described the church in some detail in his doctoral dissertation on the Negev settlements (Shereshevski, 1991). A very brief 1 Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheva (Israel). 2 The name was preserved in two documents from Nessana (Kraemer, 1958, 212-214, Pap. 75, and 226-233, Pap. 79), as well as in a variant from a manuscript of the story of Nilus from Sinai (Abel, 1924; Abel, 1935). 06-8819_Aram 18-19_07_Figueras 127 06-26-2007, 17:44 128 REMAINS OF A MURAL PAINTING OF THE TRANSFIGURATION mention of the painting’s remains was made by the late Fr. Bellarmino Bagatti in his book on the Christian villages of Judaea and the Negev, though he unfortunately mistook their location, attributing them to the central instead of the southern church. Neither did he recognize their subject, though he published three photos of the southern apse (Bagatti, 1983, 201, Tav 28). Only Abraham Negev mentioned the traces of a painting in a general article on Sobata, adding that Woolley and Lawrence recognized in them the Transfiguration scene (Negev, 1993). The photos I used in order to decipher and possibly reconstruct how the original painting could have looked, were taken recently, and from them we can realize how badly the remains are preserved today. The faint traces of painting, mostly in brownish red color, very little in yellow, appear as directly applied upon the pinky original ashlar, which is of local limestone (Fig. 2). On the whole structure of the three apses of this church there are no visible traces of lime or plaster having been applied to the stone, while such a plaster layer is quite evident on the main apse of the central church in the same town. I do not know if the colour of the mural painting had been applied directly to the stones, but this is the way it appears today to anybody visiting the site. A sim- ple explanation for this very unusual phenomenon would be that the remaining traces are not those of the mural painting which once decorated the apse. Rather, these colors could belong to a first and tentative sketch of the whole mural done by the painter before he produced the definitive painting. The latter was normally done on a thin plaster layer, either wet or dry, according to one of two well-known systems, the fresco and the secco. The plaster carrying the final painting might have not survived in our case, and most probably we only have the remains of the temporary sketch. However, if this is the case, it is rather puzzling that that sketch on the stone was done also for all the non- figurative parts of the decoration, including the tooth-pattern around and inside the small recess, today all in red, but once recorded as red and blue by Woolley and Lawrence. On the other hand, these same researchers explicitly stated that they found the whole apse covered with a thick layer of lime. They thought that the lime was deposited by rain-water from the upper ruins. Could not this layer of lime rather be the original lime background of the fresco, which did not retain the colours and has since disappeared altogether? It is also possible that, at a certain moment of history, an iconoclastic scraping away of the paintings occurred, as Woolley and Lawrence claimed, causing the total disappearance of the real painting. This phenomenon seems to be par- ticularly perceptible in the traces of the figure standing to the right of the mandorla or halo around the central figure of Christ (Fig. 3). I shall now try to describe the painting remains from an iconographic point of view. For this purpose comparison with other ancient representations of the 06-8819_Aram 18-19_07_Figueras 128 06-26-2007, 17:44 P. FIGUERAS 129 same scene are essential.3 Unfortunately, however, a very small number of representations of the Transfiguration has come down to us from the pre- iconoclastic period in the East. The most ancient and best preserved example is the famous one decorating the central apse of the sixth century church in the Sinai monastery of St. Catherine, donated by the emperor Justinian (Sotiriou, 1953; Forsyth, 1968; Forsyth-Weitzmann, 1971) (Fig. 4). In order to proceed in a systematic way, I will start with the best preserved part, which is the painting of the apostle John (Fig. 5), identified by the inscription of his name. a. The Greek letters…NNIC (Fig. 6) is what is left of the name identifying the prostrated figure in the middle of the lowest part of the painting. It stands for IWANNHC (written IWANNIC), John, the youngest of the three disciples of Jesus who are attending the scene of His Transfiguration. When compared with similar representations, we can also find the abbreviation IW (for IWANNHC) in connection with the prostrated disciple in the Belisirama church (Alti Kilise) of the 12th century, at Göröme in Turkey (Fig. 7). In the Sinai mosaic all the five persons depicted around Jesus are identified by their names written in Greek. In Shivta, however, only the name of John was written, or traces of it are preserved. A second identifying feature of this figure representing John in Shivta would be his lack of a beard, a detail characteristic of all other ancient Transfiguration scenes. However, we only guess that it was originally so here, as just a few colour stains have survived from the young disciple’s face. b. In its physical posture, one could say that the prostrated figure of John is typical of the Byzantine pictorial tradition, as we find it on many mosaics and murals, as well as on icons and miniatures. One example is the figure of peni- tent King David, from an illustrated folio of the well-known early 10th century Psalter from Paris (Lassus 1976, 139, fig. 100), which can be compared to our prostrated figure of John the disciple (Fig. 8). The same posture of the disciple in the middle is found in practically all representations of the Transfiguration scene. In Shivta, it is not clear whether the prostrated disciple is holding his face with his right hand, though traces of the latter are rather well preserved. Interestingly, in Sinai, it is the figure of Peter rather than John who is so depicted, prostrated in the central place and holding his face, which he turns to the viewer rather than to Christ (Fig. 9). This feature alone (but there are oth- ers) repudiates a direct dependence of the Shivta Transfiguration on the one in Sinai, or vice-versa. The reason for the peculiar appearance of Peter in Sinai might be the text of Luke’s narrative, where it is written, “Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep but kept awake, and they saw His glory” (Luke 9: 32). 3 I regret not having been able to consult the work by Ch. Ihm, 1960, Die Programme der christlichen Apsismalerei vom vierten Jahrhundert bis zur Mitte des achten Jahrhunderts, Wiesbaden. 06-8819_Aram 18-19_07_Figueras 129 06-26-2007, 17:44 130 REMAINS OF A MURAL PAINTING OF THE TRANSFIGURATION c. In Shivta, Peter is the figure appearing behind John, though no identifying name or any letters of it are preserved. The lowest part of his body is hidden behind the prostrated figure, but we must imagine him as kneeling down (Fig.

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