Christ Pantocrator (Sinai)

The Christ Pantocrator at Saint Catherine Monastery in the Sinai is a Byzantine icon painted in encaustic, hot wax pigment, on wood panel, dated to around the mid sixth century AD. It is the earliest known surviving image of Christ as Pantocrator, ruler of all, with the face divided asymmetrically to suggest two natures, human and divine, in one figure. The icon survived in large part because of its remote desert location, which spared it from the destruction of religious images during the Byzantine Iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries, when many comparable works in Constantinople were destroyed. It was heavily overpainted in the thirteenth century, and its true age was confirmed by conservators only in 1962. It measures about 84 by 45.5 centimetres and is believed to have arrived at the monastery as an imperial gift around the time the monastery was founded under the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/