By Nora Hamerman
Special to the Herald
(From the issue of 6/23/05)

The Roman Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29, honoring the two apostles who brought the Gospel of Christ to the Jews and Gentiles respectively, and died as martyrs.

The day’s Gospel reading tells of Christ’s words to his disciple Simon, renaming him Peter and promising that upon that rock—the literal meaning of Peter—He will build His church. "I will give you the keys of the kingdom, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

Peter’s symbol, the twin golden keys of Paradise, appears in a unique position hanging around the apostle’s neck, in the large "Icon of St. Peter" that belongs to the Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University’s research center for Byzantine studies in Washington, D.C. But while Dumbarton Oaks is building a new library and planning new galleries, the icon, considered the finest in any American public collection, will be accessible to a larger public at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, along with 16 other medieval treasures from Dumbarton Oaks.

The Walters agreed to help store the precious objects for 24 months in a climate-controlled environment on condition that they could be "stored" in their public galleries, especially in the third floor octagon where Byzantine and Ethiopian art is displayed.

We usually think of an icon, explains Walters Art Museum director Gary Vikan, as an abstract religious portrait in egg tempera on a gold covered board (like the "St. Peter"). Yet it is not the medium or size that makes a work an icon, but rather, how it is used. Icons are devotional images. They deserve special respect because the holy image is believed to literally share in the sanctity of the person whose likeness they bear.

In the act of Christian veneration, Vikan states (in "Icon," an excellent DVD available at the museum shop), the icon disappears as an object. It is transformed into a window through which the worshiper gazes into heaven. Even more than that, it is heaven’s window into our world, through which Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints intervene into human life.

"St. Peter" would likely have hung on an iconostasis, the screen of icons that separates the nave from the altar in an Orthodox church, opposite a similar image of St. Paul.

The panel is a masterpiece of the Macedonian Renaissance of the 14^th century. As the eastern Roman Empire (later dubbed "Byzantine") with its capital in Constantinople shrank under the Turkish onslaught, Byzantine art enjoyed a final flowering in the remaining provinces.

Most unusually, a high number of Macedonian icon makers signed their works. Even without a signature, the Dumbarton Oaks "St. Peter" with its rich blue and green colors, the vigorously painted furrows of the face and deep shadows on the body, and the blazing eyes, shows an emotionally intense personality. The saint’s head is turned, yet we see both ears—an indicating that the saint "listens" to prayers of supplicants nearing the iconostasis.

Dumbarton Oaks has benefited from Harvard’s Mideast excavations to gather one of the world’s foremost Byzantine collections. Most of the Walters objects were acquired a century ago by William and Henry Walters, Baltimore millionaires. The treasures of these two great Byzantine collections mean even more when seen together.

For example, delicate ivory carvings, such as a Virgin and Child of the "Hodegetria" type (where Mary shows Christ to the people) or the "Dormition of the Virgin," one of the most important Orthodox feasts, can be appreciated all the more when the Walters example is installed near a similar piece from Dumbarton Oaks.

The Walters Art Museum’s 7^th century liturgical silver vessels from Syria (one of only four such sets in the world) are displayed on a kind of "altar." Its frontal is made up of stone plaques that show two deer drinking from a stream. The two panels came from a baptistery and belong, respectively, to the Baltimore Museum of Art and Dumbarton Oaks. Together with the silver trove, they form an ensemble that can take us back, in imagination, to a Eucharist of the first millennium.

Open Wednesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the Walters Art Museum at North Charles and Centre Street is one of only a few museums worldwide to present a comprehensive history of art over 55 centuries. The galleries are designed to welcome visitors into an ambience that evokes their original setting, such as a church, unlike the sterile rooms of many larger museums. To travel to Baltimore, the premier Catholic city in America, to view sacred art at the Walters is as much a religious pilgrimage as an esthetic experience.