The transfiguration at Shivta. Retracing early Byzantine iconography

Abstract

The Transfiguration constitutes one of the most important events in the New Testament. Yet, only few pre-iconoclastic examples of the Transfiguration scene have survived: S. Apollinaire in Classe, Ravenna, St. Catherine Monastery, Sinai and Porec in Istria, each has its unique iconography. Therefore, scholars have concluded that the Transfiguration scene became widespread only after the iconoclastic controversy. We aim to show, that Transfiguration scene in Shivta, an early Byzantine settlement in the Negev desert, allows a glimpse into the early Christian iconography of the well-known scene, providing a missing link to its development in the post-iconoclastic period.

Christ’s face revealed at Shivta: an Early Byzantine wall painting in the desert of the Holy Land

“…We examined the Shivta churches’ main features to reconstruct the site’s historical trajectory in the context of understanding the Byzantine collapse in the Negev Desert (Tepper et al 2015, 2018). We documented the extant artwork depicting the transfiguration of Christ on the walls of Shivta’s southern church (Linn et al 2017; Maayan-Fanar 2017).

Figure 1Plan of Shivta, with the location of its three churches shown (site plan amended from Hirschfeld 2003: fig.

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