ИСТИНА

Beth Alpha and its famous VI c CE mosaics occupies a special place in the history of Jewish Art as well as of Byzantine Art. Discovered in 1928 and published in 1932 by E.L.Sukenik it had occupied until recently the place of one of the most characteristic images of Jewish Art of Late Antiquity. Among the striking features of the mosaic was the combination of the extensive and elaborate program and the extremely graphic, expressive and primitivistic, even grotesque style. Another unique feature of the mosaic – the added Bibical quotations that animate the scene of the Sacrifice of Isaac. The origins of the style can hardly be explained by the lack of professionalism, for these same artists Marianos and Aninas are known for their other more conventional mosaic in neighbouring Beth-Shean. The aim of my paper is to look at the style of the Beth Alpha mosaic as on a sort of experiment, in which artists had explored the problem of depicting the sacred. The methods used by the Beth-Alpha artist were never studied in detail. The style has no exact parallels in the Holy Land, but it had been noted by E.L.Sukenik that there is an obvious parallel here with the art of Christian Egypt, i.e. Coptic art with its bold expressionism. How can this comparison illumine our understanding today? The special bond between the image and the text also seems to be rooted in Egyptian tradition, where the text had developed out of image and preserved this connection. It appears, that in Beth Alpha the image becomes a special kind of text while the text acquires the qualities of the image. The usage of extant biblical quotations has few parallels among the mosaics of the Holy Land. It is exactly because the image is not enough that the text appears nearby. As such it is one of the brightest evidence of the profound transformation of culture, which took place in the first centuries of the CE., when culture became centred around the Text. The clash between classical and anti-classical concepts is evident in the majority of the mosaic panels found in the Byzantine Palestine (as was recently described by R.Talgam), but in Beth-Alpha we see testing the classical art to its limits and exploring the other means of expression, such as the equality between the text and the image. The linear, volumeless character of mosaics, the paradoxical use of colour and perspective create a feeling of conscious denial of naturalistic principles in order to convey the situation of encountering the sacred, of being a witness of the very moment of the Sacrifice of Isaac and the birth of the Chosen people. It reveals the biblical idea that there always is a lap between the image and the depth of meaning, which could be found in texts. For ages the notion of beauty was vital for producing the work of art. Now it is the idea of the presence of the sacred which becomes central for the artist. The only mean of conveying it is through changing the usual Greco-Roman aesthetic. During the presentation I am going to explore E.L.Sukenik’ idea of the Coptic origin of style of Beth-Alpha and suggest several other parallels to its style, found both in Egypt and in Ravenna.