Three saints: George, John of Damascus, Ephrem the Syrian. Part of a triptych 1325

This panel, likely painted at Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, depicts three saints with tempera and gold leaf on wood. The materials are conventional for the creation of icons, yet the hand-wrought nature of the object speaks to an interesting relationship between the artist and their materials. Painted with egg tempera, ground pigments mixed with egg yolk, the artist has built up layer upon layer to create luminous figures against a gilded ground. This is far from a slick mechanical process; rather, it’s an intimate and demanding one. The artist had to be deeply knowledgeable about the material properties of each pigment, and how they would interact when combined. The gold leaf itself would have required further labor to apply, burnished to a reflective sheen. It's not merely decoration, but an integral part of the icon’s visual language. The whole process reflects a slow, contemplative approach – a world apart from our own era of mass production, it challenges our contemporary separation of art and craft.