This very generously and beautifully illustrated volume is intended for both specialists and general readers and will give great pleasure to all those with an interest in the vita and the study of St Nicholas of Myra in Lyceum, a much-loved, almost universal saint equally revered in Byzantium, in the Slav and particularly Russian world, and in the Catholic west, where his relics now rest, in Bari, in southern Italy. This collection of articles on ‘The good helmsman’ is concerned with various aspects of the veneration of St Nicholas, grouped under the three headings of hagiography, hymnography and iconography. The basis of this collection is a conference held in Bari in 2007 under the auspices of Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk, now patriarch of Moscow. Most of the articles are by Russian, Moscow-based researchers, but work done in Italy, Bulgaria and the USA is also included. The first hagiographic section covers studies of various literary accounts of the works and miracles attributed to St Nicholas and concentrates on analysing the historical and archaeological evidence which they offer. Every article is amply illustrated by photographs and sketches of sites. A. Y. Vinogradov attempts to differentiate between hagiographic and archaeological records of the archbishop of Myra and how they affect Greek hagiographic tradition. Gerardo Cheffari studies early, pre tenth-century Latin sources of writing on St Nicholas. Climentina Ivanova (Bulgaria) does the same for Balkan Cyrillic texts and I. I. Makeeva (Moscow) for early Slavonic texts. The second section is the shortest with five articles on hymnology dedicated to St Nicholas, among which it is worth noting S. A Cherkasova's study of Russian hymnography on the translation of the relics of St Nicholas to Bari, an act of ‘relics-kidnapping’ by Venetian merchants in the eleventh century that the Church in Byzantium refused to accept. The third and longest section, on the iconography of St Nicholas, is very fully illustrated with beautifully reproduced colour photographs from St Catherine's monastery in Sinai, from Greece, Russia and Italy. The articles selected cover the various geographical and stylistic sources of the saint's iconography. Every article in this collection is followed by a short summary, for the most part in English but with a few in German or Italian. In many cases the idiomatic quality of the English could be much improved: St Nicholas, the miracle worker becomes ‘the miracle maker’.
As in the hagiography the iconography follows a geographical distribution. Nancy Patterson-Shevchenko (USA) gives a clear, detailed description of the evolution of the icon of St Nicholas in Byzantium. Her summary concludes with a short definition of the saint's cult: ‘This extraordinarily popular saint was not a martyr, nor was he a theologian … or a major source of healing. What he did do … was to step in … to restore justice and order for the individual struggling to survive.’ A scruffy immigrant once came to the Russian cathedral in London, demanding to see ‘Nikola, our saint’. He was not interested in any icons of Christ or His Mother, but only in ‘Nikola, who looks after us poor beggars’. Patterson-Shevchenko is followed by Michele Bacci's Italian perspective, which usefully complements the Byzantine overview. Valentino Pace, in a longer than usual summary, takes issue with some of his colleagues’ readings. A. V. Ryndina makes an unusual contribution in a study on ‘The Bari source of the provenance of Russian carved icons of St Nicholas’, sculpted images which contradict the prevailing strict iconographic canon and represent three-dimensional portraits. Apart from an essay on post-Byzantine Cretan icons by Maria Vassilaki, all the remaining articles deal with various aspects of Russian iconography of the saint. Eva Haustein-Bartsch describes an unusual, rare circular icon of St Nicholas, kept at the Recklinghausen museum. N. V. Zadorozhny and I. A. Shalina deal with the so-called Mozhaisk icons of the saint on which he is portrayed with a sword and holding a model of the city of Mozhaisk whose plea for protection he answered. In a second article on early Russian iconography I. A. Shalina describes some remarkable representational ‘portrait’ icons of the saint, whose intercessionary humanity appears to inspire the icon painter more forcefully than the typical, stylised evocation of the holy person.
The editor presents this volume as one intended for both the specialist and the general reader. It is however difficult to see how it can fully satisfy two such different categories of reader. The articles are detailed and equipped with meticulous footnotes from which a whole bibliography could be extracted. They are essentially descriptive and will give much pleasure to all those interested in the attractive and popular figure of St Nicholas of Myra. Perhaps this is inevitable since St Nicholas was a philanthropic saint, not one of the great teaching theologians of the early Church, whose works give rise to analysis and polemic.
