A Thousand Words: St. Catherine’s Monastery

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART / CC0 1.0 UNIVERSAL

Built in the sixth century near the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, the Monastery of St. Catherine is named for the early Christian martyr, Catherine of Alexandria, whose relics made the site a popular medieval pilgrimage destination. The monastery, however, was originally built to commemorate key events from the time of Moses and the Exodus. It purportedly encloses both the burning bush (Exodus 3) and the well where Moses first met his wife, Zipporah (Exodus 2), and it is believed to sit at the feet of both Mt. Sinai and Mt. Horeb (identified by local tradition with two separate peaks), where Moses received the tablets of the law (cf. Exodus 31–34; Deuteronomy 9).

This stunning lithograph, which shows St. Catherine’s Monastery with the towering heights of Mt. Sinai in the distance, is based on a watercolor sketch dated February 11, 1839, by David Roberts, a prolific Scottish painter famous for his many works depicting sites in and around the Holy Land. In the 1840s, lithographer Louis Haghe produced a collection of more than 250 prints of Roberts’s work, with this image appearing in the third volume.