Icon with St Peter
- Gallery: Room 40
- Culture: Late Byzantine
- Made in: Constantinople (?)
- Date: 1320 (circa)
- Object type: icon
- Materials: cedar wood; gold; linen; gesso
- Museum number: 1983,0401.1
- Museum: The British Museum
- Collection record: British Museum website
- Image © The Trustees of the British Museum, shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
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About this object
Before you is an icon titled "Icon with St Peter," dating from around 1320 and created in the Late Byzantine tradition, likely in Constantinople. The artwork portrays a bearded saint believed to be St Peter, looking to his right and dressed in a greyish blue tunic with an apricot pallium. He holds a scroll inscribed in Greek, reading: “Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul.” This quote comes from 1 Peter 2:11. The background is rich with gold leaf, set against a cedar wood panel, gessoed and lined with linen.
The icon shows stylistic traits closer to fresco painting than traditional Byzantine iconography, suggesting possible artistic influences from major church projects of the period, such as the Chora monastery in Constantinople. Its dimensions and design suggest it may have once been part of an iconostasis—perhaps among the first icons to fit into these towering screens that separated worshipers from the altar.
The piece itself was discovered during the restoration of a later 17th-century icon, and has since become an important historical artifact connected to Byzantine sacred art.
See it in person
Icon with St Peter is on display in Room 40 at the British Museum on Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, London — free to enter. Choose British Museum on audioguide.london and take a photo of it to hear this free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
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