BUDAPEST, HUNGARY—Historian Szilard Papp of the Istvan Moller Foundation thinks that fragments of a fresco in a late fourteenth-century church ruin in Transylvania may be a medieval copy of The Navicella, an early fourteenth-century mosaic by Giotto di Bondone. The original artwork was installed above the entrance arcade of Old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The original was destroyed when the basilica was rebuilt in the seventeenth century, although three copies of the image, which depicts the Christian Christ walking on water before his apostles in a boat, are known to exist in France and Italy. Papp says a sketch of the mosaic must have made its way to Transylvania. “This is definitely the fourth,” he told the AFP. “It is astonishing that such a major work was reproduced in a small village church on the periphery of western Christianity at that time, so far from Rome,” he added. To read about an isolated medieval Christian settlement in the Middle East, go to "Hidden Christian Community."
