Monastic visions: wall paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea

Abstract

An ancient church in the Coptic Monastery of St Antony at the Red Sea contains a unique cycle of 13th-century wall paintings. They constitute by far the most complete and best-preserved iconographic programme of Christian paintings to come from mediaeval Egypt. Ignored for centuries because they were covered with soot and overpainting, these compelling images have recently undergone conservation. This volume reproduces the cleaned paintings. It also describes and analyzes their amalgam of Coptic (Egyptian Christian), Byzantine and Arab styles and motifs as well as the religious culture to which they belong. In 1996, funded by the United States Agency for International Development and at the request of the Monastery of St Antony, the Antiquities Development Project of the American Research Center in Egypt began the conservation of the paintings in the church. The paintings revealed by the conservators are of extremely high quality, both stylistically and conceptually. While rooted in the Christian tradition of Egypt, they also reveal explicit connections with Byzantine and Islamic art of the 12th and 13th centuries. Some paintings can even be dated back to the 6th or 7th century. The contributors to this book - who include art historians, conservators, historians, an archaeologist and an anthropologist - discuss the significance of these revelations and place the church and the paintings within the artistic and historical traditions of both Coptic Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean region in the Middle Ages.

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