East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Monastic visions, wall paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea, edited by Elizabeth S. Bolman ; photography by Patrick Godeau

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-289) and indexes

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Monastic visions

bibliography

46975187

edited by Elizabeth S. Bolman ; photography by Patrick Godeau

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

"An ancient church in the Coptic Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea contains a unique cycle of thirteenth-century wall paintings. They constitute by far the most complete and best-preserved iconographic program of Christian paintings to come from medieval Egypt. Ignored for centuries because they were covered with soot and overpainting, these compelling images have recently undergone conservation. This beautiful book reproduces the cleaned paintings for the first time. 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 twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some newly discovered paintings can even be dated back to the sixth or seventh century. The authors of 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."

St. Antony the Great and the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea, ca. A.D. 251 to 1232/1233 / Tim Vivian -- The Church of St. Antony: the architecture / Michael Jones -- The early paintings ; Theodore, "The writer of life," and the program of 1232/1233 ; Theodore's style, the art of Christian Egypt, and beyond ; Theodore's program in context: Egypt and the Mediterranean region / Elizabeth S. Bolman -- Reflections of the temporal world: secular elements in Theodore's program / William Lyster -- The khurus vault: an Eastern Mediterranean synthesis / Elizabeth S. Bolman and William Lyster -- Conservation of the wall paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea / Adriano Luzi and Luigi De Cesaris. Perspectives on the Monastery of St. Antony: medieval and later inhabitants and visitors / Gawdat Gabra --The handwriting on the wall: graffiti in the Church of St. Antony / Sidney H. Griffith -- Windows into heaven: icons in monastic life today / Maximous El-Anthony -- In the footsteps of the saints: the Monastery of St. Antony, pilgrimage, and modern coptic identity / Elizabeth E. Oram -- The coptic inscriptions in the Church of St. Antony / Birger A. Pearson