Friday, January 18th, 2013
by David Brakke
On a Saturday in December 2012, as Egyptians went to the polls to approve or reject a proposed new constitution, I arrived in Cairo to meet my colleagues Eugene Rogers, who teaches Christian thought at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Caroline Schroeder, a fellow early church historian at the University of the Pacific. The next day we traveled south to Sohag, where we met up with Malcolm Choat, a papyrologist at Macquarie University. The four of us had traveled to this bustling city north of Luxor to visit one of the most significant surviving monuments from late ancient Christianity, the church of the Red Monastery. Thanks to a conservation project led by the art historian Elizabeth Bolman of Temple University as overall director, we were able to admire the most extensive painted church interior to survive from late ancient and early Byzantine Christianity. It is, simply put, a revelation.
© David Brakke
A door to the church on the northern side, with some surviving ornamentation from late antiquity.
In late antiquity the Red Monastery was part of a federation of three monasteries, two for men and one for women, which scholars usually call the White Monastery Federation, after the larger of the two monasteries for men. (“Red” and “White” are modern terms, based on the color of the surviving churches’ bricks.) Established by Pshoi in the middle of the fourth century, the Red Monastery probably became subordinate to the White under the leadership of Pcol, the founder of the White Monastery; the federation of three communities took definitive shape under Shenoute, who led it for some eighty years until his death in 465 CE. Shenoute directed the building of the church at the White Monastery, after which the smaller church at the Red was modeled. Although both churches partially survive, only in the Red’s church can one still see the sanctuary’s painted program almost entirely intact, thanks to mud-brick walls that covered most of it from some time in the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century.
Ten years ago a team of Italian conservators—directed by Adriano Luzi, Luigi De Cesaris, Alberto Sucato and Emiliano Ricchi—began the arduous and delicate task of cleaning paintings that had been obscured by centuries of accumulated smoke, soot, and dust. The U.S. Agency for International Development supported their work, through the American Research Center in Egypt. In the 1990s Bolman and the Italians had successfully completed a similar project on the thirteenth-century wall paintings at the Monastery of St. Antony; the breathtaking results of their work there can be seen in Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea, which Bolman edited and Yale University Press published in 2002.
The paintings in the Red Monastery church are much older than those at St. Antony: their (at least three) successive phases date to the sixth and seventh centuries. In a video made for an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier in 2012 and still available on YouTube, Bolman explains the significance of the church’s paintings and the nature of her and her colleagues’ work. Shortly before we arrived, their project came to its end.
The results of a decade of labor are extraordinary. The sanctuary of the Red Monastery church now requires the close attention (either in person or through the book that Bolman and her collaborators will soon publish) of all historians interested in the worship, art, architecture, spirituality, and monastic life of late ancient and early Byzantine Christianity—that is, of just about every church historian of the period. We can now see in vivid color “the jeweled style” that characterized the literature and art of late antiquity across the Mediterranean. These Egyptian monks did not praise God and contemplate his Word enclosed by drab grey or tan walls that reflected the monochromatic desert sand. Rather, they worshiped in a space sparkling with bright greens, pinks, and yellows, and populated with plants, animals, and a crowd of faces, including those of human beings, angels, and Christ himself.
The three semi-domes of the tri-conch apse feature monumental depictions of Christ, as an infant suckling at the breast of the Mother of God, as the incarnate Word, and as the triumphant returning savior, along with angels, the evangelists, and other biblical figures. Lower levels feature ornately decorated columns flanking niches that contain depictions of revered fathers of the monastic community (such as Pshoi, Pcol, and Shenoute) and prominent bishops of the Egyptian church (such as Athanasius, Cyril, and Dioscorus), as well as of prophets and martyrs. Around the niches plants send forth flowers, rams and gazelles run, and peacocks pose. Two columns feature dozens of paired human faces, gazing at one another. On a wall just outside the apse, a praying figure with Persian hair and boots, perhaps the church’s patron, welcomes the visitor to this lush and lively world.
It is characteristic of the jeweled style that the eye finds nowhere to rest, but roams around the walls and ceilings, delighting in the variety of the images and making connections among the figures and between individual elements and the larger program. Why are there animals in male-female and male-male pairs, sometimes with explicit genitals and sometimes without? Why do St. Stephen, the first martyr, and Theonas, the relatively obscure late third-century bishop of Alexandria, stare at each other across the southern conch? And how do all these relate to Mary and the Christs that look down at them from above? We can anticipate Bolman’s carefully researched answers to these and other questions in her forthcoming publications, but the church does not lend itself to definitive interpretations and final theological statements. Instead, it invites the continual play of the Christian imagination.
Although later phases of the painting look distinctively “Coptic,” Bolman has found that earlier phases find close parallels in places as far away as Milan, and the overall effect must have been characteristic of thousands of painted church interiors around the Mediterranean world. The huge White Monastery Federation, across the Nile from the major city of Panopolis, was no cultural backwater, even if modern-day Sohag does not receive many tourists. The Red Monastery Church provides a unique opportunity to get as close as possible to how a Christian of the seventh century would have experienced the apse of a painted church visually. The closest analogy that I can think of is what one can learn from standing in the reconstructed synagogue of Dura Europus in the National Museum of Damascus. Unlike that painted synagogue interior, however, this amazing church remains where it has always been. It is a special doorway to the past.
© Caroline Schroeder
The northern exterior wall of the Red Monastery church, which was constructed around 500 CE.
But what is the Red Monastery Church’s future? My colleagues and I were lucky enough to visit it just after the conservation team had departed and while Professor Bolman and the art historian William Lyster were still there to provide us access and to spend hours with us explaining their work and discussing the meaning of this rich visual environment. We are deeply grateful to them for what I can describe only as an early church historian’s dream come true. I hope that many of my colleagues will be able to experience this precious monument as I did, but the painted surfaces remain delicate, vulnerable to damage through even a small accident. After centuries of absence, a renewed community of Coptic monks has gathered around this ancient gem. It will be their responsibility, as well as that of the wider Coptic Orthodox Church, to find some balance between the church’s unparalleled status as evidence for the Christian past and its undeniable potential for fostering spiritual renewal in an uncertain present. In late December came word that the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization (ISESCO) will add the Red Monastery to its World Heritage List for the Islamic World, the first monument in Egypt to be so honored.