Depicting Religious Combat in the Thirteenth-Century Program at the Monastery of St. Anthony at the Red Sea

IF 0.8 1区 艺术学 0 ART
Heather A. Badamo
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The nave paintings at the monastery of St. Anthony were executed by local artists in the early thirteenth century, during a period of mounting concerns over the Arabization and Islamization of the Coptic community. The cycle, which depicts thirty-one images of military martyrs and monastic saints, stands out from contemporary programs owing to its structure and its inclusion of rarely depicted hagiographic episodes. The program juxtaposes early Christian martyrs and the great Desert Fathers of Egypt, demonstrating a preoccupation with sacred ancestry and lineage. Within the martyr cycle, the preponderance of warrior saints shown violently slaying traditional enemies of the faith (pagans, heretics, and a Jew) is striking, as most of these refer to miracles that have no textual analogue. To some extent, the presence of warrior saints can be explained within a local devotional context, in which the paintings served as the liturgical backdrop for a monastic community that regarded itself as the heir to the community founded by St. Anthony, who engaged in spiritual combat at the site where the monastery was constructed. Lost in this interpretation is how the images might relate to broader religious debates in the Islamic period. This study engages with a little-known corpus of Arab Christian texts and recent scholarship on the religious history of Egypt. I argue that the unusually violent iconography reveals an awareness of Islamic historiographic narratives and should be understood in light of east Christian hagiographic and polemical texts then circulating in Egypt. Stories in these works are characteristically structured to draw out similarities between Christianity and Islam as a step toward staking out exclusive claims to religious truth and Christian preeminence. The unusual cycle provides evidence of how Coptic Christians employed paintings to fortify the faith.
描绘13世纪红海圣安东尼修道院的宗教斗争
圣安东尼修道院中殿的画作是在13世纪早期由当地艺术家完成的,当时人们对科普特社区的阿拉伯化和伊斯兰化日益感到担忧。该循环描绘了31个军事烈士和修道院圣人的形象,由于其结构和包含很少描绘的圣徒故事,在当代节目中脱颖而出。该节目将早期基督教殉道者和埃及伟大的沙漠之父并列,展示了对神圣祖先和血统的关注。在殉道者的循环中,战士圣徒的优势表现为暴力杀死信仰的传统敌人(异教徒,异教徒和犹太人)是惊人的,因为大多数这些都是指没有文本类似的奇迹。在某种程度上,战士圣徒的存在可以在当地的宗教背景下得到解释,在这种背景下,这些画作为修道院社区的礼拜背景,这些修道院社区认为自己是圣安东尼创建的社区的继承人,圣安东尼在修道院建造的地方进行精神战斗。在这种解释中,人们忽略了这些图像与伊斯兰时期更广泛的宗教辩论之间的关系。本研究涉及鲜为人知的阿拉伯基督教文本语料库和最近关于埃及宗教历史的学术研究。我认为,这种不寻常的暴力图像揭示了对伊斯兰历史叙事的认识,应该根据当时在埃及流传的东方基督教圣徒传记和辩论文本来理解。这些作品中的故事以其独特的结构来描绘基督教和伊斯兰教之间的相似之处,作为对宗教真理和基督教卓越地位的独家主张的一步。这种不寻常的循环为科普特基督徒如何利用绘画来巩固信仰提供了证据。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.50
自引率
25.00%
发文量
8
期刊介绍: The Newsletter, published three times a year, includes notices of ICMA elections and other important votes of the membership, notices of ICMA meetings, conference and exhibition announcements, some employment and fellowship listings, and topical news items related to the discovery, conservation, research, teaching, publication, and exhibition of medieval art and architecture. The movement of some material traditionally included in the newsletter to the ICMA website, such as the Census of Dissertations in Medieval Art, has provided the opportunity for new features in the Newsletter, such as reports on issues of broad concern to our membership.
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