{"title":"Depicting Religious Combat in the Thirteenth-Century Program at the Monastery of St. Anthony at the Red Sea","authors":"Heather A. Badamo","doi":"10.1086/704516","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/704516","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1086/704516","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
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.