Rethinking Coptic art

Abstract

2. Grabar, for instance, posits complex relationships among Coptic, Byzantine, and Fatimid art. Oleg Grabar, “Imperial and Urban Art in Islam: The Subject Matter of Fātịmid Art,” in Colloque International sur l’Histoire du Caire (25 Mars–5 Avril 1969) (Cairo, 1969), 173–90. On Coptic art as a source for select motifs on the Cappella Palatina ceiling, see Jeremy Johns, “Muslim Artists and Christian Models in the Painted Ceilings of the Cappella Palatina,” in Romanesque and the Mediterranean: Patterns of Exchange across the Latin, Greek, and Islamic Worlds, c. 1000–1250, ed. Rosa Bacile (London, 2015), 59–89. He argues that Coptic artisans were not responsible for painting the ceiling, as argued earlier by Lev A. Kapitaikin, “The Twelfth-Century Paintings of the Ceilings of the Cappella Palatina, Palermo” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 2011). 3. For examples of this extremely important work, see Lucy-Anne Hunt, “Christian-Muslim Relations in Painting in Egypt of the Twelfth to Mid-Thirteenth Centuries: Sources of Wallpainting at Deir es-Suriani and the Illustration of the New Testament MS Paris, Copte-Arabe 1/ Cairo, Bibl. 94,” Cahiers Archéologiques 33 (1985): 111–55; LucyAnne Hunt, “The al-Muʿallaqa Doors Reconstructed: An Early Fourteenth-Century Sanctuary Screen from Old Cairo,” Gesta 28, no. 1 (1989): 61–77; Lucy-Anne Hunt, “Churches of Old Cairo and the Mosques of al-Qāhira: A Case of Christian-Muslim Interchange,” Since the nineteenth century, the art of medieval Egypt has been separated into two categories—Islamic and Coptic—and studied within different disciplines. The Islamic art of Egypt refers to the art, architecture, and ornament of successive Muslim dynasties: the Abbasids, Fatimids, Ayyubids, and Mamluks. Coptic art, in contrast, denotes the cultural production of the Coptic Orthodox Church, which formed the largest of several Christian communities in Egypt. Their art is primarily identified by its Christian content, comprising religious symbols, figural images, and narrative representations. The separation of Coptic and Islamic art into discrete categories posits civilizational divides and normalizes the omission of Coptic art from surveys and studies of Islamic visual culture. Such divisions hinder our understanding of Coptic and Islamic art, and their relationship to each other. Despite the growing interest in medieval contact zones, Coptic art remains little known outside specialist circles and has not benefited from the types of models that shape the study of medieval Spain. Nevertheless, we can identify two main approaches to studying the interrelations of Coptic and Islamic art. In the first, scholars posit Coptic art as a source of inspiration for the figural decoration characteristic of Fatimid art, exemplified by the ceiling of the twelfth-century palace