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RELIGIOUS UTTERANCES – art of faith introduces the reader to humanity’s historic relationship between art and faith. This daily series of articles examines the interlacing of art and faith from across the Anglican Communion. The title of the series, Religious Utterances, comes from systematic theologian Dr. Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu, whose work seeks “a recovery of humanity’s religious utterances through art.”
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RELIGIOUS UTTERANCES – art of faith
Fourteen in a series:
Theme: Restoration
Wall Painting Conservation at Dayr Anba Bishay, Sohag
[Philadelphia] Nine years ago, Temple art historian Elizabeth S. Bolman stepped into a decaying, sixth-century church at an isolated monastery near Sohag, Egypt, walked through the nave to the sanctuary and stared at its blackened walls. Beneath centuries of soot and varnish, she saw the dulled ghosts of paintings — magnificent paintings, covering almost every surface of the sanctuary.
“I was transfigured” she said. “I knew it was my destiny.”
Now, after nearly a decade of planning, fundraising, diplomacy and painstaking conservation, the fragile wall paintings of Dayr Anba Bishay — commonly known as the Church of the Red Monastery, perhaps the best-preserved and most complete original late-Roman painted church interior in the Byzantine world — are beginning to show their true colors and deliciously complex patterns again.
Almost half the church’s paintings have been brought back to life by Bolman’s 12-member international conservation team. Emerging from the sanctuary’s walls and columns are vivid motifs in pinks, greens, reds and yellows. The faces of Christ, the Virgin Mary, apostles, evangelists, prophets and angels in robes of lavender and orange look out from the niches in the sanctuary’s three lobes.
Art historians have long known that church interiors of the late Roman period were brightly colored. Contemporary accounts and a few surviving churches decorated with mosaics, a more durable medium, suggest that builders of the time used color and pattern to dazzle. Yet almost all of the paintings from churches built in the Mediterranean region in late antiquity have been lost.
“That’s why I was stunned when I first saw the Red Monastery Church,” said Bolman, an associate professor at Temple’s Tyler School of Art and an authority on Coptic and medieval art. “I recognized we had a missing link here.”
The rebirth of the Red Monastery’s wall paintings is paralleled by a rebirth of Coptic Christianity in Egypt, a nation that was predominantly Christian when the monastery was built. Although Islam quickly spread across the region after the Arab conquest in the seventh century, Egypt still has a vibrant Christian minority culture — a tribute, Bolman said, to the nation’s tradition of tolerance. Read the full story online here courtesy of Temple University.
Diagrams of the wall painting conservation process, 2002-2007, are available here courtesy of the Yale Egyptological Institute
Source: Temple University Office of News Communications, © 2007 Temple University.
On View: Photograph of the restored wall paintings of Dayr Anba Bishay — commonly known as the Church of the Red Monastery – by Temple University art historian Elizabeth Bolman.