Egyptian Spoils
The Treasures of Coptic Art: In the Coptic Museum and Churches of Old Cairo
by Gawdat Gabra and Marianne Eaton-Krauss
American University in Cairo Press, 2007
(284 pages, $49.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Mike Aquilina
Egypt’s native Christian community, the Copts, trace their origins to the apostolate of St. Mark the Evangelist. Long marginalized by the Muslim majority, they still cling tenaciously to their ancient culture, which finds expression in distinctive and beautiful art—art all but unknown in the West.
The Treasures of Coptic Art includes hundreds of color images, well photographed to highlight even the small details. The text is written by Gawdat Gabra, former director of Cairo’s Coptic Museum, and Marianne Eaton-Krauss, a specialist in pharaonic art at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities.
The editors use the term “art” broadly, to include decorated items from everyday life, like combs, lamps, flasks, jewelry, dishes, keys, and children’s toys. Egypt’s desert climate has preserved a remarkable number of artifacts that could not have survived in other, damper places: textiles like tapestries, vestments, and carpets; wood carvings; papyrus manuscripts; and, of course, devotional icons and wall paintings. They’re all in this book, alongside the more durable media, like sculpture and architecture.
Influential Art
The ancient Copts were aware of their native heritage—the art of the Pharaohs—but they also drew from other influences: Hellenistic, Jewish, Roman, and even Indian. The port of Alexandria was the mercantile and intellectual hub of the ancient world; people of all nations converged there and left their marks on the arts.
Egypt’s Christians experienced their greatest freedom in the three-century interlude between Roman persecution and Muslim invasion, and many of the works included in this book come from that period. “Coptic monuments never enjoyed the patronage of emperors, kings, rulers, or sultans,” write the authors. “In the absence of court patronage, the artistic heritage of the Copts [was] expressed in monasteries and churches.” Much of the art is in the folk idiom.
The varied influences are easy to spot. Like their forebears in the age of the Pharaohs, the Christian Copts favored the brighter hues in the palette. Like the later Byzantines, they rendered proportionally oversized eyes, ears, and foreheads, to suggest prodigious spiritual senses.
Coptic icons, however, are often simpler and less ornate than their Byzantine counterpart. Facial expressions tend to be softer, and the figures are usually, of course, darker-skinned. Overall, they have a more “primitive” and even naïve quality, as one might find in the folk paintings of the American South or the self-consciously primitivist works of Edward Hicks or Henri Rousseau.
The illustrations alone tell of the minute particulars of Coptic devotion. Carvings give evidence of the early devotion to the Blessed Virgin, St. Michael the Archangel, and especially the Holy Family, whose sojourn in Egypt is recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. There is a great multitude of portrayals of Coptic saints, most of them monks and nuns of the desert, portrayed in the robes of their habit, with the characteristic wide-eyed frontal stare.
Mike Aquilina is vice president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (www.salvationhistory.com) and a general editor of The Catholic Vision of Love catechetical series.
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