[Abstract:] 'St Matthew the Apostle in Iconography relating to Aethiopia: an historical exploration of the scenes, personalities and original sources', ASAUK, Biennial Conference 2012, 'Art in Eritrea and Ethiopia' (Leeds University Center for African Studies/LUCAS) Leeds, England (original) (raw)

IMAGES AND ICONOLATRY IN CHRISTENDOM, A POST-MODERN APPROACH

This article is primarily concerned with the question of understanding of notions and phenomena such are idolatry, iconolatry, and image in the framework of religious culture in European and Levant history from classic – antique age until late modern times. Since the topic is broad, the article is composed as a short discussion about main ideas and problems connected to the understanding and the interpretations of the notion of idolatry and images that were and are presented in public and scholar discourse. Theoretical basics for his article were taken from the work of several prominent post-modern scholars and researchers of scientific and academic fields of visual culture and art history such as Hans Belting, Michael Baxandall, David Freedberg, Peter Burke. In addition to this, the semiotic approach, as well as theory of media and communication was also engaged in the analysis conducted in the article. Keywords: Images, Christianity, cult, object, icons, visual

Space, Time, and Power in an Ethiopian Icon, ca. 1500

in: The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art, ed. by Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porras , 2024

In the early 1970s, museum curators in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, purchased a small icon from the city's antiquarian market (Figure 6.1.1). Against a vibrant background of red and green, it shows an encounter between two saints-St. George and abba Gäbrä Märʿawi. While the former is second in popularity only to the Virgin Mary in Ethiopian icon painting, the latter is an obscure 14th-century saint from the northern region of Tǝgray. The icon's style and inscriptions allow for it to be dated to the late 15th or early 16th century. Indeed, it is a prime example of Ethiopian painting of the period. Yet, questions about the work's provenance and context seem almost impossible to answer. Who painted the icon? For what purpose was it created? Since Ethiopian patrons of the period customarily donated religious works to specific monasteries and churches upon their completion, where was it placed, and for what reason? And most puzzling of all, why depict an encounter between these two saints-famous St. George and a virtually unknown local ecclesiastic? This essay seeks to offer a basic framework for making sense of this piece and others like it. Situating the icon in its art historical and historical background, I will argue that it was perhaps a provincial nobleman from the northern reaches of the Solomonic kingdom who commissioned it to heighten his standing at the Ethiopian royal court in a moment of political upheaval. By having an artisan portray these saints in a specific way and by donating it to a religious centre far from his home region, our patron would seem to have communicated two messages: his recognition of the Solomonic house's claim of descent from biblical and late antique kingship-and his own assertion of worldliness and proximity to kingly power in the late medieval Horn of Africa. A careful consideration of this work can, therefore, not only enrich our view on Ethiopian painting in the Middle Ages but it may also shine fresh light onto elite piety, patronage practices, and political dynamics among the Solomonic nobility at the turn of the 16th century.

MEDITERRANEAN ENTANGLEMENTS AS REFLECTED IN 15TH CENTURY ETHIOPIAN IMAGES OF THE VIRGIN MARY

Rassegna di studi etiopici, 2022

Starting from the 15th cent., Ethiopia experienced a large dissemination of Mari-an images in the medium of panel painting. Scholarship traditionally emphasized the ‘mixed’ or mélangé character of the earliest ‘icons’ produced in the country, where forms of local, Byzantine, and Western European origins seem to coexist. The pre-sent paper stresses some conceptual conundrums that still underlay our understand-ing of ‘hybridity’ in arts. Can the combination of forms found in Ethiopia be de-scribed as the outcome of some artists’ or their donors’ intentional promotion of an eclectic aesthetics? Or else, are we dealing with the interpenetration of Latin and Greek motifs characterizing the icons produced on Crete and the Venetian Stato da mar during the late 14th and 15th cent.? Some important works – including some of the panels attributed to Fǝre Ṣeyon, Nicolò Brancaleon, and other anonymous paintings – are analysed in the light of their connection with a large group of late 14th cent. icons which display a Byzantine Theotokos wearing Gothic-like garments and rendered in an intimate, animated relationship with her Son.

A preliminary catalogue of post-Byzantine Icons in late medieval Solomonic Ethiopia

Orbis Aethiopicus. Beiträge zur Geschichte, Religion und Kunst Äthiopiens XVII, eds. Walter Raunig and Asfa-Wossen Asserate, J.H. Röll Verlag, pp.189—227, 2020

Scholarship on Ethiopian art has long known about the existence of post-Byzantine icons dateable to the 15th and 16th century in Ethiopia. This article offers up a preliminary catalogue of all post-Byzantine icons documented as present in late medieval Ethiopia. It reveals that their number had hitherto been significantly underestimated in scholarship: instead of a mere handful, some twenty-nine post-Byzantine icons dateable to the 15th and early 16th century are attested in both the material as well as the written record. The vast majority of these objects was produced in the Eastern Mediterranean; most can be located in date and time as present in Ethiopia before 1530, and thus the wars between the Solomonic Christian kingdom and Sultanate of Adal the second quarter of the 16th century.

THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN ICONOGRAPHY IN THE VI-VII CENTURIES

Icoana Credinței, 2024

The II-III centuries represented the period of the birth of Christian sacred art through Christians imitating the custom of pagans, from whose ranks most of them came, to decorate their graves, sarcophagi or mausoleums with images and even by borrowing some pagan symbols and themes, to which they obviously gave a new, Christian meaning, to which, of course, exclusively Christian themes were added, most often of biblical origin, most of them having a narrative-historical character. In the 4th-5th centuries, under the careful supervision of the Church, a synthesis was made regarding the themes addressed, by abandoning some, by taking over others from the imperial imaginary, prevalence acquiring a dogmatic character, from the desire to express and through the mediation of figurative art, not only through the poetic, transposed into songs, the truths of faith formulated at the first four ecumenical synods, but also in terms of styles. In this second stage of the history of Christian sacred art, especially in the 5th century, as a result of the synthesis achieved in the capital of the empire between the two great artistic currents that manifested themselves in painting, the Hellenistic-Alexandrian and the Syro-Palestinian, was formed the Constantinopolitan painting school and the stylistic features specific to this school crystallized. The present study aims to point out the main characteristics and developments of Christian sacred art in the Byzantine Empire starting from the time of Emperor Justinian I until the outbreak of Byzantine iconoclasm.

The State of Early Christian Iconography in the Twenty-First Century

Studies in Iconography, 36, 2015, 99-134.

The survey discusses wall- and vault mosaics (Centcelles, Rotunda Thessaloniki), floor mosaics (Aquileia, Madaba, Petra), paintings, textiles, sculpture, sumptuary arts (silver, ivory), iconographical themes (martyrs, Christ, baptism, crucifixion), etc.