Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues

chapter 12 Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues

Claire Bosc-Tiessé

1 Some Historiographical Trends

The Christian Church established itself in Ethiopia during the fourth century, and one can suppose that it stimulated a movement of textual copying, the importation or manufacture of vestments and liturgical objects, the con- struction of churches and perhaps the creation of paintings. Under Coptic authority until the twentieth century, this Church developed specific charac- teristics. While the remains of Aksumite-era churches have been excavated, there remains nothing from the late antique period in terms of monumen- tal paintings. Members of the family of the Prophet Muhammad in exile in Ethiopia are reported to have seen ornaments in the interior of the cathedral of Aksum, which would have occurred in the seventh century, but what remains to us for study are the illuminated Gospel books of the monastery of Abba Gärima. It is thus easier to trace what medieval Christian Ethiopia inherited from the Aksumite era in architecture than in painting. It bears mention that all the surviving artistic productions of the medieval Christian kingdom con- cern the religious sphere, including representations of royalty which exist only in this context. Some efforts to survey the field have been made, in coffee-table books au- thored by scholars, in the introductory essays to exhibition catalogs or in some entries related to art history in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica from 2003 forward. That said, no analytical synthesis of medieval Ethiopian art history – recall- ing that the Ethiopian medieval area also extends over part of the territory of present-day Eritrea – has yet been written. Such a synthesis cannot, of course, be achieved in the limited space of this essay, whose principal aims are to provide an overview of the research conducted to date on some of the major forms of medieval Ethiopian art (including architecture), to bring into discussion the available evidence in order to elucidate some of the methodological and inter- pretive issues it raises, and to sketch out different approaches and new direc- tions. While iconographic analyses have generally predominated in the field and will be duly treated, this presentation focuses more on an approach that

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_013 Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia 323 seeks first to anchor objects and monuments in time – at least, where abso- lute dates are elusive, in a relative chronology or phasing, as has recently been done for the site of Lalibäla, for icons, and for some architecture, and remains a desideratum for wall paintings – before further iconographic analysis.1 This suggests a historical-anthropological perspective considering the object’s con- ditions of creation and transmission (formal and material2 as well as political, social, economic, and religious) with, in prospect, a better understanding of visual culture in its socio-political context.3 The study of Ethiopian Christian visual art, though begun in the nineteenth century and rather more developed than scholarship on other forms of artistic creation in Ethiopia, is nonetheless still in its infancy.4 The pioneering scholars of the first half of the twentieth century worked with a small sample, and therefore a very incomplete view, of the extant artworks. Interest in Ethiopian pictorial productions began only from the end of the nineteenth century when Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge published the first essay on Ethiopian painting in 1898, in the introduction to his edition and translation of the Life of Saint Mäba‌ʾa Ṣǝyon.5 He knew Ethiopian painting above all through what British troops had brought back from the sack of Mäqdäla – transferring to England a large part of what the troops of Tewodros had themselves pillaged from Gondär, the royal city of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and thus principally manuscripts of that period. Following Budge, Carlo Conti Rossini

1 François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Rock-cut stratigraphy: sequencing the Lalibela churches,” Antiquity 84, 326 (2010): 1135–1150; Claire Bosc-Tiessé and Sigrid Mirabaud, “Une archéologie des icônes éthiopiennes. Matériaux, techniques et auctorialités au XVe siècle,” Images re-vues. Histoire, anthropologie et théorie de l’art 13 (2016); Mario Di Salvo, The Basilicas of Ethiopia. An Architectural History (London, 2017). 2 That means not only the analysis of the materials, quite few (for a summary see Claire Bosc- Tiessé and Sigrid Mirabaud, “An Archaeology of Ethiopian Icons from the Fifteenth Century and A Reappraisal of Ferē Ṣeyon’s Work. Cross-Disciplinary Inquiries into the Collection of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Ethiopian Museums [IES, november 2013], ed. Ahmed Hassan Omer [Addis Ababa, forthcom- ing] but the understanding of the whole technological process. 3 The bibliographic selection, though certainly incomplete, will hopefully provide a point of entry for those who would like to investigate further. 4 For an overview of the historiography that needs to be extended and revised but could however still be used as basis, see Stanisław Chojnacki, Major Themes in Ethiopian Painting. Indigenous Developments, the Influence of Foreign Models and their Adaptation from the 13th to the 19th Century (Wiesbaden, 1983), 22–37; Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “A Century of Research on Ethiopian Church Painting: A Brief Overview,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 52, 1–2 (2009): 1–23. 5 Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge ed. and trans., Lady Meux Manuscript n° 1. The Lives of Mabâ’ Ṣĕyôn and Gabra Krĕstôs. The Ethiopic Texts Edited with an English Translation and a Chapter on the Illustration of Ethiopic Mss. (London, 1898), XI–LXXXIII.