Art: Christians on the Nile

On clay fragments, in papyrus records —the words were everywhere: “Gone.” Battered by oppressive taxes and tormented by religious persecution, the Christian Copts (their name comes from an Arab corruption of the Greek word for Egyptian) slipped from the bulging cities of 5th century Egypt into the silent desert, well in advance of the convulsive social earthquakes that rent the New Age from antiquity.

They found new roots in their own experience as farmers, brickmakers and weavers. Monks flocked to new monastic communities from among the common people as the Copts grew further away from the mainstream Christian churches. In succeeding centuries, they developed their own Christian liturgy and a Christian art that eerily foreshadowed the religious paintings, illuminations and tapestries of medieval and Renaissance Europe.

A Paper-Doll Stare. Offering a rare opportunity to see this uncommon art, the Villa Hugel—formerly the mam Krupp estate in Essen, Germany—has assembled an exhaustive exhibition of Coptic art from private collectors and museums: some 625 works ranging from the Hellenic antecedents, of 3rd century Alexandria, to 20th century examples from Nubia and Ethiopia.

Almost from the start, the Copts rejected the Hellenic way of doing things. Their early life-size statues and full-face portraits are near copies of Greek models, but the cold formality is muted with familiar gestures and folk costumes. As the flight to the desert progressed, their vision became more provincial, and the classicism was discarded. Their sculpture grew smaller and more personal, painting became fragmentary instead of monumental. There is a childlike naivete in the coy games of god and goddess, the paper-doll stare of a saint, the back-patting of Christ and a monk (see color).

In the stone-fast monasteries, ability to paint and carve figures in lifelike proportion was forgotten, and faces began to take on fixed expressions of wonder, glee and terror. But “primitive” art is often closer to nature than the well-drawn, finely carved academy pieces of “high culture,” and despite their lack of textbook accuracy, the Coptic artists were expressing their real concern; they were painting, carving and weaving the material of their daily lives against the Christian vision.

Across the silent ages, these small treasures are the voices of a people both busy and devout: ivory angels carved on a comb, a double lamp in a twin-tailed bronze dove, a polka-dotted leather sandal, a rabbit nibbling round fruit on a woven wool square. Textiles—wall hangings for tombs, shirts and coats for the dead—form perhaps the highest level of Coptic art, and the hot, dry desert climate has preserved some of the best examples: representations of everyday occurrences, proud portrayals of heroic scenes, and obedient evocations of saints and holy acts.

A World Too Fragile. With the triumph of the Arabs in Egypt, the Copts were increasingly harassed and forced into lives of strict self-discipline in order to preserve their communities. Eventually, the pressures ground too fine, and the great tradition decayed as Copts found their world too fragile against the Islamic majority.

By the beginning of the 11th century, only the Nubian and Ethiopian colonies of Coptic culture were intact. The bright colors and striking patterns of the miniature paintings and manuscripts that they now make survive as the Coptic heritage, an art with the same mixture of delight with nature and commitment to religion as those earlier Christians of the Nile.