The Coptic Museum ,part 1
The Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt
The Coptic Museum in Cairo has been closed for some time for remodeling, but we are now celebrating its recent reopening, a welcome addition to Old Coptic Cairo. It is located in the heart of Coptic Cairo.
Christianity has a long history in Egypt, and there continues to be a significant population of Christians in Egypt today. Besides the truly Egyptian heritage of Coptic Christians, there are also Roman Catholics, as well as a number of Protestant sects. Christianity spread in Egypt during the 2nd century in Egypt, just after and indeed during the Roman pagan period, and it became the dominant religion in Egypt up until the Arab invasion in 641 AD.
Christian art, specific to the Coptics of Egypt, began to emerge around 300 AD. Though Christianity marked the end of the Pharaonic period in Egypt, and even though many traditions from that more ancient religion were carried over to become a part of not only the Christian faith in Egypt, but later even the Islamic faith, the art in form, style and content was very different from those earlier times.
We can identify principally three reasons that Egyptian art made such a radical change. First of all, art was no longer such an imperial effort of the ruling elite, formalized according to the dictates of a small minority. The second reason is that Christianity delivered a very different message than that of the former pagan religion, and the art indeed changed to deliver this message. Finally, the social origins of Coptic art is perhaps best characterized as folk art. While there were certainly some professional artists centered mostly in Alexandria, at first, most of the Christian artists were local folk who did the best with their undertaking as they could.
One interesting difference is that, by around 300 AD, three-dimensional art seems to have almost completely disappeared in Egypt, at least in the form of statuary. The last free standing sculptures in Egypt were those of Roman emperors, but the sculptures of the early Coptics, irregardless of the material used, were engaged, consisting more of an exaggerated raised relief.
They usually faced the viewer directly, but they could also be half turned to one side. Over the centuries, these figures became flatter and more like conventional relief. This shift from three-dimensional representations probably also affected two-dimensional art. In traditional Pharaonic art, figures were most frequently represented in a combination of profile and frontal views, but Coptic art abandoned this old formula and turned the figure around to face the viewer. It is worth noting that much of this sculpture was originally coated with painted plaster which would have shown many details that are now gone.
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part 1,
The Coptic Museum
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