Art
Smith, Karen Sue
JESUS & MARY IN ETHIOPIA A DISTINCTIVE CHRISTIAN ART he first exhibit of Ethiopian Christian art ever to tour the United States (jointly sponsored by participating galleries and InterCultura,...
...some are miniatures...
...The magnificent illuminated books on display, however, are from Ethiopia's "golden age," the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries...
...Although Ethiopia, as part of the Eastern church, stressed Mary as the Mother of God, it was a fifteenthcentury monarch who initiated the cult of "Our Mother Zion...
...Seyon's icons of Mary and the saints, brightly colored, mostly tempera on wood, and well-preserved, show pleasing, round-faced, almond-eyed figures, lavishly painted in deep reds and yellows...
...For portability, the panels fold between wooden covers, complete with a handle...
...the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles (September 25-October 20, 1995...
...To produce the number of Marian images required for ritual veneration, the artists of Yaeqob's day must have worked at full speed...
...the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk (June 7-August 2, 1995...
...Indian art also exerted influence...
...On display is an imaginative set of portable liturgical tools...
...Only the priest may carry the tablet...
...As told, the Queen of Sheba bore Solomon a son, who brought to Ethiopia the Ark of the Covenant and established a new Israel...
...Much smaller fans were used in the sixth century to keep flies away from the Eucharist, but the Ethiopians' use of the large fans nine centuries later is not documented...
...In procession, he holds it up, draped in fine cloth keeping it from the worshipers' view...
...In fact, Fere Seyon, the only artist singled out in the show, was a monk and court painter under Emperor Yaeqob...
...She appears on silver pendants, wooden panels, in Scripture books, hymnals, and psalters...
...Its panels are painted with standing icons, then pleated...
...Almost startling to behold is Judaism's influence on Ethiopian Christianity...
...she wears luxurious fabrics—velvets and brocades with fleur-de-lis—and is flanked by saints and angels...
...Artists made wood-panel icons, which would unfold into diptychs and triptychs, small enough to be carried before the congregation or displayed on a stand...
...Because the faith spread from the top of society downward, Ethiopian Christians were spared the persecutions that befell converts in Rome...
...she nurses an infant Jesus...
...The show is a sampler, illustrating distinct art forms and subjects that developed in a Christian country which was geographically and culturally cut off from the Western world for nearly a thousand years...
...Not only do the Ethiopians circumcise male infants on their eighth day, uphold a man's duty to marry his brother's widow, and observe the Sabbath, but like the Jews in Sinai, they have become peripatetic worshipers...
...Ethiopia became a theocracy where its rulers heavily influenced liturgical practice...
...The exhibit also contains processional crosses, chalices, patens, and spoons...
...The effect is one of warmth as well as contemplation...
...She stands for prayer, hands open and raised to shoulder height...
...Perhaps that is why their early art dwells not at all on suffering, not even the Passion and death of Jesus...
...The exhibit has moved from New York to the Menil Collection in Houston (April 21-June 19...
...At New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where the tour opened, I saw fourth-century gold and silver coins inlaid with crosses on one side, the emperor's profile engraved on the other...
...Sumptuous Gospel books included canon tables (charts of parallel passages) and painted leaves depicting women at Christ's tomb...
...After that it travels to the Museum of African-American Life and Culture in Dallas (September 28-November 30...
...She sits crosslegged, sharing a cushion with the resurrected Christ reigning in glory...
...Rarer still, and particularly beautiful, is a large liturgical fan— a long piece of parchment, more than three-feet high, divided into some thirty panels, six inches wide...
...At the exhibit, one is struck by the artists' preoccupation with Mary...
...A Mary with Indian facial features and hair style appears at her Assumption wrapped in a sari...
...the priest places the chalice and paten upon it...
...Such depictions illustrate a uniquely Ethiopian religious development devised in the emperor's court...
...KAREN SUE SMITH Karen Sue Smith is the editor of CHURCH magazine, published by the National Pastoral Life Center in New York...
...The oldest pieces on display are also the smallest...
...the Dusable Museum of African-American History in Chicago (December 23February 26, 1995...
...JESUS & MARY IN ETHIOPIA A DISTINCTIVE CHRISTIAN ART he first exhibit of Ethiopian Christian art ever to tour the United States (jointly sponsored by participating galleries and InterCultura, Fort Worth, and the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore) is a small but exquisite selection of a hundred pieces, mostly from the Middle Ages...
...In pieces from the fifteenth century onward, one sees with the end of Ethiopian isolation the marked influence of European art in style and subject...
...This Ark still rests inside the nation's oldest church, Saint Mary Zion in Aksun...
...Scenes of the Passion and death of Jesus and the raising of Adam and Eve appear...
...Curiously, the Ethiopians' claim to share the Davidic line developed late and for political reasons, when a thirteenth-century monarch, hoping to bolster his authority in Byzantium, revised his background...
...and the Cleveland Museum of Art (November 14-January 7, 1996...
...The coins make clear 20 ART that the imperial house of Ethiopia had already converted to Christianity...
...Yet, the images on exhibit look anything but rushed...
...Along with hymns to Lady Mary and readings from the "Miracle of Mary," prostrations were to be made before her icon...
...Upon their conversion, Ethiopian Christians established a rich monastic life, excelling in Scripture study and calligraphy when the Greek Gospels were first brought to Ethiopia for translation...
...By fiat, Emperor Yaeqob introduced more than thirty Marian feasts into the liturgical calendar...
...Written in Ge'ez, a script resembling squared-off Greek, the pages are framed with geometrical decoration, some topped with intricate headpieces...
...A coffer, intricately carved from a single block of wood, stores the consecrated altar tablet (of wood, stone, or gold...
...For Mass, the tablet is removed and set atop the coffer (like a portable table top on a stand...
Vol. 121 • June 1994 • No. 11
