Coptic Art: The Sacred Image in Christian Egypt
In the deserts of Egypt, in remote wadis (dry riverbeds) where the silence is total and the distance from the world complete, monastic communities have been painting sacred images for seventeen centuries. The art they produced — and still produce — is Coptic art : the visual tradition of the Christian Church of Egypt, one of the oldest continuously functioning Christian communities in the world, tracing its founding to the Evangelist Mark who, according to tradition, brought the Gospel to Alexandria around 42 CE. Coptic art is not a minor regional variant of Byzantine or Western Christian art; it is an independent tradition with its own iconographic vocabulary, its own aesthetic principles, and its own theology of the image — a tradition that preserves, in its spare, intense figures and luminous colors, the direct inheritance of the earliest Christian communities of the Mediterranean world. The word "Copt" comes from the Arabic Qibt , which derives from the Greek Aigyptos (...