Preface

Jones, Michael

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Preface

Michael Jones

The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt

In Egypt the care of all historic heritage, including ancient churches currently in use, is the responsibility and prerogative of the State, specifically the Ministry of Antiquities (MoA). While the Coptic Orthodox Church is able to use historic churches, official procedures and the complex and frequently restrictive regulations enforcing them have encouraged both clergy and local populations to...

Author

Michael Jones

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23717

Preface

Michael Jones

In Egypt the care of all historic heritage, including ancient churches currently in use, is the responsibility and prerogative of the State, specifically the Ministry of Antiquities (MoA). While the Coptic Orthodox Church is able to use historic churches, official procedures and the complex and frequently restrictive regulations enforcing them have encouraged both clergy and local populations to lose interest in maintaining their religious buildings. Many sites have been abandoned, others left to decay, and it is considered the State’s responsibility to take care of them. In recent years, numerous attempts have been made to address the various problems facing the preservation of heritage, but when maintenance or repairs occur, they frequently lack compliance with international standards for cultural heritage conservation. Additionally, many of those sites that have received proper treatment lack a maintenance program, and all too often there has been a tendency on the part of the conservation community to carry out conservation interventions focusing only on the material, tangible aspects while forgetting the intangible values associated with the religious importance of the heritage.

As an example of living religious heritage, the Red Monastery church is one of the most important historic churches in Egypt, but it has experienced all the concerns described above, increasingly in recent decades. The painted interior preserves early Byzantine and early medieval murals on walls, apses, columns, and domes of unrivalled value for art historians (fig. 2). The architectural form of the church belongs to a type known from other sites in Egypt, including the neighboring White Monastery church. Nowhere else, however, is such a richly painted interior preserved in situ from this early period, making the Red Monastery a unique survivor of a kind of decorated church that must once have been widespread. Today the church is at the heart of a Christian community in Upper Egypt for whom it is a significant holy place; it attracts large numbers of visitors, particularly for the celebration of the saints’ annual feasts. At the same time, it is an important ancient monument with value for scholars, tourists, and other secular interest groups both within Egypt and internationally.

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Description: Painted interior, detail of net pattern with confronted faces

2. Net pattern with confronted faces (phase 2), T.e.II.2.

The survival of the church was assured by the work of the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe (hereafter referred to as Comité) carried out a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth century, the first hints (or possibly warnings) were apparent of several important development projects that would dramatically alter the area and introduce serious conservation risks consistent with a growing population and its needs. These were part of an initiative intended to promote the status of the monastery. Agriculture, construction works, an outreach program in the Coptic community nationwide intended to attract more visitors, and plans to increase the number of monks were all significant components in expectations for the monastery’s future that would undoubtedly endanger the historic church. The time was fitting, therefore, for a major conservation project, focusing on the cleaning, preservation, and display of the painted interior, architectural studies and conservation, and a scholarly reassessment based on the detailed recording and documentation that would be integral to the work.

arce adopted the church under the usaid-funded Egyptian Antiquities Project (eap) in April 2003. The project supports usaid's mission by focusing on economic and social development, potentially attracting tourists to a major monument and engaging the local communities in the recovery of their cultural heritage. Annual seasons of cleaning and conservation were carried out by the Italian conservation team directed by Luigi De Cesaris and Alberto Sucato until the end of the eap grant in 2004, when the project continued with further usaid support under the Egyptian Antiquities Conservation (eac) Project. Work was carried out during the spring and autumn seasons of most years; one campaign season was lost after the uprising of January 2011. The work covered in this book is the result of sixteen seasons of cleaning and conservation over a period of ten years. The death of De Cesaris during the December 2011 season deprived the project of its conservation director and its most dynamic member. Since then, Sucato and Emiliano Ricchi have skillfully led the work to completion.

The final stages of the project were accomplished by Nicholas Warner and his team in 2013 and 2014. Installation of a new floor, new doors, a modern electrical system, discrete led lighting provided by Philips-Egypt, a new altar table, and minimalist barriers to protect the lower levels of the paintings from abrasion and to divide the altar from the laity have created the frame and ambience in which the conservators’ achievements can be fully appreciated. The church preserves architecture and a painted interior created in the early Byzantine period, and the conservation project has rendered it meaningful in a twenty-first-century context. The intention in this final treatment was to avoid imitating an imagined ancient interior but, rather, to present the historical in an appropriate way that validates it in the present.

Owing to their high visibility and the dramatic impression they create, the cleaned paintings have understandably assumed pride of place among the results. However, the comprehensive and multidisciplinary project, in which they are a significant component, expanded the scope beyond a straightforward focus on the painted church interior. Since the paintings were applied to the inner walls of the historic church, they form part of a larger architectural ensemble. Therefore, a proper study and analysis of the architecture were developed together with the conservation needs of the building on which the paintings have always relied for their survival. Simultaneously, the conservation team cleaned the dome, the exposed brickwork and stone elements, the modern additions enclosing the church constructed by the Comité, and the granite and marble columns to create a suitable space for presenting the different phases of paintings in a harmonious and unified way. Similarly, different components of the overall project informed each other: architectural survey, recording and documentation of the paint and plaster layers as observed by the conservators, art historical analyses of the paintings, and archaeology of the building. These were supported throughout by comprehensive graphic and photographic documentation that forms much of the imagery in this book while also constituting an extensive archive housed at arce. The fieldwork and research have shown that the church as it exists today is a product of numerous interventions that began in the early Byzantine period when the church was built, continued sporadically into modern times, and culminated in the project documented here. Though all conservation interventions aspire to reversibility, in reality they alter existing conditions forever. Like every preservation measure throughout the history of this remarkable church, arce’s work has changed it again, adding another chapter in the chronicle of its survival and endurance.

The Red Monastery church has been retrieved from obscurity by the conservation project. Vastly increased familiarity and access are now guaranteed through actual visitation and print and digital media, which allow larger numbers of people to experience the site both in person and remotely. Success, however, has raised important questions concerning the purpose of such a project and its role in living religious cultural heritage. The clergy and Coptic faithful, the main users of the church, are confident that the project has greatly enhanced their place of worship; religious ritual and devotion will resume once the project is complete (fig. 3). The MoA, the legal owner, is not averse to religious use so long as there are regular inspections and official regulations are adhered to. Yet numerous preservation issues accompany such use, as the interests of a wide variety of interest groups are involved.

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Description: Coptic priest praying in the eastern lobe of the triconch, Red Monastery church,...

3. Coptic priest praying in the eastern lobe of the triconch.

Tangible cultural materials such as the church and its paintings were created to support intangible beliefs and devotional activities, and to separate one from the others is to focus only on form without attention to content. Today they also serve secular values expressed through scholarship and an appreciation for history and its legacy. Together they express the significance of the place through its history and the values of its present communities: local people, the owners and users, international scholars, secular or religious visitors, and tour organizers. Finding strategies to safeguard the results of the conservation project in ways that satisfy these interest groups occupied much of the closing months of the project. An effective way to achieve this has been to represent arce’s work as a form of support for the monastery’s own development plans intended to alleviate the difficulties caused by the conditions described at the beginning of this preface. By providing professional expertise in a sensitive rehabilitation of the church’s main religious function, a balance can be realized that mitigates some of the possible conflicts. For example, restrictions imposed by custom that limit access to the space around the altar and potentially exclude many visitors who might have traveled especially to see the paintings serve to reduce wear and tear. Through negotiations for the installation of a low barrier, however, more in the spirit of the ancient cancelli, rather than the high screens generally in use today that hide the altar from the laity, the public will remain at a distance but with a clear view of the cleaned paintings. Reinstatement of the use of the church as a conservation measure complies with the spirit of the Venice Charter in that it follows the principle that all historic buildings should have socially useful purposes. It also integrates the results of the conservation project into social development and upgrades the cultural heritage environment. Through dialogue it can encourage an understanding of good stewardship among those responsible for physical maintenance, which involves the community in sensitive treatment of the material property that supports their intangible values and beliefs. Visibility has increased the Red Monastery church’s significance for all the communities and interest groups who value it in different ways and made of it a symbol of renewal and continuity of tradition.

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