Conclusion

Bolman, Elizabeth S.

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Conclusion

Elizabeth S. Bolman

The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt

Before the start of the ARCE-USAID project at the turn of the twenty-first...

Author

Elizabeth S. Bolman

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23744

Conclusion

Elizabeth S. Bolman

Before the start of the arce-usaid project at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Red Monastery and its church were virtually unknown. The details of its founding were obscure, as was most of its history. A few scholars were aware that the church had a well-preserved late Roman triconch, and that its architectural sculpture was one of two relatively intact, purpose-built ensembles from this period in Egypt, the other being in the somewhat later Justinianic church at Sinai. The Red Monastery paintings, however, were almost completely overlooked.1For a discussion of the scholars who recognized the importance of the paintings, see note 48 in the Introduction and Bolman forthcoming b, chap. 1. As recently as 1990 the eminent Coptologist Paul van Moorsel could state that no early paintings in monumental churches still existed in Egypt.2Moorsel 1990, 19. Since 1990 early paintings at the Syrian Monastery have also been uncovered; Innemée 2011 with bibliography. Even more telling, the entry on the Red Monastery in the Coptic Encyclopedia of the following year includes sections on history, sculpture, and architecture, but nothing on painting except one pejorative reference stating that it was used as an economy measure in lieu of sculpture.3Coquin and Martin 1991a; Severin 1991; Grossmann 1991a. This situation indicates that Byzantinists, and more surprisingly even Coptologists, were largely or completely unaware of the paintings and their significance. The visual culture of Egypt has been something of a blind spot for the field of Byzantine studies. Admittedly, some art historians of past and current generations have brought the monastic paintings of Bawit and Saqqara into the discussion of Mediterranean art, and the cultural importance of Alexandria has often been acknowledged.4Judith McKenzie is one of a very few scholars who have recognized the important role of Egypt in the cultural history of the empire, although 1 disagree with her model of the “influence” of Alexandria; McKenzie 2007. Unusually, Kurt Weitzmann brought not only Egyptian but also Nubian paintings into the scholarly discourse; e.g., Weitzmann 1982, 187–201, pls. 318–320, 322–324, 326, 328, 330–331. See also Bolman forthcoming b, chap. 1. Nevertheless, except within the sphere of Coptology, Upper Egypt has effectively been off the map. The spectacular Red Monastery church, now freed from centuries of soot, dust, and debris, completely overturns entrenched misconceptions about the nature of Egyptian Christian visual production outside Alexandria. It emphatically demonstrates that this Byzantine province played a role in the art and architecture of the empire hitherto unimagined.

The last fifteen years of work have enabled us to reevaluate completely the significance of the monument, as well as the circumstances leading to its construction. Bentley Layton and Stephen Emmel have discovered early textual evidence for Pshoi and for the crucial moment when he and his disciples joined Pcol and thereby formed the White Monastery Federation.5This textual evidence is translated and analyzed in detail in Layton 2014, 14–19, 27–32. Pshoi and his community at the Red Monastery would have had their own church in the fourth century, and the abbot’s cell also became a memorial, presumably a chapel, but these early houses of worship no longer survive. They were probably replaced by the extant early Byzantine sanctuary, which can be securely dated to the late fifth century on the basis of Dale Kinney’s study of its sculpture. Kinney has also analyzed the dramatic plasticity of the triconch, which is the best-preserved example of its type from the empire. Its arrays of niches and columns, not commonly found in churches in this period, belong to Roman aedicular architecture and expressed high status, abundance, and euergetism. Churches in the West at this time, though often dressed with expensive stone, lack the powerful articulation of the interior walls seen in the White and Red Monastery sanctuaries.6Dale Kinney made this observation in conversation, on 22 October 2014.

The basic form of the triconch sanctuary quotes Shenoute’s earlier church, physically asserting membership in the federation. This is not the only way in which the shape is expressive. Its three lobes would also have evoked the Trinity, charging the environment around the altar with meaning. The joining of a triconch with a basilican hall is unusual. Though now separated from the roofless nave, the dynamic sanctuary would originally have been the culmination of a very impressive building (see p. vi), Nicholas Warner’s historical reconstruction of the original basilica, complete with proposals for the transition from the nave to the eastern end and the screening of the sanctuary, enables us to envision much more of the early church than now survives.

One important aspect of the Red Monastery project involves the perimeter walls of the church, long suspected to have been built somewhat later than the sanctuary. Warner has shown that the brick enclosure dates to the medieval period because of the pointed arches on the exterior windows. This feature was unknown in Egypt before the ninth century. The conservators’ study of the mortar, plaster, paint, and painting styles in the nave emphatically confirms the evidence of the windows; the only early Byzantine components are the reused portals and perhaps (if they were purpose-made for the church) the cornice blocks. Additionally, the sloping angle of these impressive sculpted doors proves that the current pitched exterior walls reproduced those of the earlier building, which in turn followed the model of the White Monastery church that itself echoed pharaonic antecedents. Scholars have thought that the tower on the south side of the nave was much later than the walls, but, after Warner’s analysis, it appears to have been contemporary, or nearly so, with the rebuilt medieval church.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this monument for scholarship is the fact that an illusionistic painting style (phase 1), sophisticated iconography (phases 2 and 3), and lavish decoration (phases 1 through 3) (figs. 32–34) are all paralleled in one or more major early Byzantine centers, most of them urban: Constantinople (see fig. 9.6), Rome, Ravenna (see fig. 9.7), Milan (see fig. 11.12), Poreč, and Sinai. To that can be added the popularity of the triconch architectural type, although specific features of design vary from region to region. Shenoute himself was anything but parochial, drawing high-level visitors to his monastery and traveling to the First Council of Ephesos and the imperial capital, Constantinople.7Behlmer 1998; Emmel 2004a, 1:8, 2:555. His tomb at the White Monastery, only two or three decades earlier than the Red Monastery church, conforms to a type of decorated mortuary space that has been found in many places in the eastern empire, and its iconographic repertoire is even more ubiquitous.8Bolman, Davis, Pyke, et al. 2010; Bolman forthcoming b, chap. 2. Only the architectural sculpture in the Red Monastery church really fails to show close connections to recent developments outside the country, which suggests that sculptors’ working practice functioned differently from that of architects and painters. This part of Upper Egypt was therefore thoroughly involved in not only the reception but also the production of early Byzantine visual culture. Historians have for some time been insisting that Egypt was a very important part of the empire, not only economically but also culturally.9Sarris 2006, 10, 14–15; Bolman forthcoming b, chap. 1. The Red Monastery church brings material and aesthetic evidence to that argument. It also problematizes the question of generative centers of artistic production. To the simplistic, traditional model that sees all creative activity coming from Constantinople and Alexandria (with occasional additions), why not add Panopolis, and a host of similar cities and other thriving centers, such as monasteries, to the dynamic? The powerhouse that was the White Monastery Federation surely fostered artistic training for more than just book-making. A fluid, nuanced paradigm seems long overdue.10The complex models proposed by Grossman and Walker (2013b) for a later period provide a template for this revaluation.

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Description: Facade wall, chancel arch, and triconch, looking east

32. The facade wall, chancel arch, and triconch, looking east. Small areas of the eastern lobe, level I, are unconserved.

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33. Angel (phase 1, underpainting), T.e.III-left.

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Description: Northeastern corner of the triconch, detail of third and fourth levels

34. The northeastern corner of the triconch, levels III and IV (phases 2 and 3).

The architectural polychromy in the Red Monastery sanctuary is a unique and in many ways miraculous survival from the early Byzantine world (fig. 35). The construction of the medieval brick walls against the paintings, to address structural concerns in the triconch, was the greatest factor in their preservation. What was until recently a remote area with a very dry climate has also accounted for the continued existence of these delicate tempera and encaustic surfaces. The density of ornamental and figural coverage surprises us, conditioned as we are to think of architecture in the classical tradition as white. The ancient Greeks and Romans commonly painted buildings, both exteriors and interiors, as well as sculpture, but most of this fragile embellishment is lost. The Red Monastery gives us a sense of how transformative the role of paint could be in the architectural culture of the larger Mediterranean. The splendid riot of colors alone evoked aristocratic buildings; by contrast, the habitations of the poor would have been drab. So few decorated early Byzantine interiors survive that we are largely unfamiliar with their visual effect. The Red Monastery church exceeds by a wide margin what we could have imagined, being a true representative of the jeweled style, dazzling the eye wherever one looks. However astonishing, this monument is but one manifestation of the common and persistent practice of painting architecture in the ancient world. The aesthetics and decorum of architectural polychromy were never static; Roman domestic painting of three or four centuries earlier, for example, was considerably more restrained than what we see at the Red Monastery.11One would ideally need, of course, to compare polychromatic interiors in monumental temples, not houses, although these are very poorly preserved; Moormann 2011. The subject deserves far more study than it has received.

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Description: Besa and Shenoute in niches with architectural polychromy

35. Besa and Shenoute (phase 3) in the niches at T.n.II.4 and T.n.II.6 with architectural polychromy (phase 2), T.n.II.1–T.n.II.6.

The four phases of newly cleaned figural paintings also add significantly to the corpus of early Byzantine art (fig. 36), with new iconographic types for this period, such as Christ in the burning bush (see fig. 10.10). The eastern semidome very possibly preserves the earliest surviving monumental church apse painting in the world (now partially obscured owing to its controversial aesthetic reintegration); it definitely includes the oldest large-scale Ascension (see figs. 20.29, 20.30). The three lobes of the sanctuary triple the available field for decoration in single-apsed churches. The subjects of phase 3 in these semidomes give us a rich illustration of the economy of salvation, showing Christ as God, as man, and as Logos. Though these essential concepts were shared by the two major doctrinal groups, with its inclusion of Dioskoros (see fig. 10.28), the third Red Monastery church program makes an emphatically Miaphysite statement. This is the only extant unambiguous example in art from this early period of explicit doctrinal allegiance.12Most recently, the paintings at Kom al-Ahbariya have been considered from a doctrinal standpoint. Leslie MacCoull, reading Johanna Wilte Orr’s dissertation, said that she argued that the message was anti-Miaphysite; MacCoull, 2003, 13. In her book, developed from her dissertation, Witte Orr stays away from doctrine, however; Witte Orr 2010, 106. The earliest prothesis, identified and dated by its third-phase paintings to the sixth or possibly early seventh century, also makes the monument remarkable (see fig. 6.35).

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36. Isaiah, detail (phase 3), T.n.III-right.

The Red Monastery church works on not only material and visual levels but also on metaphorical ones. The primary function of a church is to serve as a setting for religious services, and monastic life at the federation was ordered around these rituals and their architectural envelope, as Father Ugo Zanetti and Stephen Davis discuss in Chapter 4. The church building was the heart of the monastic community; its magnificence honored God, underscoring the importance of the liturgy.13For a discussion of Shenoute and his church, see Schroeder 2007, 90–125. The multifaceted nature of the liturgical activities in it, and of monastic life in general, also associated the church with other sacred places, such as Sinai, Jerusalem, and the beautiful gardens of paradise. Architecture and painting work together to evoke materials other than the brick, stone, mortar, and plaster out of which the building is made. These include the fabric of Moses’ tabernacle, the flesh of Christ, and the corporate body of the monastery. The garlands painted throughout the triconch, as well as the profusion of colors—especially the bright green and pink—emphasize the notion of the space as lush and eternally well-watered in what was a very arid environment. The rich, curving architecture, with its freestanding columns and deeply recessed niches, would have reminded well-traveled early Byzantine viewers of aristocratic and imperial fountain buildings, such as the one at Jerash (see fig. 5.13). The messages conveyed by the building and its decoration mesh with the textual record, which asserts that monasteries are paradise and the heavenly Jerusalem. The multicolored stones and palaces of that celestial city are suggested by the painted building itself, and by the illusory arcades in the northern and southern semidomes. This flexible relationship to matter and place was not, of course, exclusive to the ascetic life, although the self-consciously crafted monastery and its impressive church develop it. A central component of Orthodox and Catholic belief, of course, is that bread and wine are transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ.

Building, decorating, and redecorating churches provided an opportunity to shape an environment that evoked power and expressed identity. The relatively precisely dated late Roman houses at Butrint were all substantially changed with each generation, indicating that construction, renovation, and embellishment were “important aspects of status display.”14Bowden 2011, 291. Textual sources indicate that in the sixth century, some newly installed bishops had portraits of their predecessors replaced with images of themselves as part of the process of marking authority.15John of Ephesos, Ecclesiastical History, III.ii.27; John of Ephesos 1860, 134–136. Thanks to Jack Tannous for this reference. The Christological debates of the fifth and sixth centuries would also have generated a need for new images, indeed perhaps entirely new image programs, far more than the simple replacement of portraits of leaders. The desire to distinguish the Miaphysite Church from the Chalcedonian one prompted the creation of parallel clergies, new buildings and their decoration, and adapted liturgies, all to assert legitimacy and doctrine.16MacCoull 2006, esp. 401–402. Surely this kind of identity construction and demonstration of dominance goes a long way to account for the fact that three major phases of early Byzantine painting took place in the Red Monastery triconch within about a century—possibly less—as the absence of soot between the layers indicates.

The third early Byzantine program in the Red Monastery gives visual expression to information about the federation that we knew previously principally from textual sources. Analyses of educational systems, patterns of thought, and word association in the liturgy (hermeniai)—discussed by Zanetti and Davis—enable us to make sense of the at-first-sight disassociated figures in the niches and in front of piers in the semidomes of the Red Monastery church. As Agnieszka Szymańska and I show, one dominant theme in these images is ancestry. It is perhaps best exemplified by the painting of Elijah the Tishbite, given the title apa, or father, as if the Old Testament prophet had been a monk (see fig. 12.2). Power structures are also visually asserted, such as the close association between monks of the federation and patriarchs of Alexandria, demonstrated by Andrew Crislip in Chapter 1. The entire ensemble provided its intended viewers with countless opportunities to create and affirm their place in this monastic community. It presented them with exemplars and thus connected them to the holy figures represented. The text-versus-image controversy that has plagued scholarship is shown to be irrelevant. The dipinti alone exemplify the falseness of traditional categories, conveying textual information while also functioning aesthetically, as Paul Dilley explains. More fundamental than this, however, is the fact that the primary site of open-ended narrative generation is the monk himself, using oral, written, and visual sources.

The quality and character of the Red and White Monastery churches beautifully manifest the material turn not only of the institutional church, which began in the fourth century, but also of monasticism, in the fifth and sixth centuries. Dating to the early generations of organized asceticism, these monasteries and the rich array of complementary evidence and scholarship on them illuminate a transformative period in the history of cenobitic institutions, when notions of poverty, wealth, and power were rapidly changing.17See Bolman, Chapter 3 in this volume. Considerable funds were spent at the Shenoutean federation to entice the senses with extravagant architectural spaces and their decoration, as well as now vanished luxury textiles, liturgical tableware, lamps, ornamented manuscripts, and the perfumed smells of incense, to name only a few. “Embodied, multisensory” experiences, as Zanetti and Davis describe them, would have contrasted sharply with the renunciation of physical comfort by, for example, the limitation of food and sleep and the general regimentation of life.

Worldly concerns, such as making sure that there was enough food and an adequate water supply year-round, and that waste (especially human waste) was managed effectively, would have been an ever-present aspect of life in any large monastery, a counterpoint to the focus on the spiritual.18For a discussion of administrative issues, see Layton 2014, esp. 61–65. Shenoute commented with pride not only on building his church, but also on constructing a large lavatory.19Emmel 1998, 83; López 2013, 47. The evidence for plentiful water and its distribution at the White Monastery is extensive; some survives as well at the Red Monastery.20Blanke 2015. The ceramic piping at the former may postdate Shenoute, but the enormous well certainly dates to his lifetime. The more modestly proportioned well at the Red Monastery is also early, based on the style of the decorated niche inside it. The abbot and the leaders who followed him engaged intensively with the material world, as did anyone in charge of sizable groups of people. They also energetically insisted on the significance and centrality of their monastic federation within the larger social fabric by acting like bishops and other aristocrats. Not only episcopal but also ascetic competition, such as the architectural dialogue between the White Monastery church and the one at Pbow built a few years later, must have fueled the transformations within cenobitic establishments. These abbots created, decorated, and redecorated monumental churches, and they involved patrons in their projects. Shenoute, and perhaps later leaders of both of the men’s monasteries, fed the poor and ransomed captives. In subsequent generations, the White Monastery may have actually minted unofficial coins, underscoring its significance as a financial center. The abbot himself boldly asserted the centrality of his monastery, describing it as the celestial Jerusalem, a privileged point of access to sacred power.21Boud’hors 2013, 2:373. Monumental physical beauty coexisted with self-denial and personal poverty. These lavish, large-scale, and expensive settings for the voluntarily poor are not an essential, original component of monasticism, despite the fact that the venerable history of monumental monastic architecture now makes this pairing seem appropriate; people at the time argued about this collision of beauty and asceticism. It marked a radical shift in ascetic decorum.

Mark Swanson, Dilley, Warner, and I also show that the federation remained a bastion of wealth and culture for almost a thousand years (fig. 37). In the later period it was the most significant center of monasticism south of Cairo, and it seems to have been functioning as late as 1342. The women’s community survived at least into the tenth century, although it apparently generated almost nothing in the way of conspicuous, expensive visual culture, unlike the two men’s establishments. This strongly suggests that a gendered etiquette existed in the Shenoutean federation, according to which cenobitic female monastics were discouraged from having monumental buildings, no doubt just one of many ways in which their lives were different from those of male ascetics. In the thirteenth century the White Monastery, at least, was able to commission or possibly actually produce a lavish key with figural decorations and inlaid inscriptions (see fig. 16.13), whose nearest surviving parallel is a contemporary key made for the Ka‘ba, Islam’s holiest shrine. The monks also created numerous labor-intensive and expensive vellum manuscripts, and received them as gifts as well. The painter Merkouri, a man with a remarkably compelling desire to assert his presence with dipinti, strongly indicates that the Red Monastery was still very closely associated with the White Monastery in the first part of the fourteenth century. While no longer part of cultural and religious trends in the Byzantine Empire, life in the federation was still rich. Artists of various calibers produced work at both churches, one having close ties to the aesthetic world of the Dar al-Islam. Armenians and Ethiopians also stayed and worked in the White Monastery, forging connections with distant places and other cultures.

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Description: Medieval bird in a guilloche pattern

37. Medieval bird in a guilloche pattern (phase 5), F.I.1. The dark square at the left shows the condition of the wall before conservation.

The highly skilled and dedicated team of conservators has revealed breathtaking paintings, obscured for centuries under grime. Given the painstaking nature of their work, it seems possible that the arce-usaid project cost as much in time, effort, and resources as did the original construction and decoration of the church, perhaps even more (fig. 38). While the paintings were the principal focus of the project, they were far from the only parts of the monument that received attention. Adriano Luzi, Luigi De Cesaris, Alberto Sucato, Emiliano Ricchi, Warner, and Father Maximous El-Antony ensured that the entirety of the enclosed eastern end of the church, including floors, undecorated areas, and both ancient and recent surfaces, were all cleaned, well lit, and prepared for use. To help protect the monument, Warner installed new electrical systems and lighting, along with window panes to screen ultraviolet light and fans to remove the smoke of incense. This book, the vast documentary record assembled as part of the project (drawings of architecture and sculpture, graphic documentation of the paintings showing existing conditions and conservation interventions, black-and-white prints, thirty-five-millimeter and medium-format color transparencies, color prints, digital photographs and video, laser scanning, and countless specialized reports), will preserve a thorough record of the state of the Red Monastery church in the early twenty-first century and provide a foundation for future studies.22This documentary record is kept in the ARCE archive. When the building was in imminent danger of destruction a hundred years ago, Somers Clarke drew attention to it and other ancient Christian churches in Egypt. As Warner and Cédric Meurice show, the Comité stepped in and rescued the monument from collapse. The arce team continued that work, redirecting the scope to include painting conservation and study by a wide range of specialists and scholars. The recent project has gathered and synthesized a tremendous body of evidence for earlier phases in the life of the church, monastery, and federation, including, as Warner, Kinney, William Lyster, and the conservators have shown, rare details of the working practices of its builders, sculptors, and painters. Technical art history typically takes place on portable objects that are now in museums, not on buildings in remote places, so the project’s contribution to art and science is not only considerable but also exceptional.

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Description: Chiara Di Marco applying acqua sporca, Red Monastery church, Sohag, Egypt

38. Chiara Di Marco applying acqua sporca, T.e.I.3.

The contributors to this book have changed the way we understand the Red Monastery church, just as significantly as the conservators have changed the way we see it with its thick accretions removed. These authors have also to a large extent peopled it, especially from the founding of the community in the fourth century into the fourteenth century, and then sporadically until another comparatively well-documented period, beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing until 2015. We have been invited into a world full of dramatic and at times unexpected contrasts: wealth and poverty; monumental, lavishly embellished architecture and anti-worldliness. The Red Monastery church now joins the small group of well-preserved decorated churches from the early Byzantine Empire. The dynamic space of the poly-chromed triconch truly creates a staggering spectacle. The eight phases of painting (four early Byzantine and at least four medieval), only three of which have identifiable stylistic parallels elsewhere, draw attention to the artistic richness and variety available to Christians in Egypt for almost a millennium (fig. 39). The conserved interior of the triconch gives us a glimpse of what the decoration of Shenoute’s great church once looked like, described by him as comprising colors, varied materials, and inscriptions. Given the popularity of the trilobed architectural type around the Mediterranean, there would once have been many, many more like this (whether freestanding or attached to basilicas) with complex iconographic and ornamental ensembles. The sophistication of the architecture, its paintings, and their inscriptions must surely banish once and for all the remarkably persistent and profound error of characterizing Egyptian monks—particularly those from Upper Egypt—as unlettered and ignorant and classifying their cultural production as substandard. The extraordinary work of conservation, documentation, and analysis of the monument has transformed our ideas about the involvement of this region in the cultural world of Byzantium in the fifth and sixth centuries, and its continuing importance, albeit with different geographical and political parameters, in the medieval period, under Muslim rule. The Red Monastery and its church have for about 1,500 years languished in the shadow of the neighboring church and monastery of Shenoute, appearing in the historical record for fleeting moments only. At least in the history of art and architecture, this relationship is now reversed.

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Description: Test cleanings of two angels, Red Monastery church, Sohag, Egypt

39. Test cleanings of two angels, Te.III-left (phase 4) and T.e.III-right (phase 1).

The rapid pace of change in Egypt, with a critical and continuing increase in population, has resulted in the rise of groundwater levels around the Red Monastery church in recent years, attracting termites and potentially also destabilizing the building’s foundations. The population of monks is expanding at a phenomenal rate, as are structures within the community. Four new churches were built during the time that the arce-usaid project was active on-site alone. Not only is the monastery, so recently reinhabited, growing, but the numbers of Coptic faithful who come for devotional purposes are as well, including His Holiness Pope Tawadros II (see fig. 6). To that will be added visitors who wish to see the remarkable ancient monument. These factors make it not at all certain that the church will survive to the end of this century. It is my hope that following our demonstration of the rarity and value of this monument with its conservation and the studies in this book, the local and international communities will act to preserve it for many future generations (fig. 40).

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Description: Sanctuary facade wall, looking south, with a view into the triconch

40. The sanctuary facade wall, looking south, with a view into the triconch. Conservation of the northern nave wall is incomplete.

1 For a discussion of the scholars who recognized the importance of the paintings, see note 48 in the Introduction and Bolman forthcoming b, chap. 1. »

2 Moorsel 1990, 19. Since 1990 early paintings at the Syrian Monastery have also been uncovered; Innemée 2011 with bibliography. »

3 Coquin and Martin 1991a; Severin 1991; Grossmann 1991a. »

4 Judith McKenzie is one of a very few scholars who have recognized the important role of Egypt in the cultural history of the empire, although 1 disagree with her model of the “influence” of Alexandria; McKenzie 2007. Unusually, Kurt Weitzmann brought not only Egyptian but also Nubian paintings into the scholarly discourse; e.g., Weitzmann 1982, 187–201, pls. 318–320, 322–324, 326, 328, 330–331. See also Bolman forthcoming b, chap. 1. »

5 This textual evidence is translated and analyzed in detail in Layton 2014, 14–19, 27–32. »

6 Dale Kinney made this observation in conversation, on 22 October 2014. »

7 Behlmer 1998; Emmel 2004a, 1:8, 2:555. »

8 Bolman, Davis, Pyke, et al. 2010; Bolman forthcoming b, chap. 2. »

9 Sarris 2006, 10, 14–15; Bolman forthcoming b, chap. 1. »

10 The complex models proposed by Grossman and Walker (2013b) for a later period provide a template for this revaluation. »

11 One would ideally need, of course, to compare polychromatic interiors in monumental temples, not houses, although these are very poorly preserved; Moormann 2011. »

12 Most recently, the paintings at Kom al-Ahbariya have been considered from a doctrinal standpoint. Leslie MacCoull, reading Johanna Wilte Orr’s dissertation, said that she argued that the message was anti-Miaphysite; MacCoull, 2003, 13. In her book, developed from her dissertation, Witte Orr stays away from doctrine, however; Witte Orr 2010, 106. »

13 For a discussion of Shenoute and his church, see Schroeder 2007, 90–125. »

14 Bowden 2011, 291. »

15 John of Ephesos, Ecclesiastical History, III.ii.27; John of Ephesos 1860, 134–136. Thanks to Jack Tannous for this reference. »

16 MacCoull 2006, esp. 401–402. »

17 See Bolman, Chapter 3 in this volume. »

18 For a discussion of administrative issues, see Layton 2014, esp. 61–65. »

19 Emmel 1998, 83; López 2013, 47. »

20 Blanke 2015. »

21 Boud’hors 2013, 2:373. »

22 This documentary record is kept in the ARCE archive. »

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