Burnt by the Sun: Ethiopia’s Sacred Art
By Henry Chase
Ethiopian Review, July 1996
Centuries before Europe’s conversion to Christianitycenturies in which Celtic, Germanic and Slavic peoples saw the natural world as magical, with trees, birds and thunder possessing ominous spiritual powerAfrica gave birth to the world’s first Christian state.
Picture in your mind King Ezana, ruler of Aksum, who reigns from Ethiopia’s northern highlands down to the Red Sea and the port city of Adulis, whose knee bends neither to Rome nor to its great rival, Sassinid Persia. He wears a fringed robe and is adorned with necklace, armlets, bracelets and possibly with finger rings. His head is covered with a cloth, tied down with a riborn; or perhaps the occasion is a formal one, and we see him in the high and elaborate royal Aksumite tiara.
The year is A.D. 324a decade after Rome’s co-emperors, Constantine the Great and Licinius, legalized Christianity, making it only one of the Empire’s many recognizedand Axum is a major force in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is one of but four states (Rome, Persia and the Kushan Kingdom in northern India being the others) to issue gold coinage for international trade. It is also poised to become a Christian state, for with Ezana’s personal conversion his subjects are, albeit nominally at first, brought into Christianity’s fold. More than a thousand years earlier, Homer’s proud Achaeans knew of the “most distant of men, the blameless Ethiopians.” And almost two thousand years before the clash beneath the walls of Troy, the Fifth Dynasty pharaoh Sahure sent expeditions to Ethiopia, which he knew as the land of punt. So why is the Christian legacy of Ethiopia so little known in the West? Perhaps because Ethiopian Christianityarguably the extant version of the religion closest to that practiced in the first centuries after Christ’s deathwas always oriented toward Eastern Orthodoxy’s Monophysite tendency, toward the see of Alexanderia, rather than toward Rome or Constantinopel; perhaps because Ethiopia was for so long largely cut off from the European mainstream by the surrounding tide of Islam; perhaps because the Ethiopians (“burnt faces” in the Greek language that named them) are black, and European cultures continue to identify Christianity as a Western religion.
Whatever the reason of the past, the legacy of Aksum and its successor kingdoms in Ethiopia today stands revealed in the United States, thanks to a stunning exhibition, “African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia,” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. On display here, over the Winter solstice (which pagan European custom transformed into the season of Christ’s birth), is an exploration of 1,500 years of Ethiopia’s material and spiritual culture. From third century Aksumite coinage through 18th-century illuminated manuscripts, “Sacred Art” reopens our eyes to twin truths: Africa has always been an active participant in the saga we call civilization, and artistic beauty married to spiritual narrative and imagery is central to that saga.
The exhibit’s coins of Aksum do more than testify to that kingdom’s trade links with Rome, South Arabia and India and its prominence on the Red Sea littoral. They help establish a lineage that lasted half a millennium, give us physical evidence of royal paraphernalia and symbolism, and reveal Christianity’s status as a state religion almost simultaneous with Constantinople the Great’s founding of Constantinople in A.D. 330.
As with most coinage in the ancient world, the ruler is the dominant imagethus we know of Ezana’s fringed robe and tiara. These coins also testify that wheat, two stalks of which typically frame Akum’s kings, was critical to the economy. But from an era when royal rule was divinely ordained, the coins speak of more than the secular world. Above Endubis, the first king of Aksum to issue coins, and his successor, Aphilas, are pagan symbols of divinity, the disc and the crescent; in their hands are the profane symbols of their power, a sword or a spear. Inscribed for all to see is their claim to devinely endorsed absolute rule based on descent from Aksum’s tutelary deity: “Son of Mahrem.” But beginning with Ezana in the mid-fourth century, the cross replaces the disc and crescent, and the Son of Maharem disappears, to be replaced in time with such phrases as, “By the grace of God,” and “By this cross [the king] will conquer.”
Initially, the legends in the coins are in Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean from the days of Alexander the Great through the collapse of Byzantium 1,700 years later. Over time, however, Aksum’s silver and bronze coins begin to bear inscriptions in Ge’ez, a Semitic languge that emerged as Ethiopia’s classical tongue following the influx of peoples from across the Red Sea during the fifth century B.C. Significantly, however, the gold coins used for international trade never lose their legends in Greek, even if they gain them in Ge’ez. Rome, too, influences Aksum; the weight of the Kingdom’s coins closely parallels the empire’s currency, even to the changes introduced following Constantine the Great’s monetary reforms.
Finally, the exhibit’s coins foreshadow Aksum’s decline and its withdrawal to Ethiopia’s isolated highlands. The reduction in the gold content of Aksumite currency, already notable by the reign of Ezana, accelerates following Persia’s conquest of the Yemen (Circa A.D. 570) and the Muslim Arab conquest of Egybt and Syria. These developments bring an end to a Red Sea trade that had enriched Christian Aksum, reminding exhibit visitors, in the words of Ecclesiastes, “To every thing is a season, a time to every purpose under heaven.”
If the coins of “Sacred Art” tell a historical tale of the rise and fall of yet another kingdom, the exhibit’s icons, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and processional and hand crosses reveal to us both the religious vision of Ethiopia’s Christianity and the height of artistic power reached in representing that vision. We are looking through a window opened a millennium after King Ezana’s convension, into an Ethiopian world of the 12th through the 18th centuries, a world in which the Byzantine empire falls, Islam encircles African Christianity, and Ethiopia’s royal capital shifts under pressure from Islamic and pagan adversaries.
What do we see? First, we see portrays of Ethiopia’s ideological assertion of orthodoxy, an orthodoxy rooted in a direct transmisions of God’s convenant with Israel. For according to tradition, Ethiopia was founded in the 10th century B.C. by Menelik I, the son of King Solomon and Queen of Sheba, who is identified as the Aksumite queen Makeda. Moreover, according to the seventh-century treatise Kebre Negest (Glory of the Kings), Menelik brought with him to Ethiopia the Ark of the Covenant (the chest containing the twin tablets of the Ten Commandments, God’s law given unto Mosses), which the mythopoetic epic calls Zion. Metaphorically, identified as Zion, the Ark was the dwelling place of God, and thus Ethiopia implicitly inherited the mantle of Israel and primacy within Christendom.
The Ark is the key symbol of Christian Ethiopia. No one who has worshipped in an Ethiopian church will have missed its symbolic representation, the menbere tabot, a wooden chest containing a consecrated stone tablet. Significantly, it is not the church that is consecrated, but the tabot that dwells within the church. Although central ideologically, the Ark is little represented visually in Ethiopian painting, possibly because Ethiopian Christians already had so many images of it before their eyes and possibly because the thematic focus of Ethiopian painting inclines toward the New Testament.
The themes of Ethiopian painting are few in number and remarkably constant. Christ’s passion, Mary and the Child, miracles associated with Mary, and scenes of the Holy Land and the Disciples dominate both “Sacred Art” and the larger world of Ethiopian art. Mary is particularly prominent, for the 15th-century (Early Solomonic) emperor Zere Yaqob introduced a Marian cult, commanding that every church have an icon as well as an altar tablet devoted to her. And it was for Zere Yaqob’s count that the monk Fere Tseyon (Fruit of Zion), Ethiopia’s most important medieval painter, labored.
At least a score of the exhibit’s paintings feature Mary; these range from Fere Tseyon’s “Our Lady Mary with Her Beloved Son, the Ancient of Days, Prophets, Apostles, and Saints” through the mid-18th-century “Mary Nursing Her Infant Son, Crucifixion, Christ with a Crown of Thorns, Donor Portrait.” In the Fere Tseyon work we see an African painter of originality, but one touched by his Western counterparts; we also see religio-artistic motif and ideological assertion. As elsewhere in Fere Tseyon’s work, his figures have round faces, almond-shaped eyes and pursed lips, showing the influence of Byzantine and Italian quattrocento styles, with whose devotional images he would have been familiar.
The motif in “Our Lady Mary” of Christ’s offering to Mary of a sprig of flowers was a recognized Marian symbol of the virgin Birth (alluding to Isaiah 11.1) and would recall to contemporary viewers the Sunday verse in Wuddase Maryam (Praise of Mary): “Mary, you are the flower of a delicious perfume which has blossomed from the tree of Jesse.” Not only the reference to David’s father is ideological: In the left panel of the triptych there appear two leading Ethiopian saints, each of whom founded a monastery supported by a 14th-century emperor, implicitly endorsing Zere Yaqob’s introduction of a cult of Mary.
As a commissioned painter for Zere Yeqob, Fere Tseyon naturally features Mary. But his work is more than merely derivative stylistically and constrained thematically. His soft, naturalistic forms and the gentle melancholy expressions that grace his protagonists catch our eyes across the centuries that separate us. And his iconography is new, establishing an enduring pattern. In other Fere Tseyon paintings (such as “Our Lady Mary with Her Beloved Son, and Saint John the Evangelist, Apostles”) viewers will note his motif of a gray dove was an established literary metaphor for our Lady Mary, Fere Tseyon was the first to employ it as a visual symbol.
Both Tseyon’s impact and Ethiopia’s links to the wider world of Western art are evident later at the Early Solomonic court, where European artists and artisans, such as the Venerian Nicolo Brancaleon (1480-1526), ensured a cultural cross-fertilization of styles, stories and images. Brancaleon’s work, represented in “Sacred Art” by “Saint George and Scenes of His Martyrdom,” marries Ethiopia, Byzantium and Europe. While his Saint George would be at home in southern Europe and his snakelike dragon is typically Byzantine, the triptych’s lower register features portraits of three Ethiopian saints, Tekle Haymanot (founder of the great monastery of Debra Libanos), Ewostatewos and Kiros (brother of the late 4th-century emperor, Theodosius the Great), in a style introduced by Fere Tseyon.
The 18th-century “Mary Nursing Her Infant Son, Crucifixion, Christ with a Crown of Thorns, Donor Portrait” portrays an atypically humanized Chirst, with a plump body of a child not uncommon to European paintings of the day. The anachronistic nobleman donor painted into the picture wears a sword and a collared tunic of imported flowered fabric, both attesting to his social status. His round, full “Afro” typified court fashion during the 18th centuryand leaves a weird, 1970s sense of deja vu in the modern viewer.
Beyond works that are alive with the rhythm of line and bold color of other African cultures, with the decorative flatness common to Coptic and Byzantine art, and, in the later period, with the serenity of Italian Renaissance panel painting, and beyond material artifacts that establish Aksum as a major player in the Eastern Mediterranean world of the early Christian era, visitors to “Sacred Art” are also fortunate to see silver, bronze and brass crosses of interlanced and leaflike design; 15th-century illuminated manuscripts (copied from ninth-century manuscripts), whose monastic style is less naturalistic and relies more on bright primary colors than do court style paintings; and unique liturgical fans of great expanse, whose painted stories of, say, “Our Lady Mary with Angels, Apostles, Saints, and Prophets,” do not entirely disguise the fact that their functiones was to keep flies away from the Eucharistic bread. Infused with faith, surrounded by foes, and not infrequently swollen with pride, independent Ethiopia created wonders. Thanks to “Sacred Art,” these far-off representatives of humanity are no longer “the most distant of men” of whom Homer sang. Hallelujah!
_______________________________________
Reprinted by Permission from american vision Magazine. Henry H. Chase is a Senior Editor of american vision.