The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art: On Portuguese-Ethiopian Contacts in the Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries

The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art On Portuguese-Ethiopian Contacts in the Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries

edited by Manuel Joao Ramos and Isabel Boavida

Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. 181 pp., 16 color plates, 53 black-and-white photos, index, 6 maps, bibliography. 45.00 [pounds sterling] hardback.

This beautifully produced book contains the most interesting papers of the Fifth International Conference on Ethiopian Art, held in Arrabida, Portugal, in 1999. It is devoted fully to the artistic and architectural heritage of sixteenth and seventeenth century Christian Ethiopia, a time when it was most influenced by foreign artists and builders who had come in the wake of the Portuguese Jesuit mission to Ethiopia in the 1550s (in its turn a result of the modest military assistance given by Portugal to the Ethiopian emperor Libna Dingil fighting off a Muslim jihad from the coastal lowlands). Many ruins of churches, religious schools, palaces, royal camps, or residences inspired by European building styles are still found scattered across northern Ethiopia. Notable contributions to other Ethiopian material art traditions were made by Turks, Indians, and possibly Egyptians, in the form of motifs in the styles of architecture and new craft work techniques. Labor was also provided by other foreigners, including Greeks and Armenians. Traditional luxury goods like oriental rugs and textiles were imported from India or the Near East and are still found in many churches. Art historians have long been fascinated by the subject of foreign influence on Ethiopian art and building traditions and thus the topic is comparatively well studied, but this book is a very welcome addition, presenting material based on recent research and a re-examination of historical records.

The period during which foreigners met or confronted the indigenous religious and artistic traditions of the old Ethiopian Christian highland empire produced both glory and destruction. It ended in civil war in the late 1620s--early 1630s, as a result of Ethiopian emperor Susinyos converting to Catholicism against the will of most of the local clergy and population. Many Roman Catholic churches and palaces were subsequently destroyed.

The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art begins with a short introduction by the editors, who plead for recognizing diversity in Ethiopian art history but also for seeing the connecting lines between these various traditions. The cumulative result of the chapters is a good overview of the variety in only one tradition--the late medieval arts of Christian Highland Ethiopia--and treats a broad range of subjects, from mural paintings in churches and castles to the history of an old helmet and mail shirt from a sixteenth century foreign soldier kept in a monastery. Most of the papers are accessible to readers with a general interest in Ethiopian art, while others are quite specialized and provide much new detail.

Part 1 contains five papers by specialists on the old religious and urban stone architecture. Historian Richard Pankhurst gives a good survey of the four old imperial capitals (Imfraz, Gorgora, Danqaz, and Gondar). L. Berry describes the sixteenth and seventeenth century local Ethiopian and "Jesuit" style buildings in the Lake T'ana basin; contrary to accepted opinion, Berry denies the significance of the impact of the second on the first. Architect Fasil Giorgis contributes an overview of the interaction of the foreign and local influences and technologies in Gondar architecture, while I. Campbell gives a case study of the hitherto not-very-well-known early seventeenth century church of Ganata Yesus in Azazo, of which only some ruins remain. The last chapter in Part 1 is a study by P. Henze of the architecture and ornamentation of ruins of the monastery at Martula Maryam in Gojjam, an informative but brief contribution with news on the unusual decorations and details of the building, revealing a definite foreign influence.

The chapters on stone architecture do not offer the new interpretations one might have expected. Most of the authors, in a readable manner, present and summarize what is already known--the locations, the buildings, the artifacts, the exchanges between local styles and foreign-inspired styles--and call for further research. But, paradoxically, such a call has been made very often in the past decades, and not much seems to have been added since the work of, for example, A. Monti della Corte (1938), F. Anfray (1960s and 1970s), L. Berry (1970s-1980s) and some others. Berry, in his chapter on monumental stone architecture, notes that while further field study might be needed," ... it appears unlikely that such an effort will ever be made" (p. 27). Certainly the very poor state of the remnants still standing and the lack of (new) historical source material make this very difficult.

In Part 2, five chapters discuss icons and mural paintings. Here we find detailed, original studies. There is a chapter on the eighteenth century miniatures depicting Ethiopian saints by S. Chojnacki; a quite fascinating study by C. Bosc-Tiesse of the use of sixteenth century occidental engravings by the French Jesuit J. Nadal as an example for paintings in the Ethiopian church of Narga Sellasse; and A. Wion's chapter on the production and use of pigments in the seventeenth century, showing that some of the most important ones were "luxury" imports from India, Europe, or the Middle East. The depiction of the Muslim warrior Ahmed, nicknamed "Gragn," in Ethiopian folk painting is treated by Girma Fisseha. T.C. Tribe's analysis of the representation of space and time in eighteenth century Gondarine painting, the most ambitious and interesting paper in terms of theory, highlights the religious and political worldview of the Ethiopian Christian elite at the time of the resurgence of the empire in the seventeenth century. Tribe presents a cogent interpretation of eschatological/apocalyptic elements as expressed in manuscript paintings, maps, and narratives of the period.