A special exhibit at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum is not only a delight to the eye and mind, but also sheds light on a little-known relationship between the two oldest nations to have embraced Christianity, some 1,700 years ago. The show reveals that Armenia and Ethiopia enjoyed close ties over the centuries, ties that radiate through the two countries’ art. Both nations remain predominantly Christian to this day.
“Ethiopia at the Crossroads” — referring to the east African nation’s unique geographical position at a meeting point between Europe, Africa and Asia — celebrates three decades of acquiring Ethiopian art by the Walters, which holds one of the world’s premier collections of early Christian books.
First Christian nations
Armenia officially adopted Christianity in 302 CE, followed by Ethiopia in the 320s, about a decade after the Emperor Constantine legalized Christian worship in the Roman Empire in 313. The relationship between the two countries, despite their distance on the map, began very early.
Ethiopian and Armenian clerics cared, side by side, for holy sites in places such as Jerusalem. Manuscripts, textiles, and small devotional and liturgical objects went back and forth.
In Jerusalem, the Ethiopian and Armenian artists share an early emphasis on the symbolism of the cross. Indeed, the very earliest signs of Ethiopia’s new Christian faith in the fourth century are coins minted under the first Christian Emperor, which at first show a crescent moon, and then are suddenly marked with crosses. But the endlessly creative and often bejeweled crosses of Ethiopian Christian churches did not include the body of Christ. That came later, as a new influence arrived in Ethiopia: Catholic missionaries.
Canon Tables side by side
One of the thrills of the Baltimore exhibit is a chance to see a book decorated by Armenia’s most celebrated medieval book illuminator, Toros Roslin. This precious possession of the Walters is on view side by side with an Ethiopian Gospel book at the Walters show.
The Sebastia Gospel of 1262 (MS No. 539) is not only the most lavishly decorated among the signed works of Roslin, but the only one in the United States.
The manuscript was kept in the ancient trading hub of Sivas (Sebastia, formerly part of Armenia Minor, now Turkey) since the 17th century, where it remained until the Armenian genocide in 1919. Ten years later American rail magnate Henry Walters purchased it in Paris.
The pages of Ethiopian and Armenian Gospels on view at the Walters are canon tables, a system of dividing the Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, before the modern system of chapters and verses came along in the 13th and 16th centuries. The tables showed the concordances among the different Gospel accounts side-by-side. The canon tables of Toros Roslin and the Ethiopic example in the exhibit both show colorful birds atop the arched frames of the tables and strikingly similar geometric designs decorating the columns.
Catholic influences
The Baltimore exhibit also highlights the influence of Western Catholic art in Ethiopia, despite theological disputes. Beginning in 1402, Ethiopia exchanged ambassadors with the leading courts of Western Europe. In the late 1400s, a Venetian artist-monk, Niccolo Brancaleon, is recorded in the Ethiopian royal court. Soon after, the Ethiopian artist Fare Sayon transformed the European tradition of devotional images of the Virgin and Child into a local vernacular, adding the archangels Gabriel and Michael guarding Mary and Christ, and using the typical Ethiopian colors of red, yellow, green and blue.
In the later 1500s, Jesuit missionaries from Portugal brought prints of popular Catholic imagery as visual propaganda to Ethiopia. While the Jesuits themselves were expelled in the 1630s, they briefly converted the emperor Susanyos and left behind a rich artistic tradition, adapted to the national style. They introduced the image of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, wearing the Crown of Thorns and displaying the wounds from the physical abuse he endured before his death on the cross. Meant to evoke an emotional response to Christ’s suffering from the viewer, and often paired with Christ being lowered from the cross after his Crucifixion, such icons became very important for individual devotion and collective worship.
Hamerman writes from Reston.
