Ethiopian art comes out of hiding
About the publication of the book "L'Art de l'Ethiopie - Des origines au Siècle d'or (330-1527)", by Jacques Mercier, published by Place des Victoires.
Geometric painting of an incredible modernity, crosses with innumerable forms, coloured illuminations, fascinating icons... The infinite richness of its motifs and techniques makes Ethiopia the most creative actor of Christian art in Africa. A beautiful book has just been published devoted to Ethiopian works of art from the 4th to the early 16th century, based on the investigations carried out by anthropologist Jacques Mercier over more than fifty years in more than 350 churches. An art gallery like no other!
The first full-page illumination chosen to illustrate Sophie Flouquet's article in Beaux-Arts Magazine, "Jesus the Teacher", shows the extent to which Ethiopian art was able to constantly renew itself while retaining a profound originality. The modernity of this compact crowd on a parchment attests as well as its spectacular landscapes to the singularity of the only African state that was able to resist Western colonisation. The discovery of Lucy in 1974 made Ethiopia the cradle of humanity. But its religious art could well make it the cradle of luminism, the artistic movement that pays particular attention to light.
The illustrations in Jacques Mercier's book are strikingly beautiful and mostly unpublished. Combined with new analyses, including those of perhaps the oldest illustrated manuscripts in Christianity, they shed a unique light on this art form, which is full of masterpieces. It is difficult today, in view of the civil wars that continue to ravage the country, not to be concerned about its heritage...
A little history: the Constitution promulgated in 1995 established the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Its beginnings go back to the abolition of the monarchical regime in 1975. This book deals with the art of so-called historical Ethiopia, i.e. before 1975. More precisely, it is about religious art. We know from the appearance of the cross motif on Aksumite coins that the negus (king) of Aksum, Ezana, converted to Christianity around 330-340 CE, shortly after the legalisation of Christianity in the Roman Empire and the foundation of Constantinople. Most Ethiopian monarchs up to Haile Selassie subsequently claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The absence of Akkumite temples in the Ethiopian landscape and of sacred sculptures from this period suggests that Christianisation was marked by extensive destruction of earlier cult objects and buildings. The history of Ethiopian art elaborated in this book thus begins with this founding caesura, which notably substitutes the art of painting for that of sculpture. Almost all the artefacts preserved from then until the 18th century are liturgical objects or Christian symbols. As Jacques Mercier observes, "the history of Ethiopian art merges with that of Christian art". Hence the somewhat misleading title of this beautiful book... which can be happily forgiven as the reproductions of works of art are of such high quality.
The painters who worked in Aksum were excellently trained in protobyzantine art. The evangelists, the interlacing, the fauna and flora that decorate the Gospels of Abba Gärima are a succession of paintings, each one more refined than the last, having undoubtedly been protected from the ravages of time thanks to their oblivion in some hiding place until their discovery in the 14th century. Painting on stuccoed wood took over, and the Golden Age of Ethiopian art began with the reign of Dawitt (1378-1413), a sovereign who commissioned two masterpieces in a profoundly original style, including the "Life of the Saints and Martyrs", which was only rediscovered thanks to the good hiding place that protected it until the 19th century...