On the eve of 7 January, Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Christians attended Christmas Mass to celebrate the birth of Jesus some two weeks after the Western world celebrated the same occasion on 25 December.

For the followers of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, Easter, which marks the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, is the more significant feast, in view of the perception that it is the completion of the journey of salvation that started with the nativity of Christ.

In Egyptian Coptic art, images of the crucifixion are also more common than those of the birth of Christ. However, those of the nativity are among the most celebrated.

“Egyptian pictorial depictions of the birth of Jesus have a unique style that is related to ancient Egyptian art and reflects elements of Coptic Orthodox faith in a way that is very singular,” said painter and professor of fine art Beshoy Zaraa.

Coptic Orthodox himself, Zaraa was born in 1988 and brought up in Upper Egypt, where he studied and teaches at schools of fine art in Luxor and Assiut.

He has studied the history of the depictions of Christian subjects in European Renaissance paintings as well as the evolution of Egyptian painting from the early to the late 20th century. He is also a painter interested in depicting key moments of the Christian faith, including the birth of Jesus Christ.

Drawing on this experience, Zaraa argues that what Egyptian art has to offer in this respect is “unique in the symbolism that it uses.”

Unlike the works of the leading European painters of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, where details of the birth of Jesus or moments in his life, or of the Virgin Mary, are carefully portrayed, Egyptian paintings “for the most part, especially those not produced for commercial purposes or not destined to end up on the walls of a church, are high in ideas and sentiments but low on details,” he said.

“The works of Egyptian artists, including those by Ragheb Ayyad for example, reflect on the soul of the story rather than a straightforward depiction,” Zaraa said. This is not just about the outlines, but also, and maybe more, about the colours used.

The colours used in the nativity scenes painted by Ayyad, an early to mid-20th-century Egyptian expressionist painter, are intended to evoke the birth of a boy child in Egypt as much as the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary.

Moreover, “examining the paintings that depict the key moments of the Christian faith in Egypt through Egyptian Coptic art, one finds that for centuries they took the form of icons and murals rather than anything else,” Zaraa said.

 It is not easy to speak with certainty about the evolution of Egyptian Coptic art, given that many of the icons and murals of the early centuries of Christianity in Egypt have been “damaged, having been touched by generations of worshippers in search of blessings.”

Many icons were destroyed in the 7th century CE as a result of the Orthodox Churches’ distrust of images, describing them as a distraction from true Christian faith.

After the Arab conquest of Egypt in the 7th century CE and the decline in the visual arts, there was not much room for the evolution of religious images outside the context of the Coptic Church and its followers.

“The church in Egypt was influenced by features familiar to the artists of the country as a whole, and so we see colours that are very different from those used in famous European Renaissance paintings,” Zaraa said.

“This is not surprising, and in pictorial depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus made in the 20th and 2st centuries we have seen African artists, for example, depicting them as African-looking and relating to the core Christian idea that Christ is there to save humanity at large.”

“Political and economic developments have an impact on trends in art, so while Egypt was always known for its unique icons, faces painted on wood, it did not see a large production of paintings, including, but not only, those with religious associations.”

Egypt needed to wait until after the French Expedition in the late 18th century and the rule of Mohamed Ali Pasha in the early 19th century for its art to take on a new style.

“Once art was re-embraced, there was room for Christian images to start being produced of better quality and not just for religious purposes,” Zaraa said.

CHRISTIAN IMAGERY: According to Zaraa, images of the birth or crucifixion of Jesus are not always about these moments alone.

“Not if we are talking about a work of art, like those made by Ragheb Ayyad or Gamail Shafik, in the case of Egyptian art, or for that matter those by the Russian painter Marc Chagall in European art,” he said.

In his 1938 painting “The White Crucifixion,” Chagall, born in the late 19th century and dying in 1985, depicts the European Holocaust by making reference to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Zaraa said. “Chagall, himself a Jew, was using the moment of crucifixion for its emotional and moral resonance rather than for the actual moment that Christians believed happened,” he argued.

The use of Christian motifs to refer to the plight of Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s continued in other works by Chagall, including his 1942 painting “The Madonna of the Village,” Zaraa said. This was a transformative moment when the Christian creed was being used for inspiration rather than as a testimony of faith.

Zaraa said that the French painter Paul Gauguin’s “The Yellow Christ” and “The Green Christ” of 1889 represent the epitome of suffering rather than being a reflection on the torture of crucifixion itself.

Today, Zaraa added, it is not hard to see how some Palestinian artists, irrespective of whether or not they are Christian, can depict the atrocities being committed against the children of Gaza by using the symbolism of the Massacre of the Innocents.

In the Christian story, this was when King Herod ordered the killing of all boys under the age of two after he was told by the Magi that a child destined to become the King of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem.

“This is the difference between art in which Christianity is an element and art intended to glorify religion and faith,” Zaraa said. He added that while Europe had needed a Renaissance to move from a limited perception of religion in art, Egyptian art, with its centuries of history, had found it easier to move into the realm of abstraction.

Zaraa said that the Christian story of the nativity and resurrection had been used in Egyptian art to show similarities to the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, mother, mourner, and magical healer.

He added that in Europe the 14th-century Italian painter Giotto had begun to liberate the depiction of Christian history from earlier limitations with works like the “Ognissanti Madonna” and “The Flight into Egypt,” both produced in 1306, or “The Crucifixion,” produced in 1320.

Especially in the case of “The Crucifixion,” it is the spirit of the moment rather than its actual details that are presented.

“Two centuries later, with his “Madonna Litta,” Leonardo da Vinci used the devotional subject of the Madonna lactans, with an airy background, and the features of both the Virgin Mary and Jesus to reflect on the rejoicing of motherhood in general and not only the glory of the birth of Jesus Christ,” Zaraa said.

Between the works of Giotto and those of Leonardo, Zaraa said, there was also the work of the Italian painter Botticelli, notably the 1501 painting “The Mystical Nativity.” This is about the birth and the eventual crucifixion of Christ, given the sheet that the child is resting on in this painting, one that would eventually be put around His crucified body.

It is about the path of life and death and the hidden pain behind the face of joy, all “quite philosophical and compatible with the ideas of the time.”

“In the case of Egypt, despite the obstacles that faced the path of art, especially under Ottoman rule, there was already a huge reservoir to draw on,” Zaraa said. Stories of the Virgin Mary and Jesus were not confined to artists who subscribed to the Christian faith.

“Egyptian artists in general have taken inspiration from the Christian tradition,” he said.

There is an obvious difference in the depiction of the birth of a child in the works of an artist like Wagdi Habashi and those of Helmi Al-Touni, who both died in 2024. However, Zaraa said that it is hard to think that either artists’ works are not influenced by images of the Virgin Mary carrying the baby Jesus as “engraved” in the collective Egyptian consciousness, “which is the widely shared folk art that has so many elements behind its shared origins.”

In some of his own works, Zaraa depicts Christian tradition as a journey from darkness into light, one in which the depth of pain allows for the birth of a new life.

He agrees that these works do not suit the walls of a church. Instead, they are intended for an art gallery. However, he said that this is where his paintings relate to those by other artists who have sought to depict Christian stories.

“For the most part,” they always saw their works as art and examples of an art “which depicts reality,” he concluded.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly