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This chapter discusses Marcus Simaika's efforts to preserve the ancient Coptic churches that had been subjected to destruction and damage. In the preface to his book A Brief Guide to the Coptic Museum and to the Principal Ancient Churches of Cairo, Simaika addressed the importance of Coptic antiquities. He divided Coptic art into two main periods: the first spanned the era from the fourth to the tenth centuries, and the second period extended from the tenth century. During his stay at Alfred J. Butler's house in Oxford in the fall of 1890, Simaika warned both Butler and Somers Clarke of the danger to the ancient Coptic churches from well-meaning but misguided benefactors who wanted to replace these priceless monuments with Italian marbled structures in the Greek style. Simaika proposed that these churches be placed under the control of the “Committee for the Preservation of Arab Art.”

This chapter discusses the recognition of Marcus Simaika's work both at home and abroad. Among other accolades, Simaika was made an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Fellow of the British Society of Archaeologists, and a Member of the British Royal Geographic Society in 1917. In 1923, M. Georges Foucart, the Ministère de l'instruction publique et des cultes of France, presented to the library of the Coptic Museum all their publications on Coptic studies. Similar donations were made by the authorities of the British Museum. Furthermore, Simaika was invited to lecture at Cambridge University in 1924 on Coptic art and archaeology and at the University of Stockholm on Coptic art. On February 20, 1947, three years after Simaika's death, a ceremony was held at the Coptic Museum to inaugurate a new hall and to unveil the bust of Marcus Pasha Simaika.

Yuhanna al-Armani is an icon painter whose paintings still adorn a number of churches in Old Cairo. Yet, curiously enough, he is often credited with being behind a revival in Coptic religious art in the eighteenth century. He belonged to Cairo's Armenian community, a community with ancient roots in Cairo, which was sufficiently well integrated into Egyptian society that one of its members could become a leading painter of Coptic icons. This chapter attempts to sketch a biography of Yuhanna al-Armani. Needless to say, Yuhanna's icons, the body of work he produced, remain an important source of information on the man and his times. By taking into consideration the works he painted and the archival material deriving from various sources, one can tie the concrete cultural production to the social and economic conditions of the eighteenth century.

The Akhmim ciboria and icons with saints displaying rosaries fit into the period between the inimitable Mattary and the sophisticated Ibrahim al-Nasih, who worked between the 1740s and 1780. It is art of a theological and artistic revival, of ecumenism but also of provincial restraint, and lacking major artists. Without documents this attribution remains preliminary. New discoveries in the illustrated and dated Coptic-Arabic manuscripts from the Akhmim region, presented by Father Bigoul al-Suriany in this volume, will expand our knowledge. The meaning of the rosary as the symbol of the Coptic Catholic faith or as a sign of modernity has to be further researched. Christians in Upper Egypt cling to their traditions. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the modest Akhmim figurative art from the Beylik-Mamluk and missionary eras are those details that are loaned from late antique and early Coptic art in the Thebaide. Used more than a millennium later on hybrid Coptic-Arabic icons, these local attributes and gestures again demonstrate the remarkable survival of indigenous iconography.

In the course of the 17th century, during the Ottoman period, significant innovations were introduced into Coptic art, which has led some scholars to speak of the “Akhmimic style.”. The Akhmimic style is a worldwide Catholic contribution, which is comparable to the Mozarabic style. Like the Mozarabic style it consisted of different cultural characteristics and styles, helping to spread the Catholic faith throughout the Middle East and Africa. Some scholars have considered two different styles in two separate periods, but from this study it appears that it was one style with two sequential stages, from about the year ad 1663 to about the year ad 1890.

This chapter examines the Christian funerary stelae or tombstones excavated at the Fayoum Oasis in Egypt. Various regional conditions influenced the development of Christian funerary stelae in Egypt and they fall within the larger category of so-called Coptic art influenced at first by Greco-Roman funerary decorations. The decorative programs of the stelae from burial grounds in the Fayoum were varied, but generally fall into three types. These are the mother-with-child stelae, the aedicula type or orans type, and the stelae with elaborate crosses.

The massive wall painting conservation project now underway in the church at the Red Monastery near Sohag is contributing substantially to the known corpus of late antique art. Obscured under layers of soot, dust, and varnish for centuries, even most specialists of Coptic art had little familiarity with these paintings. The newly cleaned figural images and non-figural architectural polychromy are of great significance, and even in advance of their publication have drawn considerable interest not only from Coptologists but also from specialists in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine world. The results of early campaigns of conservation work are now in press, and this chapter introduces the monument and presents previously unpublished findings from work in 2006 and early 2007.

This chapter describes the preservation efforts undertaken by the American Research Center in Egypt on the famous murals, preserved in the Cairo Coptic Museum, which were originally excavated in Apa Jeremiah's Saqqara monastery and Apa Apollo's Bawit monastery. These wall paintings have traditionally been considered the principal symbols of Coptic art. The Saqqara niches were excavated between 1906 and 1910. In keeping with Egyptian tradition, all the paintings are painted on plaster a secco. The Saqqara niches were constructed of mud brick lined with a white lime plaster arricio, often quite coarse and uneven, containing siliceous alluvial sand and some occasional plant fibers. The Bawit niches were excavated in 1913. The two niches were painted on mud with only a thin white lime wash applied for the paintings, rendering them considerably more delicate than the Saqqara niches.