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Yuhanna al-Armani's biography is studied with the hope of throwing light upon different aspects of eighteenth-century Egypt. In a sense, Yuhanna was an ordinary person who through his work had achieved a certain status. He never attained great wealth, but seems to have lived in relative comfort, like many other craftsmen, whether they were living in Cairo or another Ottoman city. His career sheds light on the ways in which artists functioned and carried out their work and gives us an idea of their social status. It might not be entirely relevant to this undertaking to present details about his family and social networks. However, this chapter presents these details in the hope that they might bring Yuhanna back to life to some extent and—more importantly—might be of use to other scholars in future research.

This chapter focuses on the traditions and economics of craftsmen in the field within which Yuhanna al-Armani worked. Using both the visual and archival material, this chapter tries to place Yuhanna al-Armani's artwork within the context of the division and organization of labor. There is as yet no complete catalogue of Coptic icons produced in Egypt or surviving in Egyptian churches and monasteries. Thus, there is no complete listing of all the icons attributed to Yuhanna al-Armani. This chapter relies on regular visits to the churches of Cairo and Old Cairo in order to record Yuhanna's icons, which still hang there. It relies on these observations and on a study that was undertaken some forty years ago, in 1971, by Nubar Der Mikaelian but never published. This chapter divides Yuhanna's work into two categories: works commissioned for churches and monasteries, and works commissioned by individual patrons.

Trying to understand any particular trend out of a historical setting can easily lead to a distorted view of the matter. The same is true for the legacy of an artist like Yuhanna al-Armani. This study has argued that Yuhanna's icons developed and flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of a combination of factors that coincided at that time. It has argued against the dominant view among many scholars that the artist had recently arrived in Egypt and had come with his cultural luggage, for the most part a set of exogenous cultural traditions that flourished in the new society he moved to. The traditions that Yuhanna introduced are assumed to have been more modern and more developed than those that could be found locally.

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.