© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM/ART RESOURCE, NY
This carved cedarwood panel depicting the Baptism and Annunciation of Jesus is one of a set of ten impressive iconographic panels from a door at the Holy Virgin Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church, also known as the Hanging Church, in Cairo, Egypt. Using a motif frequently employed in medieval Eastern Orthodox art, the top scene shows a bearded Jesus waist-deep in the Jordan River, with John the Baptist extending his arm over Jesus and three angels holding garments on the opposite side. In the lower register, an angel approaches the Virgin Mary to announce Jesus’s coming birth.
The door panels, which are now on display in the British Museum, were carved around 1300, but the history of the church goes back much further. Among the oldest churches in Cairo, the Hanging Church was built atop two bastions of an earlier Roman fortress (enigmatically known as the Babylon fortress) that was established during the time of Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305 CE). The church likely dates to the fourth century, but its origin remains a mystery, since restoration work in the sixth century obscured evidence of its earliest phase. After a brief conversion to a mosque, the church was reconsecrated in the tenth century and has remained a center of Coptic Christianity ever since, even serving as the see of the Coptic patriarchate in the 11th–13th centuries.
This carved cedarwood panel depicting the Baptism and Annunciation of Jesus is one of a set of ten impressive iconographic panels from a door at the Holy Virgin Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church, also known as the Hanging Church, in Cairo, Egypt. Using a motif frequently employed in medieval Eastern Orthodox art, the top scene shows a bearded Jesus waist-deep in the Jordan River, with John the Baptist extending his arm over Jesus and three angels holding garments on the opposite side. In the lower register, an angel approaches the Virgin Mary to announce Jesus’s coming birth. The door panels, which […]
