What is doing in Ethiopia a wooden triptych apparently from the Sienese school?
“The image of Our Lord Jesus Christ”, considered being the oldest African icon and exhibited to believers only once a year, was first described by Diana Spencer, an English art historian, in 1970, when she reached the Gutij village and the Monastery where it is kept, after an adventurous journey to say the least.
However, it was worth it. The work was truly unique, but showed ambigous characteristics, which made it difficult to establish its origin and dating.
Today Jacques Mercier, who wrote a book about it, reinterprets it by hypothesizing a non-Byzantine origin, idea that could pave the way for new studies on the spread of Italian stylistic features outside areas already known to us.
In fact, the work has iconographic features close to both the African and Byzantine, and Sienese fields. The rendering of the faces obtained from countless very fine and crossed brushstrokes, the use of punches in the halo of Christ, suggest a proximity to what was the established procedure in Siena in the fourteenth century. At the same time, the decoration of Christ’s robe is close to the motifs found on Ethiopian processional crosses.
Mercier puts forward the hypothesis that a Sienese master reached Ethiopia and produced the icon there.
Who he could possibly be, how he came to Africa and why, remains to be discovered; quite extraordinary, considering that the artist would have made a journey of thousands of kilometers to one of the most inaccessible areas of the continent.
A further hypothesis is proposed by Verena Krebs, who recalls an Ethiopian diplomatic mission in Venice in 1402, at which time the icon may have been commissioned.
Surely it is a fascinating work from many points of view. A lot more could be discovered if we knew the materials with which it was made.
Scientific analyses would make a difference. Imagine a radiographic and reflectographic diagnostic campaign (copy or single work?) With the addition of a study on the essence of the wood (European or African?), on the pictorial palette (where did the colors come from?), concluding with macro-photographs of the punches and of the characteristics of the brushstroke.
A detailed comparison could then be made with the techniques of the Sienese masters and with their works in our Under the Gold database. A comparative study of the diagnostic results could help to understand it better and perhaps write a new chapter in the history and history of art.
