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Diptych with Twelve Apostles & St. Paul
Workshop or Circle of Wäldä Maryam (Ethiopia, active mid- to late 1600s-early 1700s)
c. 1700
- Medium
- Tempera, wood, textile
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 39 x 51 cm (15 3/8 x 20 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- Africa, East Africa, Ethiopia, presumably Gondär
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, African Art
- Credit line
- Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Depicting 13 holy men, this diptych (two-panel painting) is sized for an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian church or elite home. It is painted in the bold, colorful style associated with royal court workshops from the early 1600s to the mid-1700s. Painter Wäldä Maryam (or someone he trained) set this scene of Christ’s apostles in the context of his homeland. Each saint wears fashionable clothing imported from India. While they are posed and dressed similarly to emphasize their group identity, the artist portrayed their faces and hairstyles individually. Captions in Ge’ez––an eastern African language dating to the 400s BCE––identify each by name.
