Das Wort im Bild

In the Coptic Church, numerous pictorial representations with Christian content attest their deep significance for the Coptic faith. In order to give expression to individual motifs, individual passages from various texts were transformed into works of representational art, and thus specific forms of representation were created.
This study brings together for the first time in a monograph the iconographies of twelve monks and martyrs in Egypt and also the hagiographic textual sources that were determinative for their representational images. Furthermore, new identifications, corrections, and reconstructions are offered, and the iconographic variants that are found in icons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are described.
In this way, questions about the “word in pictures” and the relationship between Coptic hagiography and Coptic art can be given a copious answer.