Preserving Egypt's Early Christian Past at the Red Monastery, Sohag

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is pleased to congratulate Professor Elizabeth Bolman (Ph.D. '97, History of Art) who is named the 2018 recipient of the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize by the Medieval Academy of America. The prize recognizes Professor Bolman's critical work in the digital preservation of the Red Monastery in Sohag, Egypt. As Project Director of “The Digital Red Monastery Church: Open Access for Scholars and the Public, for Research and Teaching,” Professor Bolman and her team have undertaken a highly sophisticated technique of laser scanning to produce a high-resolution panoramic scan of the church’s superbly painted triconch. Panoramic scans of the painted Tomb of St. Shenoute at the nearby White Monastery in Sohag were also made.

The laser scanning was part of a major conservation project that Bolman directed for well over a decade to preserve a church at the Red Monastery. Support for the project came from the United States Agency for International Development, and the grant was administered by the American Research Center in Egypt. Built in the late 5th century CE, the Red Monastery is one of the best preserved Byzantine churches from Late Antiquity. The church has aesthetic similarities to its more widely-known contemporaries at San Vitale in Ravenna and the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. However, it is the remarkable preservation of its secco (tempera) and encaustic paintings that sets the Red Monastery apart. The church features a vibrant interior of painted depictions of early Byzantine iconography and ornamental motifs, which cover no less than eighty percent of the elaborate triconch sanctuary, including its three massive semidomes.

In 2002, the World Monuments Watch named the church one of the 100 most endangered cultural heritage sites in the world. Thus there was grave need systematically to scan and document the church’s polychromatic surfaces and architectural ornamentation in the face of structural degradation and the effects of time. The monks of the Red Monastery have resumed liturgical services in the church after the completion of Bolman’s restoration project. 

Learn more about scanning at the Red Monastery through the project's online laser scan flythrough, created by Pietro Gasparri, with the assistance of Nicholas Warner. View the church's interior at length and in fine detail as part of the open access component of The Digital Red Monastery Project reconstruction, available here. Learn more about the history of St. Shenoute of Atripe and view the project's panoramas of two rooms of the tomb at the White Monastery: First Chamber; Second Chamber.

Professor Bolman is the Elsie B. Smith Professor in Liberal Arts and Chair of the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She previously taught for seventeen years in the Department of Art History at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and most recently served as department chair. In addition to the Digital Red Monastery Project, Professor Bolman has published the (2016) edited volume The Red Monastery: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt, available from Yale University Press. Two chapters in it were written by her doctoral advisor at Bryn Mawr College, Dale Kinney, Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus of the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of History of Art.