Readers glancing at Erica Cruikshank Dodd’s book on the frescoes in the Syrian Monastery of Moses the Ethiopian will not find ready evidence of the “new art history.” Unfashionable terms like “influence” and “Oriental” abound, and nowhere does one come across references to “the gaze” or the construction of gender. More careful examination, however, will soon show that Dodd indeed participates in current debates about the visual culture of the Mediterranean in the period of the Crusades. She does so in two principal ways: by bringing to scholarly attention a virtually unknown painted church program from Muslim-controlled Syria, and by proposing a new interpretation of the interchange of artistic styles and subjects from East to West. Her contribution is substantial and in many ways original.

The main subjects of Dodd’s work are the frescoes in the monastic church of Mar Musa al-Habashi (St. Moses the Ethiopian), located near Nebek, Syria. The paintings belong to two principal phases: The first was completed between 1058 and 1088 C.E., and the final, major program dates to 1192 C.E. Dodd has compiled an impressive amount of information, documentary evidence, and interpretation in this dense, compact book. The text principally consists of clear analyses of the site’s history and of the iconography and style of the paintings. The book also includes a descriptive catalogue of the frescoes, appendices, and indices. The appendices include important documentation and translation of the Syriac and Arabic inscriptions by John J. C. McCullough and Kassem Toueir; two interesting but thorny topics that are usefully removed from the central part of the book (one on hand gestures, by Dodd, and on the other, ties between Sicily and Syria, by Charelli); and a technical study of the frescoes by James Martin and Nicholas Zammuto. Accompanying these are numerous color and black-and-white plates.

If these paintings are known at all to most readers, it will be because of Dodd’s previous articles, which this book supersedes. These earlier publications document her extraordinary effort, spanning several decades, to study and photograph the best-preserved program of medieval Christian wall paintings in Syria. Almost all of the photographs are hers, including those from lesser-known sites. Since the time she began work at Mar Musa, portions of the paintings have fallen off the walls and been destroyed. With persistence and stamina, she documented the paintings on each visit, and we can therefore consult photographs of frescoes that would otherwise be completely unknown to us today. That said, the book would have benefited from more professional photography. The tonalities and hues in many of the color plates are incorrect, and no general color views of the church interior are included. Additionally, several of the photographs are slightly out of focus. The problem undoubtedly stems from the paucity of available funds for documenting works of art (as Dodd went to extraordinary efforts to document the church properly and should not be criticized for failing to produce high-quality images for the book).

Dodd carefully situates these paintings in the potentially confusing mix of cultures, religions, styles, and iconographical formulations that constitute the visual culture of the eastern Mediterranean. She is fully in command of recent and often obscure work in the field of eastern Christian art. Her treatment of the paintings and their historical context is wide ranging and thorough. In most respects, her methods belong to traditional art history as exemplified by the publications of André Grabar and Kurt Weitzmann. At times she breaks inventively from standard conceptualizations about the dynamics of artistic change and development. She proposes, for example, that an influx of Ethiopian monks in Syria may have reinvigorated monumental wall painting in churches (24). She also makes the novel suggestion that an Ethiopian source exercised significant influence on Christian art in the eastern Mediterranean. Elsewhere, her explanation of iconographic motifs is conventional but persuasive. Traditional art history has much to offer, especially in understudied fields like Syrian Christian art, and Dodd’s work stands with the best in the genre.

Dodd situates the Mar Musa frescoes from 1192, her major focus here, within the twelfth- and thirteenth-century revitalization of the Syrian Orthodox Church. She offers an analysis of the iconography and style of these paintings and proposes a new model for understanding the role of Syrian Christian art in the Crusader period. Having shown that the iconographic character of these frescoes has ties to early Christian, Byzantine, Coptic, Norman Sicilian, and Crusader art, she demonstrates that the style of the Mar Musa paintings is a different matter entirely. While distinctly Syrian in character, it belongs to the shared visual culture of the Muslim-controlled territories, which included the work of both Muslim and Christian artisans. Its closest surviving relatives are Christian paintings in Lebanon and a Fatimid work. Dodd maps out the complex network of hybrid styles in the eastern Mediterranean, which has been made clearer in recent decades by the work of Weitzmann, Jaroslav Folda, Annemarie Weyl Carr, and others. She adds a new element to this scholarship by claiming a major role for Syrian paintings. She proposes that they served as mediators between the Islamic and Christian realms in both the Mediterranean region and northwestern Europe. The visual products of this contact paralleled the role of Christians in Syria vis-à-vis their Muslim rulers and the Crusaders. She writes:

In the realm of politics and history during the Crusades, the East Christian Arabs frequently acted as intermediaries between “Saracen” and Crusading Christian. They were trusted by the Crusaders because they knew the Moslem Arabs, spoke Arabic and could be counted as friends against the enemy while they were accustomed to work with the Moslems, sometimes playing one side against the other. Their art betrays the same ambiguity as their politics (123).

In a few cases, I disagree with Dodd’s methods and conclusions. For example, her practice of resorting to the influence of lost monumental art in Jerusalem is so familiar as to be suspect. Implicit in this model is the assumption that large-scale representations were more important and influential than the “minor arts.” This pattern of thought likely has more to do with the Renaissance foundations of the discipline of art history than it does with the working practices of Mediterranean artists in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In all fairness, Dodd has not imagined these destroyed mosaics and frescoes, but instead depends on textual sources. Indeed, her treatment is so thorough that the diagram she presents for the dissemination of iconographic types from Jerusalem seems plausible, even if I am not fully persuaded by it.

Dodd has contributed significantly to our understanding of monumental painting in medieval Syria, and has also added an intriguing new element to debates about the character of eastern Mediterranean art. While the major painted program of 1192 has close ties to works from all over the region and parts of Europe, it cannot be mistaken for anything other than Syrian Orthodox art. Before this, the Syrian artistic tradition was not understood to have played much of a role in the art of the eastern Mediterranean. In her view, it was not just one more ingredient, but rather an essential element, functioning as a vital intermediary between East and West. While I remain less than completely convinced by the evidence for this new role, I admire its freshness, and in principle can certainly allow for a model that gives Syrian art an active part to play in the transmission of the visual culture of the Islamic East to the West.

With this comprehensive publication, the program at Mar Musa can also add meaningfully to discussions about the character of Christian art produced in territories under Muslim rule. A parallel to the Syrian frescoes, located in a similar context, is the painted program in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea, from about forty years later. The Mar Musa frescoes and the 1232–33 paintings in the Coptic monastery share an approach to line, color, and the placement of monumental figures within frames, although the two are stylistically distinct. The Egyptian paintings, however, include an Arabization of iconography that the Syrian paintings lack. In the Mar Musa program, the only men wearing turbans are in Hell and are convincingly identified by Dodd as Muslims. In the Coptic paintings, Christians, a pagan, and a Jew wear turbans. No Muslims are shown at all, and the turban is a common item of dress, not a feature signifying religion. It should perhaps not surprise us to find this kind of difference in two parallel settings, given the rich complexity of eastern Mediterranean visual culture in this period. Dodd should be commended for her important contribution to this fascinating subject.