Saint Anne from Faras
Eighth to ninth century
A woman with enormous dark eyes looks out from a fragment of plaster, her head wrapped in a pale veil, and holds one finger to her lips as if asking you to be quiet. An inscription in Greek beside her names her as Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. The painting is small, only about the size of a large book, and the colours are the ochres, browns and creamy whites of the Nubian desert where it was made. Of all the paintings in this gallery, it is the one that visitors remember, because the gesture is so intimate and so unexpected.
Saint Anne was painted on the wall of the cathedral of Faras, a Christian city on the Nile in what is now northern Sudan, sometime around the eighth or ninth century. The style comes from Byzantium and Coptic Egypt, with its flat outlines, frontal pose and huge expressive eyes, but the Nubian painters had their own softness of colour. The finger at the lips is very rare in Christian art; it may be a gesture of silence and prayer, or a reference to the secret of the Virgin's conception. Look at the line of the veil and the slight tilt of the head, drawn with great economy.
The cathedral of Faras was buried in sand for centuries, which preserved its paintings, and it was excavated in 1961 to 1964 by a Polish team under Kazimierz Michałowski as part of the UNESCO campaign to save the monuments of Nubia before the Aswan High Dam flooded the valley. The paintings were cut from the walls and divided between Khartoum and Warsaw. The site is now under Lake Nasser. Saint Anne has become the emblem of the museum.
Did You Know? The site of Faras lies at the bottom of Lake Nasser, so these detached paintings are all that survives of the cathedral.
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