Diptych with Twelve Apostles & St. Paul (c. 1700): Art, History and Details

Diptych with Twelve Apostles & St. Paul (c. 1700) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Workshop or Circle of Wäldä Maryam (Ethiopia, active mid- to late 1600s-early 1700s).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Diptych with Twelve Apostles & St. Paul
• Date: c. 1700
• Creator attribution: Workshop or Circle of Wäldä Maryam (Ethiopia, active mid- to late 1600s-early 1700s)
• Culture: Africa, East Africa, Ethiopia, presumably Gondär
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Tempera, wood, textile
• Dimensions: 39 x 51 cm (15 3/8 x 20 1/16 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 2023.4

A detail from the museum

Captions written in the language Gəˁəz identify each holy man by name. This African language is nearly 2,500 years old!

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Windmuller-Luna, Kristen. “Africa & Byzantium: Spectacular treasures from diverse lands joined by deserts, seas, and rivers.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 64, no. 1 (2024): Cover, 4-7, 24.
• "Looking Back to Look Forward: A Year in Highlights.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 65, no. 3 (2024): 38.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.