My name's Elizabeth Bolman, and I'm an art historian,
and I'm the director of the Red Monastery Project,
a conservation project at a monastic church
dating to about the year 500.
And the best preserved part of it is the sanctuary
that rises up in two levels of niches,
topped by three enormous semi-domes,
above which a modern 20th-century dome
covering the center.
It's a late antique church,
originally named after a holy monk named Pshoi.
What makes it so completely extraordinary
is that it has original painted skin
that stretches from the floor
all the way up to the clerestory above the semi-domes.
And it was built
for an intentionally formed ascetic community of men
who chose to renounce the world,
devoting themselves to God and hopefully improving themselves
to the point where they would, after death,
receive admission to paradise and eternal life.
And when I first saw the Red Monastery church
in the mid-90s,
and I immediately recognized that it was unparalleled.
This is the only survival of the aesthetic
that has been called the jeweled style
anywhere in the Mediterranean
that is created in paint.
And there would have been thousands,
if not hundreds of thousands,
of these painted churches in Egypt and elsewhere.
One actually interesting episode in its history
that helped protect the wall paintings,
is that at some point in the medieval period,
the monks built mud-brick walls against the painted surfaces,
up to the base of the semi-domes,
and that wall was removed about a century ago,
but for 500 years,
those paintings were protected by this mud-brick wall.
The church was in use for centuries and centuries.
When I first walked into it, was totally blackened.
Huge clouds of incense and smoke from lamps and candles
all coated the surfaces of the paintings,
in addition, of course,
to the dust of the desert of Egypt.
One of the dramatic things about the monument,
watching it being conserved,
was the contrast
between the cleaned and uncleaned parts
of the walls.
The people who did the extraordinary site work
of conserving these paintings
all come from Italy.
These extraordinary conservators,
Adriano Luzi and Luigi de Cesaris,
I had had the privilege of working with them
at a medieval church in Egypt
at the Monastery of St. Anthony, where they were able to reveal
extraordinarily bright and fabulous medieval paintings.
And so I learned from them
to actually see through the grime, in a way,
and see the potential.
It is with them that I began
this decade-long period of site work.
The entire monument was constructed and decorated
four times, probably within a 200 year period.
And what we're seeing is primarily from the third phase
and the fourth phase.
Third phase includes all the bright colors,
creating this vibrant, kaleidoscopic kind of place.
Many of their paints were in an encaustic base,
which means that they're wax, so they have a kind of
shiny effect, the pink and green especially.
And they were interested in creating a riotous effect
that encouraged your eye to jump from one part of the church
to another.
And the fourth phase, which is all the figural paintings,
that dates to, at most, a century later.
Lots of other figural paintings
survive from the fourth phase in the niches.
Some of those compelling faces are monks from
the monastic federation that this church belonged to.
There are also some of
the patriarchs or Popes of the Egyptian Orthodox Church.
There are evangelists and saints as well.
This is the most important historical monument
in the entire country of Egypt from the late antique period.
It's an enormous endeavor.
We could not possibly have done it without
the absolute engagement of the Coptic church
and the full collaboration of the Egyptian Supreme Council
of Antiquities.
The funding comes from the United States Agency
for International Development, with the support
of the American people.
The USA money is being administered by
the American Research Center in Egypt.
There's a wide-ranging program to support the development
of monuments and preservation of monuments for tourism.
The Red Monastery is an enormous project
that involves people of many nationalities
from many different kinds of backgrounds.
There's a huge team of scholars working with me.
We're preparing a book right now.
So it's a fantastic international team,
and working with them has been such a great privilege.