Isaac Fanous

Biography

Sources disagree even on where he was born. By some accounts it was Al-Minya, by others the village of Aba al-Waqf near Maghagha, in the same governorate of Minya. The date of birth is the same everywhere: 19 December 1919.

His father traded in textiles in Cairo and liked to read. The family encouraged art: an elder brother became a photographer, and another brother studied art and at the end of his life directed the Mokhtar Museum. Fanous took his school certificate at the French school of Al-Khurunfish, then entered the Faculty of Applied Arts (now part of Helwan University) and graduated in 1941 from the sculpture department, first in his year. In 1943 he received a diploma as a drawing teacher from the Institute of Art Education for Teachers and began teaching in schools in Shubra, a district of Cairo. The Coptic Museum opened the way to Coptic art. There he met the painter Ragheb Ayad, who introduced him to Boutros Pasha Samika, and Fanous began working at the museum by the hour. Among those he came to know in these years were the architect Hanna Samika, the painter Yassa Abd al-Masih and Rauf Habib. When the Institute of Coptic Studies opened in January 1954, Fanous became one of its first students. Youssef Afifi, his teacher of mosaic, fresco and Coptic painting, advised him to keep away from “Westernism” and to preserve his authentically Coptic Egyptian brush. He received the institute’s diploma in 1956 and a doctorate in Coptic art in 1958 by some accounts, in Paris in 1966 by others.

France, where he went in the mid-1960s on a two-year scholarship at the Louvre, is where it all came together. There he studied icon painting under Léonid Ouspensky, and the meeting, it seems, was a turning point. The trip became possible after Pope Cyril VI obtained permission from Nasser to send the institute’s students and teachers abroad. Later he also took a degree at the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Florence (1975).

What was new in what he did? Egyptian churches of the nineteenth century were often decorated with icons almost indistinguishable from Western, especially Protestant, religious art. Fanous took the old Coptic manner as his base, for example that of Yuhanna al-Armani, added impressions from Western religious graphic art and gradually worked out his own: with pronounced symmetry, greater austerity and intensified peculiarities of earlier Coptic painting. This style is called Modern Coptic, or Neo-Coptic. It arose on the wave of a revival of Coptic culture under Pope Cyril VI (1959–1971). His first works in Alexandria were made in the church of Abu Kir and Yuhanna, followed by the Church of the Virgin in Golf, Garden City, the shrine of St Mark at the cathedral and the church of Anba Bishoy in Clot Bey. He painted frescoes, icons, mosaics and stained glass set in lead. He alone painted the whole interior of St Takla Haymanot’s Church in Alexandria, consecrated in 1969. In 1977–1978 he spent six months in Britain, painting icons for St Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Church on Allen Street in London. Pope John Paul II invited him to decorate the Catholic cathedral in Nasr City, where the mosaic covers about 200 square metres.

From 1975 he headed the Coptic art department of the Institute of Coptic Studies and trained pupils, including some from other countries. In 1984 Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria conferred an honorary doctorate on him, and in 1987 the Institute of Oriental Studies in Venice awarded him a gold medal.

He died on 15 January 2007; by other accounts, on 14 January. The funeral service was held at the Boutrosiya church in Abbasiya.