Crosses from Ethiopia at the Dallas Museum of Art: An Overview

Erattum

Carried in procession, placed at the top of a church to mark the landscape, held by a priest to bestow blessings, or worn around the neck for protection and to assert identity, the cross, in all its manifestations, has been for centuries a ubiquitous symbol in the daily and religious life of Christian Ethiopians.¹ Thanks to the publication of catalogs, articles, and books, the organization of exhibitions, anthropological research, and the study of literary sources, our knowledge of Ethiopian crosses has improved considerably since Eine Moore's pioneering work on the subject (1971; 1973).

However, the study of Ethiopian crosses is still very much in its early stages. In particular, the approach to dating Ethiopian crosses has seen little development, and the criteria one must adopt are still those first clearly outlined by Moore.² Inscriptions providing reliable dating evidence for Ethiopian crosses are rare—especially on pieces that are presumed to predate the fifteenth century—and not always original, forcing us to rely, in most cases, on stylistic, morphological, and paleographic evidence. Taken individually, these three strands of evidence are not always reliable,³ but in combination they can allow us to date a cross on firmer grounds.

Unfortunately, few Ethiopian crosses can be dated with confidence.⁴ For this reason it is important to document, catalogue, and study the thousands of crosses scattered across Ethiopia's many monasteries to identify examples that can be dated with some certainty and thus, eventually, enable us to provide a more reliable framework for investigating those examples that currently pose difficulties to Ethiopianist art historians. As argued elsewhere for the study of Ethiopian manuscripts (Gnisci 2017), the cataloging effort should also include the many collections of Ethiopian crosses in European and American museums.

The aim of this article is to take a step in this direction by offering an overview of an extensive collection of Ethiopian crosses at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). In 2016, thanks to a collaboration between the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History (EODIAH) and the DMA, I was invited to take a closer look at this collection, which had received some attention in the literature but had not yet been systematically investigated. The collection includes 258 items:⁵ 178 hand crosses;⁶ 8 processional crosses;⁷ 5 metal prayer-stick finials;⁸ and 67 pectoral crosses.⁹ As it is obviously not possible to analyze each item in a paper of this length, the focus will be on some of its highlights.

The DMA's collection of crosses is one of the largest outside of Ethiopia. To put it in perspective, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution (Kotz 1999: 159) owns a total of sixty-six such items (fifteen hand crosses; forty-three pectoral crosses; four processional crosses; and four prayer stick finials) whereas the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD (Horowitz 2001) has seventeen (three hand crosses; eight processional crosses; and six pectoral crosses). Both museums also own other objects, such as scrolls, icons and manuscripts, which are not present in the DMA's collection. Several other museums in the United States have Ethiopian crosses. The largest of which I am aware is the Portland Art Museum in Portland, OR, which has 344 crosses that were examined in a preliminary fashion by Perczel (1981). Another large collection is that of the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which owns eighty-nine crosses.¹⁰ Most institutions, however, only have a small number of pieces. In this respect, worthy of mention are the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (LaGamma 2004), the Newark Musuem in Newark, NJ,¹¹ the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT, and the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, FL (Cooksey 2016: 73–77), among others.

The history of how such a large number of Ethiopian crosses came to be acquired by the DMA has been presented elsewhere (Walker 2009: 264–66), but it is worthwhile to recapitulate that information here.¹² Between 1964 and...