The workshop of the al-Musawwir family in Aleppo, described in The Aleppo School of Icon Painting, was the first great centre of Arab Christian icon painting. But it was not the last. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries painters in Damascus, Jerusalem and Lebanon kept the tradition alive, each in their own manner.

Followers of the Aleppo style

The style of Ni'mat al-Musawwir continued into the late eighteenth century through painters such as Shukrallah ibn Yuwakim and Kyrillos al-Dimashqi, and through anonymous monks who copied his types.

Painters of the eighteenth century

  • Hanna al-Qudsi ("John of Jerusalem"), active in the early eighteenth century, worked across Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. Much of his work was restoration and copying, including copies of icons by Ni'mat. An icon of the Archangel Michael dated 1726 records in its inscription that it follows an earlier Cretan model.
  • Patriarch Sylvester of Antioch, a Cypriot-born patriarch of the mid-eighteenth century, was himself a painter whose icons keep strictly to Byzantine form. An icon of St Spyridon painted by him in 1749 was given to a church in Romania.

The nineteenth century

  • Michael the Cretan (Michael Polychronis) worked in Damascus in the 1810s. He painted in oil and blended Byzantine composition with Italianate modelling and motifs from Damascene woodwork. His influence on later painters was very large, and his icons can be found in many churches of the region.
  • The Jerusalem school. In the mid-nineteenth century painters in Jerusalem, among them Mikhail Mhanna, Yuhanna Saliba and Nicolas Theodorus, produced large numbers of icons with broad brushwork and calm, rounded faces. Pilgrims carried many of them across the Orthodox world.
  • Rural painters. In Lebanon and inland Syria, local priests and painters made simpler, earthier icons, sometimes without gold.

A tradition in Arabic

What unites these painters is that they worked for Arabic-speaking Orthodox and Melkite communities. Their icons carry Arabic inscriptions, honour local saints and reflect the visual world of the Levant, while keeping the compositions handed down from Byzantium. Many of their works still hang in the churches they were painted for, and many more are at risk from conflict and neglect, which makes recording them an urgent task.