The Arabic icons

This article by Lebanese painter and art historian Mahmoud Zibawi focuses on the tradition of Arab-Christian icons, a little-known iconographic school originating from the Melkite communities of Syria and Lebanon. Drawing on historical and stylistic analysis, the article traces the evolution of this art from the earliest early-Christian representations of Antioch to the popular production of the nineteenth century. The central argument is that this tradition, whose revival asserted itself in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the Al-Musawwir family of painters from Aleppo, was initially grounded in fidelity to Byzantine canons before undergoing a gradual decline under the influence of Catholic missions and Western painting. The article makes a twofold contribution: it documents a largely overlooked iconographic heritage and shows how confessional and cultural pressures progressively distanced this school from its orthodox theological and aesthetic foundations.