Brooklyn Museum Coptic Holdings to be Available in Princeton University’s Online Index of Christian Art.

The exceptional Brooklyn Museum collection of Coptic material, among the most important resources in North America for the study of Christian Arts in Egypt, will be digitally photographed and catalogued for inclusion in Princeton University’s Index of Christian Art in a partnership between the two institutions.

The Coptic holdings in the Brooklyn Museum include outstanding examples of textiles, jewelry, bones, metalwork and sculpture. These works will be photographed in situ and they will be catalogued for inclusion in the Index database, which is now the largest online iconographical resource for the medievalist.

The photography is now nearing completion but the cataloguing is expected to take twelve months to finish. The collection will join a number of other Coptic collections in the online resource, which includes manuscripts from the Morgan Library, the holdings of the Newark Museum, and the photographic archive of the Paul Van Moorsel Center for Christian Art and Culture in Leiden University.

The Brooklyn Museum project will provide the opportunity to extend the geographic coverage of the Index and will over time enable the scholar to understand the close interaction between the Eastern and Western worlds in the Middle Ages.

This project is being organized by Ann Russman, Ph. D. Curator of Egyptian Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum and Colum P. Hourihane, Ph. D., FSA, Director, Index of Christian Art.

Contact: Sally Williams, Public Information Officer, Brooklyn Museum. (718) 501-6330 or sally.williams@brooklynmuseum.org.