Mural Paintings, Church of the Summer Residence of the Maronite Patriarch, Diman

Most routes through Mount Lebanon are winding and narrow, lined by oak, cedar, and cypress trees and roamed by the occasional sheep. The road to Our Lady of Diman is no exception and the church’s spacious parking lot seems to emerge out of nowhere. The stately edifice overlooks the Qadisha Valley, known for both its natural beauty and its religious significance to Lebanese Christians, especially Maronite Catholics. The imposing architecture and impressive location of the church befit its purpose. Since its construction around the turn of the twentieth century, it has served as the summer residence of the Maronite Catholic Patriarch.1 The prestige of the building is everywhere apparent: in the inlaid marble floor, in the gold and blue panes of the stained-glass windows. The church’s most remarkable feature, however, is the ceiling over its nave, with frescoes completed in the late 1930s by celebrated Lebanese painter Saliba Douaihy (1913-1994).

• 1
  According to the Maronite Foundation, construction of the Patriarchate in Diman began on September 28, 1899. https://maronitefoundation.org/MaroniteFoundation/en/MaronitesHistory/57

Saliba Douaihy was born into a Maronite Catholic family in the town of Ehden, about eighteen kilometers from Diman in the district of Mount Lebanon. From its inception, his artistic education was managed by the Maronite Patriarchate, which sent a teenage Douaihy to study at the Beirut atelier of prominent painter Habib Srour (1860-1938).1 Srour, who had trained in Italy, taught the budding artist for several years before recommending that he, too, complete his education abroad. In 1932, Douaihy left to study in Paris under the auspices of a fellowship from the Franco-Lebanese government, returning to Lebanon four years later when Maronite Patriarch Antoine ‘Arida commissioned the frescoes at Our Lady of Diman.

• 1
  Badr El Hage, collected interviews with Saliba Douaihy. Published in the Mathaf Encyclopedia of Art and the Arab World: http://www.encyclopedia.mathaf.org.qa/en/essays/Pages/Saliba-Douaihy,-Autobiography-and-Artistic-Views.aspx

Douaihy’s academic trajectory was a typical one, inherited from the first generation of modern Lebanese easel painters. For these “pioneers,” including Srour and his mentor, Daoud Corm (1852-1930), and their immediate successors, training was generally conservative and success was often predicated on European education. There was no formal institution of arts education in Lebanon until 1943, and government scholarships for study abroad were usually the best means for aspiring artists to hone their skills. Like most institutions under the French Mandate, this ad hoc system overwhelmingly favored Christians, who occupied a privileged position vis à vis the colonial government. The Maronite Catholic community in particular produced a disproportionate number of artists, having nurtured cultural ties to Europe long before the advent of the French. Though instruction in the visual arts was available at military academies during the later decades of the Ottoman Empire, the tradition of easel painting in Lebanon is most closely tied to the Catholic church, purportedly originating with the establishment of the Maronite College of Rome in Mount Lebanon in 1584.1 A history of Lebanese cleric-painters can be traced back to the 1600s, and in the 1830s the Vatican itself sponsored the development of oil painting among Jesuits in Lebanon as part of a larger campaign to shore up the Maronites’ place among Uniate churches and foster its “historical ties” to the West.2

• 1
  Matthew Burrows, “‘Mission Civilisatrice’: French Cultural Policy in the Middle East, 1860-1914,” The Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (March 1986): 112.
• 2
  Stephen Sheehi, “Modernism, Anxiety, and the Ideology of Arab Vision,” Discourse 28, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 77. For more on the early history of oil painting in Lebanon, see Sarah Rogers, “Daoud Corm, Cosmopolitan Nationalism, and the Origins of Lebanese Modern Art,” The Arab Studies Journal 18, no 1. (Spring 2010): 46-77; Silvia Naef, A la recherche d’une modernité arabe: l’évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996); Charbel Dagher, “How Painting Came East,” translated by Pauline Homsi Vinson, al-Jadid: A Review of Arab Culture and Arts (Summer/Fall 2006): 11-15.

Though artists including Douaihy, Srour, and Corm had access to contemporary European aesthetic currents, they all sought to “paint like Michelangelo or Raphael” rather than Monet or Picasso. Given the widespread aesthetic preference for realism and the increasingly strident association of Maronite Catholics with Italy and France, it is unsurprising that Douaihy’s paintings would purposefully evoke the Western European canon of late Renaissance and Baroque religious paintings. The frescoes’ brilliant colors and dramatic use of light evoke the work of Mannerist painters Pontormo (1494-1557) and El Greco (1541-1614), and his depiction of Mary’s immaculate conception features a composition and color palette strikingly similar to Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1618-1682)’s The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables (1678). The frescoes even insert the two famous putti of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1513) into a gap between scenes.

In their allusion to canonical images and stylistic norms of European Renaissance art, these paintings do more than cater to the tastes of the Christian bourgeoisie. They also imbricate the highly valued cultural “treasures” of European history and the Maronite community of Mount Lebanon, playing into a well-established sectarian vision of the nascent Lebanese nation. Amidst these nods to Western “masters,” however, the figures in each episode are modeled after members of the local community. For example, the children of a prominent deacon appear as the Virgin Mary and the angel Gabriel in the Annunciation scene.1 Douaihy’s use of local models implicates Lebanese Christians as claimants to the artistic heritage of the European Renaissance, legitimizing the ties between Lebanon and Europe that Christian nationalists sought to maintain through the establishment of the new republic.

This interpretation is supported by the panoramic landscape bordering the twelve narrative paintings; the Qadisha Valley’s rocky, verdant terrain frames Christ’s life. In dialog with Douaihy’s choice of models, the landscape localizes the biblical stories, anchoring them to the immediate vicinity of Our Lady of Diman. Moreover, the sweeping panorama enshrines a landscape of both religious and political significance. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Qadisha Valley is home to the Forest of the Cedars of God as well as a proliferation of monasteries and hermitages.2 Its inhospitable cliffs have sheltered Christian ascetics for over a thousand years, and the some believe the valley itself to possess miraculous qualities. As the seat of the Maronite Catholic Church, the Qadisha Valley is also central to the image of “the mountains” (Mount Lebanon) that dominated nationalist debates during the 1930s. The accounts of French and Lebanese Christian historians in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries mythologized the mountains as a historic refuge for the oppressed, where religious minorities had thrived for centuries beyond the reach of the (purportedly tyrannical) Sunni ruling class.3 Though Shi’a and Druze communities are counted among these religious minorities, this history—the factual accuracy of which is subject to debate—largely served the interests of the Maronite Catholics to whom the French allocated political primacy.4 Mount Lebanon dominated French and Christian nationalist definitions of Lebanese cultural identity, positioning the nascent country as a “haven” of Westward-facing Christianity in a hostile Muslim region. The mountains were also central to the national borders for which these parties advocated. While their Arabist detractors sought to maintain a union with Syria, Christian nationalists envisioned a territorially discrete entity anchored in Mount Lebanon.

• 1
  Sader, “Saliba ad-Douaihy,” 28.
• 2
  The Forest of the Cedars of God is what remains of a once-vast cedar forest that provided valuable timber for civilizations from the Phoenicians to the Ottomans and is mentioned in both the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
• 3
  The mythology surrounding Mount Lebanon, though mobilized through the twentieth century, is most intimately tied to the Mount Lebanon civil war of 1860. The sectarian tensions that gave rise to the conflict were exploited and exacerbated by foreign powers; the primary antagonists, Maronite Christians and Druze, were supported by the French and the British, respectively.
• 4
  See Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism, Ch. 5; Kamal S. Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered, (London: IB Taurus & Co., 1988), 130-150; Kais Firro, Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate (London: IB Taurus, 2002); Fawwaz Trablousi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London; Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007).

Douaihy thus completed his commission at a time when Mount Lebanon held enormous symbolic capital. Although the artist may not have painted the Qadisha Valley in a consciously politicized way, during the first decades of the twentieth century Lebanon’s Maronite community increasingly supported independence from France, and considered the mountains the epicenter of a discrete Lebanese nation. The envisioned nation was itself characterized by a cultural affinity with the West. Douaihy’s Biblical scenes, aesthetically indebted to the European canon and populated by the church’s community, speak to the place of this international bond in his social milieu. Douaihy’s frescoes shed light on the cultural valences of contemporaneous sectarianism, on the inextricable nature of religious and secular spheres as they intersected over Mount Lebanon in the 1930s. The Church of Our Lady of Diman gains gravitas from the connections it makes across the Mediterranean, but it also points to the fissures that widened closer to home.