Art historian Elizabeth S. Bolman was recently awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to fund the completion of a book-length study on the Church of the Red Monastery, a basilica dating to the middle of the sixth century.

Through conservation, scholarly study and archaeology, Bolman and a team of conservators have worked for a decade to restore the original colored paintings that still exist on the walls of the monastery, located in Sohag, Egypt. The ornamental paintings are the best-preserved example of non-figural architectural polychromy in paint, surviving from Late Antiquity, Bolman said.

“Until the start of my work at the site, the church had almost completely escaped scholarly notice, and was not considered to be of great importance, probably due to its remoteness and the obscuring layers of soot on its paintings,” Bolman said. “It is now being recognized as the most significant historical Christian monument still extant in Egypt.”

Bolman will collaborate with a team of 16 scholars and specialists to complete the book, which she hopes will direct attention to this overlooked region of Egypt.

The Red Monastery church belonged to a large monastic federation that dominated the region, which also included the White Monastery, a women’s monastery in a nearby village.

In addition to serving as editor, Bolman will pen the introduction, conclusion and five chapters on the significance of the painted subjects for the monastic community, the images’ connection to the rituals in the church, the relationship between beauty and asceticism and the significance of the architectural polychromy.

“Ultimately, these chapters and the rest of the book will demonstrate that the region of Upper Egypt in which the Red Monastery is located, today a backwater, was participating fully in Mediterranean cultural trends in Late Antiquity.”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation annually awards fellowships to a diverse group of scholars, artists and scientists in the United States and Canada. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, 180 successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. Only two of this year’s recipients are art historians.

Since its establishment in 1925, the foundation has granted nearly $290 million in fellowships to more than 17,000 individuals. The $260 million endowment funds 180 fellowships in some 78 fields, including computer science, astrophysics and African studies.

“The most significant thing about the foundation may be the continuity of our mission, a commitment to funding individuals at the highest level to do the work they were meant to do,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We don’t support groups or organizations. We have always bet everything on the individual, which seems to me increasingly rare in a corporatized America.”