Visual Constructs of Jerusalem

The special position of Jerusalem among the cities of the world stems from a long history shared by the three Abrahamic religions, and the belief that the city reflected a heavenly counterpart. Because of this unique combination, Jerusalem is generally seen as extending along a vertical axis stretching between past, present, and future. However, through its many ‘earthly’ representations, Jerusalem has an equally important horizontal dimension: it is represented elsewhere in all media, from two-dimensional maps to monumental renderings of the architecture and topography of the city’s loca sancta.

In documenting the increasing emphasis on studying the earthly proliferations of the city, the current book witnesses a shift in theoretical and methodological insights since the publication of The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Art in 1998. Its main focus is on European translations of Jerusalem in images, objects, places, and spaces that evoke the city through some physical similarity or by denomination and cult - all visual and material aids to commemoration and worship from afar. The book discusses both well-known and long-neglected examples, the forms of cult they generate and the virtual pilgrimages they serve, and calls attention to their written and visual equivalents and companions. In so doing, it opens a whole new vista onto the summa of representations of Jerusalem.

Introduction — BIANCA KÜHNEL, GALIT NOGA-BANAI, HANNA VORHOLT

Loca sancta: Formation and Accumulation of Traditions

‘Remembering Sion’: Early Medieval Latin Recollections of the Basilica on Mount Sion and the Interplay of Relics, Tradition, and Images — THOMAS O’LOUGHLIN

Mary in Jerusalem: An Imaginary Map — ORA LIMOR

Lavit et venit videns: The Healing of the Blind Man at the Pool of Siloam — BARBARA BAERT

Patronage Contested: Archaeology and the Early Modern Struggle for Possession at the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem — JORDAN PICKETT

From Biblical to Non-Biblical Holy Places: The Shrine of Subiaco as a Construct of Jerusalem — ALESSANDRO SCAFI

Monumental Translations

How Mtskheta Turned into the Georgians’ New Jerusalem — TAMILA MGALOBLISHVILI

Locative Memory and the Pilgrim’s Experience of Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages — MICHELE BACCI

New Research on the Holy Sepulchre at the ‘Jerusalem’ of San Vivaldo, Italy — RICCARDO PACCIANI

Pilgrimage Experience: Bridging Size and Medium — TSAFRA SIEW

The Baptistery of Pisa and the Rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre: A Reconsideration — NETA BODNER

Strategies of Translation

From Sanctified Topos to Iconic and Symbolic Model: Two Early Representations of the Holy Sepulchre in Croatia — MARINA VICELJA-MATIJAŠIĆ

Defending Jerusalem: Visualizations of a Christian Identity in Medieval Scandinavia  — KRISTIN B. AAVITSLAND

Jerusalem in Medieval Georgian Art — GEORGE GAGOSHIDZE

A (Hi)story of Jerusalem: Memories and Images in the Austro-Hungarian Empire  — LILY ARAD

The Running Girl in Mea Shearim: Gender, Nostalgia, and the Uncanny in Leora Laor’s Photography (2002–2004) — MILLY HEYD

Evocations of the Temple

Reconstructing Jerusalem in the Jewish Liturgical Realm: The Worms Synagogue and its Legacy — SARIT SHALEV-EYNI

Beyond the Veil: Roman Constructs of the New Temple in the Twelfth Century — EIVOR ANDERSEN OFTESTAD

Heavenly Jerusalem in Baroque Architectural Theory — VICTOR PLAHTE TSCHUDI

King Solomon’s Temple and Throne as Models in Islamic Visual Culture  — RACHEL MILSTEIN

Relics, Reliquaries, and Ritual

Holy Places and Their Relics — BRUNO REUDENBACH

The True Cross of Jerusalem in the Latin West: Mediterranean Connections and Institutional Agency — NIKOLAS JASPERT

‘Living Stones’ of Jerusalem: The Triumphal Arch Mosaic of Santa Prassede in Rome — ERIK THUNØ

Strategies of Constructing Jerusalem in Medieval Serbia — JELENA ERDELJAN

The Holy Fire and Visual Constructs of Jerusalem, East and West — ALEXEI LIDOV

Maps of Jerusalem

From Eusebius to the Crusader Maps: The Origin of the Holy Land Maps — MILKA LEVY-RUBIN

Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem: The View From Twelfth-Century Flanders — JAY RUBENSTEIN

Quaresmius’s Novae Ierosolymae et Locorum Circumiacentium Accurata Imago (1639): An Image of the Holy City and its Message — REHAV RUBIN

An American Missionary’s Maps of Jerusalem: Past, Present, and Future — EVELYN EDSON

Maps of the Holy Land

Experiencing the Holy Land and Crusade in Matthew Paris’s Maps of Palestine — LAURA J. WHATLEY

‘As If You Were There’: The Cultural Impact of Two Pilgrims’ Maps of the Holy Land — PNINA ARAD

Mapping the History of Salvation for the ‘Mind’s Eyes’: Context and Function of the Map of the Holy Land in the Rudimentum Novitiorum of 1475 — ANDREA WORM

Ottheinrich and Sandtner: Sixteenth-Century Pilgrimage Maps and an Imaginary Model of Jerusalem — HAIM GOREN

Mappae mundi

The City of the Great King: Jerusalem in Hugh of Saint Victor’s Mystic Ark — CONRAD RUDOLPH

The Jerusalem Effect: Rethinking the Centre in Medieval World Maps — MARCIA KUPFER

Manuscripts and Panel Painting

Ducitur et reducitur: Passion Devotion and Mental Motion in an Illuminated Meditationes Vitae Christi manuscript (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410) — RENANA BARTAL

Virtual Pilgrimage through the Jerusalem Cityscape — KATHRYN M. RUDY

Pilgrimage Literature and Travelogues

Representations and Descriptions of Jerusalem in the Printed Travelogues of the Early Modern Period (1486–1700) — MILAN PELC

The Jerusalem of the Mind’s Eye: Imagined Pilgrimage in the Late Fifteenth Century — KATHRYNE BEEBE

Memory and Representations of Jerusalem in Medieval and Early Modern Pilgrimage Reports — MARIA E. DORNINGER

Richard Pococke, or the Invention of Jerusalem for Tourists — OLGA MEDVEDKOVA

Byzantine Approaches

Visualizing the Tomb of Christ: Images, Settings, and Ways of Seeing — ROBERT OUSTERHOUT

‘Remembering Zion’ and Simulacra: Jerusalem in the Byzantine Psalter — MATI MEYER

Souvenirs of the Holy Land: The Production of Proskynetaria in Jerusalem — MAT IMMERZEEL

Proskynetaria as Devotional Objects and Preservers of Ethnic Identity — MÁRTA NAGY