The Art of Jerusalem: Power and Piety in the Holy Land

Catalog description

Explores the art and architecture of Jerusalem from the reign of Herod through the Crusades, a period of successive Jewish, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, and Latin domination. Attention will be given to the repeated transformation of the landscape of Jerusalem through the destruction, construction, and modification of important religious and cultural monuments. We will gauge the role of Jerusalem as an object of desire for the dispossessed and for pilgrims of three faiths, and explore how the accretion of myth and memory shaped the city's symbolic identity, and how this imaginary ideal, as expressed in art and architecture, emphasized or denied the physical and political realities of medieval Jerusalem.