State of the field

Richard Krautheimer’s 1942 article ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of mediaeval architecture”’ fundamentally shaped how art and architectural historians see Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.Footnote ² Krautheimer sought to establish how medieval makers and users understood the relationship between architectural forms and symbolic meanings, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre provided an ideal test case.Footnote ³ As he observed, medieval authors described the Jerusalem monument as a prototype for a number of architecturally dissimilar structures – suggesting that the Holy Sepulchre’s unique sanctity could be transferred through replication. The differences between centrally-planned European ‘copies’ of the Holy Sepulchre and the Jerusalem original indicated the flexibility of building ad similitudinem, or in the likeness of, the church that enshrined the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.Footnote ⁴ As Krautheimer noted, some churches with relics of the cross, tomb and other Christ-charged matter claimed an affiliation with the Holy Sepulchre despite a lack of architectural resemblance, indicating that a complex web of connections established meaning and attachments.Footnote ⁵ These observations regarding the architectural replication of a distant locus sanctus stimulated a subfield of art history dedicated to Jerusalem’s monumental translations, the historical relationships they witness and the forms of desire they elicited.

As Catherine Carver McCurrach and Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo note, Krautheimer’s iconographic system centres symbolic content.Footnote ⁶ Medieval users and authors perceived structures as Holy Sepulchres based on strict or loose architectural resemblance, naming conventions or ritual practices. Because the monuments could look quite different, the symbolic relationship was not always defined by a visual image. An ‘iconography of architecture’ built on the Holy Sepulchre’s foundations diverges from iconographic analysis in other media, where visual recognition prompts the identification of figures and narratives. While an architectural copy may also be founded on evocative features like a centralised layout, the associations are not exclusively or unambiguously activated by the space’s appearance.

Kurt Weitzmann’s 1974 article ‘Loca sancta and the representational arts of Palestine’ employed a more traditional framework of iconographic analysis to investigate how ‘the loca sancta stimulated the creation of images with very specific topographical details’.Footnote ⁷ Taking the mosaics and icons of St Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai as a point of departure, and weaving in reliquaries, ivories, Syriac gospel manuscripts and frescoes, Weitzmann explored how depictions of biblical events incorporated characteristic features of their associated pilgrimage churches. As he noted, the images exceed the scriptural narrative by introducing specific features related to contemporary pilgrims’ experience, collapsing the story and its commemorative space. On a sixth- or seventh-century inner lid of a reliquary box in the Vatican, for instance, the angel’s announcement of the Resurrection to the two Marys is visually staged within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre’s walls. The reliquary enshrined rocks, wood and other natural matter gathered from the Holy Sepulchre and other sites, and the representation of the Jerusalem monument reinforced the site-specific continuities between biblical events, geological features and the pilgrim’s present experience of place. Weitzmann emphasised that there were multiple modes of depicting sacred structures in narrative representations, that the circulation and re-creation of such motifs was a global practice emanating from a Palestinian centre and that the images appeared in most medieval media.Footnote ⁸ Weitzmann’s 1974 article did not cite Krautheimer’s foundational study, suggesting that he understood spatial and representational symbolism to be distinct forms of making meaning.

Krautheimer referred to the European Holy Sepulchres as ‘mementos’ and Weitzmann defined ‘loca sancta pictures’ as ‘souvenirs in various media’.Footnote ⁹ Their commemorative categorisations clarify the works’ functions – a souvenir, according to Susan Stewart, is a possessable trace of experience, narrative and location that creates longing for an unrecoverable authentic original.Footnote ¹⁰ However, this shared vocabulary masks distinctions in how the structures and images activate imaginative faculties. An architectural copy resituates the Jerusalem monument in the medieval worshippers’ space and time, enabling them to project themselves into a desired space and narrative. A ‘loca sancta picture’, on the other hand, allows beholders to project the sacred past into a distant and specific landscape. Both types of architectural representation elicit desire, but placing people in space and depicting place bring the ‘authentic original’ into view in different ways. Subsequent generations of scholarship have generatively expanded on Krautheimer and Weitzmann’s ideas, but have neglected to observe the distinctions in their discussion of the material.

The proliferation of research on Jerusalem’s representations from the 1990s to the present might be connected to broader scholarly trends – increased emphasis on the interconnectedness of the medieval world, interdisciplinary conversations grounded in shared theoretical paradigms and growing interest in the imbrication of crusading movements and modern political models.Footnote ¹¹ It could also be tied to a rise in international conferences dedicated to the topic and their associated publications, which have become essential reading in the field: ‘The real and ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art’ in Jerusalem in May 1996; ‘New Jerusalems’ in Moscow in June 2006; ‘Jerusalem as narrative space’ in Florence in December 2007; and ‘Visual constructs of Jerusalem’ in Jerusalem in 2010.Footnote ¹² More recently, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 exhibition ‘Jerusalem 1000–1400: every people under Heaven’ employed a constellation of objects from many corners of the globe to tell a similar story.Footnote ¹³ While Krautheimer and Weitzmann focused on representations rather than the historical city, the conference and exhibition publications toggle between monuments in Jerusalem itself and architectural and visual works that made Jerusalem present in other places. Effectively, the city serves as a terrestrial anchoring point for a global history of art. This approach has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it reinforces that the production and display of knowledge about Palestinian monuments was central to many medieval visual cultures. The wide chronological and geographical scope of the volumes highlight how Jerusalem’s changing architectural and political conditions impact the forms and functions of secondary representations. On the other hand, inclusion within the corpus presupposes that similitude to Jerusalem’s physical structures was the objective of patrons and makers and was recognisable to medieval viewers.Footnote ¹⁴ This runs the risk of attributing specific significance to common and complex iconographies, and of assuming that such references were universally legible.

Works reviewed

Two recent contributions to the field, Cathleen A. Fleck’s 2023 Reimagining Jerusalem’s architectural identities in the later Middle Ages and Kathryn Blair Moore’s 2017 The architecture of the Christian Holy Land, highlight the gaps between Krautheimer and Weitzmann’s approaches and their impact on contemporary scholarship. Both authors draw on Mary Carruthers’s work on medieval memory to emphasise the emotive and creative purpose of Jerusalem’s representations in the cultural context of their makers and users.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather than a souvenir’s insufficient substitute, Fleck and Moore move towards what we might consider a translation model. Portable objects, graphic images and monuments adapt the original using language that renders Jerusalem comprehensible for the new reader. Fleck’s key term, ‘reimagining’, centres the beholder by asking how ‘the repetition of certain images across cultures led the holy city to “stick in the mind” of medieval artists, patrons, and viewers’.Footnote ¹⁶ Moore focuses on the mediating role of the object, defining manuscripts and monuments as ‘re-creations’ of the experience of witnessing Jerusalem’s sacred spaces.Footnote ¹⁷ Fleck focuses on five portable works made between 1160 and 1356, while Moore covers a large corpus of fifth- through seventeenth-century graphic and architectural re-creations. As there is no overlap between their objects of study and major differences in their approaches, placing the two books in conversation illuminates distinctions in Jerusalem studies that have broader implications for interdisciplinary scholarship on reception.

Kathryn Blair Moore describes her book as an ‘elaboration’ of Krautheimer’s 1942 article that emphasises the historically-situated meanings of two-dimensional images of Jerusalem’s sacred structures, pilgrims’ narrative descriptions and architectural recreations.Footnote ¹⁸ Her primary argument is that worshippers understood sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Ascension as indelible inscriptions of Christ’s corporeal absence, and that architectural description, depiction and construction enabled audiences to experience this central Christian mystery in historically specific ways.Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, representations of architectural forms enshrined the absences at their centre, enabling Eusebius’ ‘facts louder than any voice’ to speak different languages for different audiences. Moore divides the book into sections based on significant shifts: seventh- to eleventh-century Benedictine architectural abstractions; twelfth-century crusader claims; Franciscan affective and experiential pieties; and post-Reformation ideological debates. Changing devotional practices, political conditions and technologies frame her presentation of manuscripts and monuments primarily intended for European Christian audiences.

Architecture of the Christian Holy Land shifts the scholarly conversation away from medieval or modern similitudes. Moore is less concerned with the slippages and fidelities of the translation process, as questions of accuracy fail to fully address how and why architectural likenesses were drawn, printed or built. Instead, she analyses how works instrumentalise specific modes of devotional and political engagement with the monuments they represent. Short studies of European monuments connect their construction to the patron or worshipping community’s interest in the Holy Land. Rather than a souvenir of a faraway structure, the recreations facilitate characteristic forms of ritual practice and, after the First Crusade, generate new political claims to Palestine. Moore’s analysis of two texts with abundant architectural illustrations – the seventh-century De locis sanctis of Adomnán of Iona and the fourteenth-century Libro d’Oltramare of Fr Niccolò da Poggibonsi – anchor the Benedictine and Franciscan sections. Moore presents the copying of Adomnán’s schematic plans of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Church of the Ascension in ninth-century Benedictine monasteries as a ‘re-creation of those buildings as a reinscription of sacred forms in real space’ intended to draw attention to the imprint of Christ’s presence at their centres.Footnote ²⁰ Moore notes that architectural re-creations in the same monastic environments provided a platform for more embodied meditations and relations. Following the formation of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, Moore argues that Poggibonsi and other members of the order highlighted an affective interaction with the physical sites to encourage lay piety at home and patronage for the Custody abroad. The book also traces an arc of political proximity and distance from Palestinian territories, presenting twelfth- to fifteenth-century works as potential reclamations and eighth- to eleventh-century and Ottoman-era objects and structures as attempted substitutions.

Moore’s book asks: ‘When and why did description of architectural forms become an essential idea of the imagined pilgrimage to the Holy Land? And, how did this relate to the re-creation of the pilgrimage in real space, through architectural construction?’Footnote ²¹ Rather than one point of origin and cause, each chapter answers the question through a different historical frame. Representations of Jerusalem in non-Latin Christian contexts are occasionally referenced, but the book’s arc focuses on Western Europe with a particular attention to Italy. Architecture of the Christian Holy Land is likely to appeal to students and specialists in many disciplines, as the material is presented clearly and compellingly. While the absence of in-text references to scholars other than Krautheimer makes the book more user-friendly, the decision (which may have been the publisher’s) to use endnotes is something of a shame. As the notes and forty-nine-page bibliography make clear, Moore draws on a wealth of past work and intervenes in active debates. Placing the authors on the same page as their ideas would make it easier for new researchers to understand the field and use her work as a point of departure. Given its comprehensive scope and compelling conclusions, Moore’s book will likely become central to future studies of Jerusalem’s architectural representations.

Cathleen A. Fleck’s 2023 Reimagining Jerusalem’s architectural identities does not directly engage with Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, although it cites a 2010 article by Moore on the relationship between the Dome of the Rock’s representation in pre-sixteenth-century pilgrimage accounts and Italian narrative painting.Footnote ²² Rather than an oversight, the absence illuminates the differences that also may have led Weitzmann to leave Krautheimer out of his citational conversation. Like Weitzmann, Fleck foregrounds images of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity, the Dome of the Rock and other Palestinian monuments in representations of scriptural events or generalised ‘cityscapes’.Footnote ²³ She identifies the depiction of specific architectural features in five key objects as citations of loca sancta and explores how connections to Jerusalem supported imaginative attachments to both the city and its sacred sites. Fleck chose the works – a twelfth-century pilaster carved in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and moved to Mamluk Cairo, the thirteenth-century Riccardiana Psalter from southern Italy or Sicily, a pair of enamelled glass beakers made in the Levant, an inlaid metal canteen some scholars attribute to Mosul and the fourteenth-century Clement Bible illuminated in Angevin Naples – to present ‘a less Eurocentric and more pluralistic analysis of the crusader era’.Footnote ²⁴ She states that each was ‘closely tied to the Levant … they all reflected on and responded to the religious and geo-political powers and tensions associated with Jerusalem in the tumultuous Middle Ages’.Footnote ²⁵ Each chapter is written as a standalone study of a single work, although the pilaster carved in Jerusalem has separate chapters situating it in its Latin Kingdom and secondary Cairene contexts. The chapters are abundantly illustrated and follow a similar analytical thread: Fleck identifies representations of Jerusalem’s architecture, highlights what she considers intentional references to the city’s contemporary sacred monuments, and proposes a provenance that connects to a specific understanding of the city. The book seems designed for current modes of fragmentary digital reading, as chapters repeat background information on Jerusalem monuments and limited reference is made to the works and arguments in other chapters.

Fleck identifies potential representations of the Dome of the Rock on all five objects: as a relief carving on the pilaster and a painted image on one of the glass beakers, and as a backdrop to the Presentation in the Temple in the psalter, canteen and Bible. She echoes other scholars in noting unusual iconographic features in the first four works as evidence of an intentional representation of the Jerusalem monument. For the Clement Bible, Fleck points out the structure’s Pantheon-like form and the manuscript’s connection to the court of King Robert i of Anjou, and argues that ‘by deliberately not referencing the actual architecture of Jerusalem, the patron distanced himself from it and suggested that Naples was more concerned with the Italian holy city than with the distant one in the Levant’.Footnote ²⁶ This emphasis on a patron’s individual modes of attachment is echoed in other chapters, and supports Fleck’s overall aim to show how ‘people claimed some sites, creating “affinity,” and spurned others, establishing “contrast,” based on strong sentiments inspired by their religious perspectives and their faith’s symbolic or actual struggle to possess the city’.Footnote ²⁷

Centring precise iconographic identifications and the affinities they evoke leads Fleck to associate the portable works with potential patrons who mustered a similar range of references. These include the aforementioned Neapolitan courtier, a woman in a Benedictine convent, ‘an Eastern Christian cleric who knew the Arabic language and had once experienced or heard second-hand of the Palm Sunday liturgy at the depicted Jerusalem sites’ (or a Frankish patron or pilgrim), and a ‘Syrian Orthodox merchant from Mosul who was a member of a confraternity in Acre linked to the Hospitallers’.Footnote ²⁸ Fleck’s speculations about patronage are bolstered by research that draws attention to the medieval world’s myriad interconnections. However, reconstructing individual attachments to Jerusalem risks obscuring the contexts of the works’ creation by arguing for precision in contexts of productive ambiguity. Given the flexible understanding of architectural similitude in the medieval period and the role played by an artist’s available iconographic models, it is difficult to conclusively establish intentional reference, or an intentional absence of reference in the Clement Bible, in scenes with architectural settings. Past studies of the canteen and beakers by Eva Hoffman and Maria Georgopoulou query the point of seeking specificity, as the portability of the works and their production in cities with diverse Muslim and Christian populations renders them open to many potential interpretations.Footnote ²⁹ Fleck’s discussion of the pilaster’s reception in Jerusalem and Cairo, which considers the public reception of the Latin ruler or Mamluk sultan’s political discourse, points to the promise of a wider angle. As her introduction, conclusion and the juxtaposition of chapters demonstrates, medieval audiences from different religious communities appreciated a shared repertoire of narrative images set in Palestine’s sacred landscape. Establishing a singular iconographic reading in relation to a specific kind of user may therefore limit scholarly understanding of a multifaceted visual repertoire.

Reimagining Jerusalem’s architectural identities summarises past scholarship on the five works and advances intriguing new readings of each object’s iconography. Because Fleck describes her intentions as an effort to undermine art history’s Eurocentricity and interrogate categories like ‘crusader’ or ‘Islamic’, the book seems more directed towards scholars and students seeking to challenge a Eurocentric canon than those who are already working outside of it.Footnote ³⁰ Chapter titles like ‘Jerusalem on souvenir glass beakers and cross-cultural exchange’ and ‘A multicultural view of Jerusalem on the Freer Canteen’ imply political frameworks that structure Fleck’s presentation of the medieval world. Her methods of establishing faith-based affinity for Jerusalem through iconographic identification, however, at points reify the binary identities she seeks to undermine.

Fleck presents the diversity of Christian communities in a world that is unshaped by internal power dynamics and principally defined through a Frankish lens. This approach aligns with objects made in Jerusalem for Latin Kingdom patrons and manuscripts made in Sicily and Naples for a cloistered woman or courtier. It strikes a dissonant chord when discussing the canteen and beakers. Because Fleck identifies representations of clerics from different Christian communities on the beakers, she sees the work as reflecting a Latin Kingdom multiculturalism that may have appealed to all Christian audiences. However, one might question whether the Latin church’s adoption of Orthodox rituals witnessed by the Palm Sunday liturgy shows how ‘the twelfth-century Latin Franks were (perhaps unwittingly) approaching their stewardship of the holy city in an inclusive fashion’.Footnote ³¹ As Christopher MacEvitt’s model of ‘rough tolerance’ in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem suggests, twelfth-century ‘inclusivity’ might be better defined by considering whose interests are served by making difference selectively visible or invisible.Footnote ³² Fleck’s attribution of the Freer Canteen to a Christian resident of Mosul renders the connection to the crusades more tenuous. While Fleck repeatedly highlights the insufficiencies of the term ‘Islamic’ art, her discussion of the canteen points to the risks of eliding a Christian and a crusader perspective.

As Moore’s wide-ranging analysis of Jerusalem’s representations concludes, translating monuments into structures, images or words is always a political act. She suggests that Krautheimer’s failure to reference the crusades reflected a nostalgic presentation of Jerusalem’s Christian past under the British Mandate.Footnote ³³ In contrast, she describes her project as an effort to demonstrate how monumental rhetoric constructed, and continues to construct, evolving kinds of European Christian claims to Palestine across the centuries under conditions of religious antagonism.Footnote ³⁴ While Moore’s centuries-spanning narrative is anchored by the perspectives of authors and patrons who worshipped in Latin and European vernaculars, Fleck places a wider range of medieval voices in conversation and highlights the promise of studies that centre a Global Middle Ages. Fleck’s celebration of presence without referencing power, however, may unintentionally echo modern models of multiculturalism that uphold oppression.Footnote ³⁵

Like Weitzmann, Fleck defines iconographic features as evidence of an intentional representation of a locus sanctus and highlights the global appeal of such images. The depiction of the site within the story illuminates how individuals understood the Jerusalem of their era. What distinguishes a ‘Weitzmannian’ approach to iconography is that the architectural representation does not make the monument present for the user, but highlights its distance. Expanding on Krautheimer’s observations regarding symbolic ‘similitude’, Moore draws attention to the ways representations of architecture enabled their users to make sacred place present. Reimagining Jerusalem’s architectural identities in the later Middle Ages and The architecture of the Christian Holy Land explore Jerusalem’s heterogeneous omnipresence within the medieval imagination. Each contributes to a growing interest in the political and devotional dimensions of Jerusalem’s architectural representations, and their distinct approaches and divergent corpus of works highlight the difference between an iconographic ‘reimagining’ predicated on recognition and a ‘re-creation’ that presumes a desire to reconstruct the space.