The Imagined and Real Jerusalem in Art and Architecture pdf

The Imagined and Real Jerusalem in Art and Architecture

Edited by Jeroen Goudeau – Mariëtte Verhoeven – Wouter Weijers

THE IMAGINED AND REAL JERUSALEM IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Jerusalem is a city, a place, a mental construction, a biblical-mythical memory. Once Jerusalem has been all this at the same time, then Jerusalem can be all this time and again by active remembrance within the context and problematic nature of the present.

Through the centuries Jerusalem has been visited, sought after, used, reused, appropriated, and it has acted as a point of reference on many levels. The city has become part of different cultural figurations in different periods and places.

 However politically explosive, a reference to this city is ultimately pointing back to the Jerusalem of the Bible. The city, or even only its name, can be an experience of divine presence, as much as it can be a source of conflict deriving from the same claim that it is the Holy City – a claim that is forever contested and reasserted.

From Early Christian times on, a great variety of legitimizations have been constructed by emphasizing myriad aspects of this source, by way of more or less orchestrated memory processes.

The contributions in this book refer, explicitly or implicitly, to dimensions of cultural memory, the way in which the past is remembered, appropriated and represented. Memory takes a vital part in the dynamics of culture.

It recaptures, recycles, reshuffles and re-mediates cultural practices. It uses language, texts, images and buildings in order to develop, preserve and continue cultural identities.

Cultural memory is thus a mediated memory. Its media are not so many vessels of memory in which memory passively resides but objects or manifestations through which memories are produced, shared, and given meaning.1

They select and organize representations of the past in such a way that they can be meaningful in the (historical) present, though such redirections may lead to conflicts among groups with different or antagonistic experiences.2

Cultural memories are thus negotiated, present-oriented and relative, and they depend upon processes of exchange and transfer. In this book, readers can find various examples of these processes throughout a range of historical periods and artistic media.

This collection of studies on Jerusalem in art and architecture is the result of a joint project by researchers of the Department of Art History at Radboud University Nijmegen. In May 2011 and September 2012 two symposia served as mid-term reviews at which the preliminary results were presented.

Specialists in various fields such as the history of painting, sculpture, architecture, book illumination, and applied arts, from Early Christian times to the present, ar-