"Jewish and Christian Symbolic Imaging of Jerusalem in the Fourth Century," in A. Hoffmann and G. Wolf, Jerusalem as Narrative Space (2012) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beholding the Holy City: Changes in the Iconic Representation of Jerusalem in the 21th Century
2013
This article focuses on a recent turning point in the history of gazes in and of Jerusalem. For decades, the Muslim structure of the Dome of the Rock and the Jewish Western Wall served as a primary (dual) image for Jerusalem. Yet since the 1990s, there has been a transition towards framing the city as exclusively Jewish, with a focus on the Tower of David as the new icon. This transition embodies the political shifts to an ethno-national agenda combined with the neoliberal zeitgeist.
Throughout Jewish art, coins, funerary art, synagogue decorations, and medieval manuscripts, temple motifs have been widely utilized to represent the significant place that Jerusalem holds in Jewish thought and history. These motifs, including the menorah and Ark of Covenant, serve as powerful symbols of the city's importance. This viewpoint is also apparent in modern art, which delves into eschatological and theological subjects concerning the re-establishment of the Jewish state. According to Shulamit Laderman In her chapter, "Representations of Jerusalem in Jewish Art and Literature In The Late Antique, Medieval, And Modern Periods," Art allows us to bridge the gap between the past and present, blending ancient landmarks with modern elements and theological concepts, as evidenced by the many artworks portraying the Temple and City of Jerusalem.
The Image-paradigm of Jerusalem in Christian Hierotopy
A. Simsky. The Image-paradigm of Jerusalem in Christian Hierotopy // Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2018. Issue 3 (17). P. 101-113, 2018
Image-paradigms are non-pictorial mental images of the sacred. They are engendered in the viewer's imagination by means of organized ensembles of iconic, symbolic and typological elements of sacred spaces and emerge from a manifold of interrelating associations. In this paper I elucidate this complex notion by studying the example of one image-paradigm of fundamental importance , namely, the Holy City of Jerusalem, which appears to the religious imagination as the synthesis of an idealized historical city-relic and its celestial counterpart – the Heavenly Jerusalem. This Jerusalem is both the 'navel' of the world and a place of God's immediate, living presence. The Church as a whole, as well as individual churches, are identified with Jerusalem, which reflects their primary function of serving as meeting places with God. While participating in the liturgy and integrating into the liturgical space, the faithful feel themselves to be in the midst of the Heavenly Jerusalem, a feeling which clearly cannot be reduced to or evoked by a simple two-dimensional picture. The image-paradigm works by means of a 'spatial icon', that is, a thoughtfully arranged spatial system of pointers, including architecture, an iconographic program , as well as the entire liturgical performance, including the very presence of the congregation absorbed in pious contemplation. An image-paradigm belongs to the religious tradition as a whole and takes shape in individual minds through a wide variety of religious experiences, including training, reading, prayer, liturgical life, mysticism, etc. In this paper, I begin with a brief review of iconographic strategies employed in conjuring the image-paradigm of the Holy City in Christian churches. In particular, the Celestial City can be represented in icons by means of earthly architecture including either recognizable motives of Constantinian Jerusalem or idealized and even fantastic patterns. Next, I move on to New Jerusalems, that is, Medieval reconstructions of the Christian Jerusalem, which were used as sites of virtual pilgrimage. Finally, I discuss possible links between Russian onion domes and the cupola of most prominent Jerusalem churches: the Holy Sepulcher and the Dome of the Rock. Particularly, I show how the famous cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed in Moscow was designed to represent Jerusalem as a city of multiple and diverse churches. In closing I turn to the Western tradition and provide a summary characterization of Gothic architectural icons of the Holy City and compare them to the Byzantine strategies.
2022
Jerusalem is a city rich with geopolitical and eschatological connotations venerated by three major religions intervening in iconographic supersession and engaging in incessant communal conflicts – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Holy City has elicited many instances of literal and figurative imagery, but none is perhaps more evocative and persistent than that of the Temple Mount on Mount Moriah. Through consideration of the geographic and religious significance of the Temple Mount precinct for the three religions, this paper attempts to analyze the input of other historians on the scholarship of the intentional patronage of supersessionist visual imagery on this holy site, specifically with Islamic and Christian intercession over the Dome of the Rock (b. 692 CE).
The Holy Fire and Visual Constructs of Jerusalem, East and West
Alexei Lidov. The Holy Fire and Visual Constructs of Jerusalem, East and West. Published in: Visual Constructs of Jerusalem. Eds B. Kuhnel, G. Noga-Banai, H. Vorholt. Turnhout, Belgium: BREPOLS Publishers, 2014, p. 241-249. , 2014
In this paper I address the phenomenon of the Holy Fire and the hierotopical and art historical aspects of this great miracle of the Christian world. According to the belief of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Fire descends every Great Saturday of Easter upon the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It seems very significant that the Holy Fire was perceived as a kind of the most important relic, which could be preserved and transferred from Jerusalem to any other place. I will argue that there is a possibility to reconstruct the ritual, spatial and artistic environment, which came to being in conjunction with the Paschal miracle of the Holy Fire. Some particular rites are discussed: "Lo Scoppio del Carro" in Medieval Florence, ''les lanternes des morts" in France, Italy, Spain. As I have argued elsewhere, it was the cupola of the kouvouklion over the Holy Sepulchre that pre-destined the appearance of the onion-shaped domes A number of other sources, testifying to the influence of the Holy Fire are also discussed in the paper. All of them make it clear that the Miracle of the Holy Fire was a powerful, though nowadays underestimated, paradigm of the Christian visual culture, which exercised its influence on both iconographic devices and concepts of particular sacred spaces that played a crucial role in translations of New Jerusalems.