Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500–1500

Description

Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500–1500, focuses on the unique ways that natural materials carry the spirit of place. Since early Christianity, wood, earth, water and stone were taken from loca sancta to signify them elsewhere. Academic discourse has indiscriminately grouped material tokens from holy places and their containers with architectural and topographical emulations, twodimensional images, and bodily relics. However, unlike textual or visual representations, natural materials do not describe or interpret the Holy Land; they are part of it. Tangible and timeless, they realize the meaning of their place of origin in new locations. What makes earth, stones or bottled water transported from holy sites sacred? How do they become pars pro toto, signifying the whole from which they were taken? This book will examine natural media used for translating loca sancta, the processes of their sanctification and how, although inherently abstract, they become charged with meaning. It will address their metamorphosis, natural or induced; how they change the environment to which they are transported; their capacity to translate a static and distant site elsewhere; the effect of their relocation on users/viewers; and how their containers and staging are used to communicate their substance. List of color plates vii List of figures viii List of contributors xii Acknowledgments xviii Foreword xix CAROLINE WALKER BYNUM Natural materials, place, and representation xxiii RENANA BARTAL, NETA BODNER, AND BIANCA KÜHNEL I Collecting and collections 1 1 Earth, stone, water, and oil: objects of veneration in Holy Land travel narratives 3 ORA LIMOR 2 Eleventh-century relic collections and the Holy Land 19 JULIA M. H. SMITH 3 The popes and the loca sancta of Jerusalem: relic practice and relic diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean after the Muslim conquest 36 MANFRED LUCHTERHANDT 4 Jerusalem refracted: geographies of the True Cross in late antiquity 64 LAURA VENESKEY II Agents of translation 77 5 Una processione da farsi ogni anno con una Messa Solenne: reception of stone relics from the Holy Land in Renaissance Ragusa 79 TANJA TRŠKA vi Contents 6 The Stone of Grace in the Gareja Desert, Georgia 94 ZAZA SKHIRTLADZE 7 Earth from elsewhere: burial in terra sancta beyond the Holy Land 109 LUCY DONKIN 8 Materiality and liminality: nonmimetic evocations of Jerusalem along the Venetian sea routes to the Holy Land 127 MICHELE BACCI III Instillation and enactment 155 9 Rocks of Jerusalem: bringing the Holy Land home 157 ELINA GERTSMAN AND ASA SIMON MITTMAN 10 Image, epigram, and nature in Middle Byzantine personal devotion 172 BRAD HOSTETLER 11 Place and surface: Golgotha in late medieval Bruges 190 NADINE MAI 12 Moving stones: on the columns of the Dome of the Rock, their history and meaning 207 LAWRENCE NEES 13 Christ’s unction and the material realization of a stone in Jerusalem 216 YAMIT RACHMAN-SCHRIRE IV Contemporary re-enactment 231 14 Susan Hiller’s Homages to Joseph Beuys: mystics, cult, and anthropology 233 KOBI BEN-MEIR Index 250