Crusader Art in the Holy Land, from the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291 (review)

In Hegel's Aesthetics, the philosopher declares: "Of all that is noble in the achievements of the ancient and modern world, I know pretty nearly all of it, and one can and should know it all." With the completion of his magisterial history of Crusader art, it can be said that Folda knows nearly all of what falls under the rubric and that, by virtue of his book, the rest of us are now in a position to know it as well. This second and concluding volume defines its goal as "identifying, analyzing, discussing, and interpreting all recognizable works of Crusader art," including architecture. Moreover, Folda addresses not just the "Holy Land" per se but also all the surrounding territories—not to mention the far-flung spheres from which the crusaders and their camp followers came. His is, in other words, a comprehensive and multicultural study. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's Toward a Geography of Art appeared in 2004, too late for Folda to take account of its arguments; but the issues that Kaufmann raises are relevant to Folda's inquiry. How, for example, should one deal with an illuminated manuscript brought to Acre rather than produced there? It too would have formed part of the visual culture of the region, despite being an import, in the same way that, mutatis mutandis, Japanese anime are now part of the visual culture of the United States. Folda devoted an earlier book, on an artist he dubbed the Paris-Acre Master, to a case involving an already formed French artist who came to the Holy Land. Material of this kind is included in the new book as well, but here, in the context of a comprehensive work, it demonstrates that including everything—no matter how laudable the desire or how big the book—will remain elusive. The circles of those things that in some way comprise relevant contexts grow ever wider, even as they overlap, to the point that they can rebound on one another; and apparent peripheries become central.

In recent years, such questions have themselves become central to debates over the interaction of Byzantine and Western culture, with old, rather schematic dichotomies and structures of "influence" giving way to far more complicated pictures. This debate has been defined, in part (and in ways that Folda usefully reviews), by discussions of whether to discuss such cultural productions in terms of colonialism (a term Folda considers but then rejects), or of "manieria greca," or of some Mediterranean "lingua franca." Folda concludes by arguing that "the major art produced in the mainland Crusader States between 1098 and 1291 was produced for Frankish or Crusader patrons, by local Crusader or even Frankish and sometimes indigenous Christian artists . . . and as such merits being called the 'art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land.'" He also observes that 2009 will mark the nine-hundredth anniversary of the Crusader capture of Tripoli, as well as the thousandth anniversary of the taking of Jerusalem in the First Crusade. These landmarks, he suggests, will bring the question of "'what is Crusader art' . . . much more clearly in view!" In light of current events, and of resurgent attitudes that reinforce or reimpose binary paradigms and polarizing tendencies, a scholar may, even while celebrating Folda's impressive accomplishment, look forward to these anniversaries with as much trepidation as relish.