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  • Sacred Stimulus: Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome by Galit Noga-Banai
  • Jan Willem Drijvers
Sacred Stimulus: Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome
Galit Noga-Banai
Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 200; 16 color plates, 54 black-and-white figures. ISBN 978-0-19-087465-0

This book examines earthly Jerusalem as a source of inspiration and stimulus for the visual Christianization of the city of Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries. It does so not from the perspective of textual evidence (of which there hardly is any to sustain the Jerusalem-Rome connection), but it approaches Jerusalemite traditions and perceptions in Rome through visual culture. Although the study of Rome’s Christian conversion through architecture, reliefs, decorative programs, and funerary art has a long tradition, this is (as far as I know) the first time that the relationship between earthly Jerusalem and the creation of a local Christian narrative in the eternal city has been studied in depth from the angle of visual language and portable objects. The book makes clear how important visual vocabulary and materiality, textual material, is for understanding the past. The main argument of the art historian Noga-Banai is that the use of Jerusalemite images constructed Rome’s Christian identity and associated the city with the biblical past in Palestine, and thereby made that past part of Rome’s cultural memory.

The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter discusses Jerusalemite spoils and relics. It starts with an exposé of the presence of Jerusalem in Rome by way of the war spoils brought by Titus after the suppression of the Jewish Revolt in 70 ce. The representation of the arrival into Rome of the sacred vessels from the Temple and a Torah scroll on the Arch of Titus and preserved in Vespasian’s Temple of Peace, marks a physical and visual connection with the Old Jerusalem. The first physical association with the New Jerusalem (i.e., Christian Jerusalem) dates probably from the 330s when a relic of the Cross was deposited in the church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, the former residence of Helena Augusta, who is alleged to have found the Cross. Noga-Banai then moves on to a discussion of the (heavily restored) mosaic Dominus legem dat (Dld) in S. Costanza. She hypothesizes that this visual representation of Christ presenting the law to Peter in the presence of Paul may have been inspired by the presence of the Torah scroll in Rome. That the Torah was part of the cultural memory in Rome is reflected by Talmudic references that the Temple treasures were preserved in Rome. Wall paintings in Jewish catacombs under the Villa Torlonia with representations of the Ark and the Torah scroll are suggested by Noga-Banai to be a Jewish response to the Christian Dld. These visual statements seem to represent the Jewish-Christian dialogue about which group constituted [End Page 262] God’s chosen people. The same dialogue was also going on in fourth-century Jerusalem where the victorious Cross kept in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was juxtaposed with the Temple and the sacred objects once kept there. The failed restoration of the Temple by Julian in 363 according to Noga-Banai refreshed the collective memory of Jews and Christians in Rome of Jerusalemite objects and traditions in their city.

The second chapter examines representations in Rome of narratives which had their origin in Palestine. In the first part of the chapter the focus is on images of the Christogram and its adoration by Peter and Paul as for instance represented on sarcophagi and gold glass. Noga-Banai suggests that the various representations of the Christogram adored by the two apostles in Rome had their origin in Jerusalem narratives about the discovery and celestial appearances of the Cross which had first appeared in the fourth century in Jerusalem under the episcopate of Cyril (ca. 348–386). Noga-Banai also discusses the Crossing of the Red Sea sarcophagus (now in Split) which has a Christogram likewise venerated by Peter and Paul. In the second part she discusses the so-called Bethesda sarcophagi which depict...

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