Sacred Stimulus: Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome by Galit Noga-Banai (review)

Noga-Banai's Sacred Stimulus is written to engage two types of readers: the art historian and the historian. Art historians will relish in the precision with which Noga-Banai presents and describes mosaics, sarcophagi, wall paintings and other visual material, her constructive engagement with older scholarship (helpfully well-documented in the extensive footnotes), and the nuanced and surprising readings that emerge. These are case studies that can productively be read on their own terms, even as they are interwoven into a larger and more ambitious historical thesis about the subtle, but significant influence of the earthly Jerusalem on art in Rome in the fourth to mid-fifth century. This review focuses on that thesis from a historian's perspective.

Noga-Banai's preface begins with a charming vignette of a modern sculpture, "Second Temple: Jerusalem-Rome-Jerusalem," overlooked by all but the most attentive (or well-informed) viewers: a concave hourglass carved into a sidewalk in what was formerly the Jewish ghetto of Rome. This "miniment," as its artist Micha Ullman terms it, though easy to overlook, is nevertheless subtly present in the urban fabric of the city. Similarly, so Sacred Stimulus argues, Jerusalem was present, as a visual idea, in late antique Rome—despite the fact that, as the author readily admits, its traces are as difficult, if not more, to identify. Most ambitiously, Noga-Banai contends that careful visual analysis can reveal an engagement with Jerusalem—and even a shifting argument about its meaning and importance vis-à-vis Rome—that has left no trace in the textual record. As she eloquently expresses it, "Visual rhetoric can help us to see the absence of words and decipher the presence of silence" (5). In itself this is a plausible and credible thesis, even if readers will not all be equally persuaded by the specific relationships between Rome and Jerusalem that Noga-Banai posits.

The starting points for Noga-Banai's analysis are a historical claim, namely that "[i]n order to stake its claim to be the head of the Church . . . Rome had to overcome [not only Constantinople but] another much more complicated obstacle as well: Jerusalem" (4), and a first-century Roman monument: the Arch of Titus and its representation of the Temple spoils. Rome's claim to these sacred treasures, in addition to Rome's acquisition of relics of the True Cross, were, according to Noga-Banai, the stimuli for Rome's attempts to establish its superiority to Jerusalem. Specifically, in chapter 1, she suggests that the presence of a copy of the Mosaic law in Rome influenced late fourth-century depictions of the Dominus legem dat scene as found in a mosaic from the mausoleum of S. Constanza and a wall painting from the catacomb under the Villa Torlonia. With respect to the S. Constanza mosaic she argues that it "pictures the significant eschatological event of ingathering, which is to take place on Mount Zion, as in fact taking place in Rome" (29). Then in chapter 2, in a similar vein, she draws a relationship between Roman compositions showing the adoration of the elevated Christogram by Peter and Paul and Cyril of Jerusalem's account that emphasizes Jerusalem as the home of the True Cross. In turn, Noga-Banai posits that there was a change in Rome's relationship to Jerusalem from the late fourth century onward, once "Rome finally established itself as a pilgrimage center as sacred as Jerusalem" (139). This trajectory is explored through Pope Damasus's attention to martyrs' tombs (juxtaposed with Cyril of Jerusalem's efforts to "Christianize" Jerusalem), the imperial reconstruction of S. Paolo fuori le Mura, and portable art of the fifth century. Depictions of Christian Jerusalem in fifth-century Rome (in the mosaics of S. Pudenziana and S. Maria Maggiore and the architecture of S. Stefano Rotondo) register, according to Noga-Banai, Rome's embrace of Jerusalem "with the strong arm of...