Materiality and liminality

The debate among art historians over Jerusalem’s impact on medieval Christianity has often emphasized the role played by the celebrated buildings marking the most worshipped loca sancta as architectural models. In Richard Krautheimer’s pioneering study, the different (and often ambiguous) ways in which the Anastasis Rotunda was replicated in Romanesque or Gothic buildings were viewed as exemplary case studies enabling iconographic and iconological analyses of medieval architecture. ¹ Since then, many new data have been collected and several new studies have dealt with the monumental replicas of the Jerusalem holy sites between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. Scholars have become more and more aware that the motivations underlying the construction of ad instar churches might have been multifarious and dependent on many different factors, such as an association with particular institutions connected with the Holy Land and the Crusaders, the varying conditions of pilgrimage, the use of a building as a burial site for individual donors or as visual or spatial support for the performance of collective or private devotions, or the wish to efficaciously evoke the heavenly Jerusalem by hinting at its terrestrial double. ² Less clearly discernible before the late Middle Ages and the invention of sacri monti is the purpose of a translatio Hierusalem, that is, creation of a surrogate goal for pilgrims, not only replicating the forms of buildings and their settings in the urban or natural landscape, but also reproducing the sanctity attributed to the holy sites and their memorial qualities. ³