Workshop on Jerusalem in the Medieval and Modern Imagination
Time: Thursday | 25 February 2021 | 5:00p CST
Location: Zoom | Zoom information available here
Annabel Wharton’s talk considers the reciprocal effects of a model of an ancient city and its modern observers. The “Holy Land Hotel Model ofAncient Jerusalem” was constructed under the direction of Michael Avi Yonah, a distinguished senior Israeli archaeologist; later, the project was supervised by another eminent archaeologist, Yoram Tsafrir. The model, opened to the public in 1966 on the grounds of the Holy Land Hotel in the suburbs of Jerusalem, was moved to the Israel Museum in 2006.
Not only has the location of the model shifted in those forty years, but also its audiences and its meanings have changed. For its scholarly makers, the model was a scientific archive. For the model’s Jewish, Christian and Palestinian observers, it has had very different meanings, some of which have affected its form. This paper demonstrates how a model is, in unexpected ways, historical and political, and how those politics and histories are unstable and interdependent.
Annabel Wharton
William B. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History
Duke University
This program is a part of the Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, sponsored by the Center for theHumanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with support fromNancy and David Borghesi and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.