This course examines the art and architecture of the sacred sites and cities of the Middle East. It introduces a visual and material history spanning millennia and encompassing the regions major religious cultures in all their denominational diversity-Judaism, Greco-Roman Polytheism, Christianity, Islam. Special attention will be paid to the Middle Ages, including the Crusades and their aftermath, with topics including cultural hybridity, sectarianism, 'proto-colonialism' and the manifestation of these topics in art. The course examines pilgrimage in the development of sacred sites, and the widespread phenomenon of recreating these sites elsewhere throughout the world (culminating in American theme parks). Students will consider the shifting criteria for what constitutes the sacred in cult-religious practice and imagination. How and why does a thing or a place come to be seen as holy? To what extent can this holiness be altered, transferred, or reproduced? And what is the role of the visual arts in this process?
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