The art of pilgrimage

To develop a course on the art of pilgrimage, Prof. Holly Flora and Prof. Leslie Geddes traveled in June to Israel and Jordan to meet scholars of medieval art and to view sites long venerated in the Holy Land. As an invited speaker, Prof. Flora presented “Materiality and the Senses in Cimabue’s Assisi Murals (c. 1200)” to faculty and graduate students participating in a seminar on medieval art and the senses at Tel Aviv University. Their host, Dr. Renana Bartal, escorted Professors Flora and Geddes to sites near the Sea of Galilee, including Capernaum, the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, and Magdala. Medievalist doctoral students of Tel Aviv University took them to see the 12th-century Crusader church, now a Benedictine monastery, at Abu Ghosh. In Jerusalem they were fortunate to participate in a private tour of the Western Wall and the Via Dolorosa, facilitated by TAU’s Prof. Assaf Pinkus. Prof. Galit Noga-Banai of Hebrew University showed them the archaeological site of the first Marian church, located halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. One their own, Professors Flora and Geddes traveled to Masada, the fortified palace built by Herod the Great and site of an infamous siege during the First Jewish-Roman War, and Petra, where they saw the famous rock-cut architecture of the Nabataeans.