visual culture 305
A history of medieval Mediterranean visual culture would proceed geographically
to a number of other zones of cultural interaction—contact or frontier zones—such
as the Frankish Morea or Famagusta in Cyprus where Gothic cathedrals appear along-
side centrally-planned Byzantine churches, or to the Venetian–Byzantine architectural
dialogues in Crete, or to the Levant where the art of the Crusaders intermingles with
local indigenous artistic traditions and Ayyubid metalwork was produced with
Christian iconography. In these areas of increased “connectivity” we typically encoun-
ter visual culture that does not fit within the traditional teleology of medieval art. In
fact, these have been the primary areas featured in a number of conferences on cul-
tural encounter in the medieval Mediterranean that have resulted in publication in
premier journals.^3 The scholarship in such volumes ranges in topic from Mudejar
architecture and ornament, domed basilicas of Sicily and Calabria, and vernacular
architecture in Venetian Crete. They cover such exempla often presented in textbooks
as peripheral “asides” or exceptional digressions. To write a history of medieval
Mediterranean visual culture, on the contrary, would be to bring these traditionally
peripheral areas of visual culture to center stage, to foreground them as central to the
primary narrative. The benefits of such a history would be to account for the relations
between regionalism and broader artistic trends and to attend more fully to the diver-
sity of these frontier or contact zones.
Significantly, many of these distinctly Mediterranean arts—that is, traditions better
understood as “Mediterranean” than by the canonic field designations—constitute
radical cultural shifts that follow in the aftermath of the Crusades. The era of the
Crusades, in other words, can be seen as a catalyst for the generation of many visual
idioms that defy the taxonomic teleology of art history.
The stakes of this discussion are elucidated by the longer history and historiogra-
phy of Crusader art itself. Driven initially by a Eurocentric colonial agenda in the
nineteenth century, “Crusader Art” began as a mapping of French or English artistic
traditions in the Holy Land. In large part due to the work of Jaroslav Folda, we now
understand the origins of the art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land as deeply rooted
in the post-Napoleonic French colonial enterprise in the Near East (Folda, 1995).
The earliest scholarly studies of the architecture of the Holy Land treated the art and
architecture of the Frankish Levant as a literal and symbolic extension and projection
of France. Accordingly, celebrated Crusader monuments such as the renovated
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Church of St Anne, and the Annunciation shrine
on the Mount of Olives were understood to be predicated on the importation of
French artisans and artistic ideologies even if attuned to the local materials and climate
of the region. This earliest historiography is driven by a celebration of the
“Europeanness” of the visual culture of the crusader Levant at the expense of recog-
nizing eastern influences or local visual vernaculars; it remained decisively locked in a
model of artistic influence that was understood to travel in one direction: from west
to east.
The next generation of scholars challenged a uni-directional model of influence by
raising the possibility of artistic interchange among Crusaders, Frankish settlers and
Byzantine and Islamic artistic traditions in the eastern Mediterranean. With this
expansion of points of reference, and with the widening of the corpus to include, in
addition to architecture, the figural arts such as manuscripts and icons, the field of
Crusader Art as it is known today came into its own and became characterized as a style