Professor Woodfin is teaching a course on the art of Medieval Jerusalem this semester, so I got to add these fabulous images of Crusader and Mamluk architecture from his course textbook, Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem's Sacred Esplanade. It's a bit of a sensitive subject given the contentious history of Jerusalem and Queens' diverse student body, with sizeable numbers of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim students. The chronology of Jerusalem is pretty much just successive waves of domination by all these different groups for thousands of years.
On the plus side, it makes for some fascinating layers of history and architecture - centuries worth of renovations, additions, tear-downs, and reconstructions. For example, many of these 15th century Mamluk constructions repurpose 8th century carved Frankish stone, and then 19th century tile got added on top, creating layers of architecture that would seem to benefit from stratigraphy as much as parsing the surface. Queens College was fortunate enough to acquire a huge, amazing collection of black and white photographs from Brown University that showcases Gothic and Medieval architecture from England and France. Professor Bill Clark had them squirreled away in his office for a year or so, but we've finally managed to organize them (alphabetically by city), and begin scanning and cataloging them.
Therefore, I'm very proud to announce that the Queens College Gothic Architecture Collection is now live! While I'd love to make the entire collection available in the Commons, so that anyone with an internet connection could view them, we don't yet have the permission from Brown University. For the present, you can find these images in an institutional collections of ArtStor by scrolling to the end of the Queens College Collections list. (Since ArtStor is offered only through the Rosenthal Library databases, don't forget to have your QC ID handy to log in!) In the meantime, here's a taste of the photographs we're cataloging! |
About the VR CoordinatorJacqui Hopely Monkell has been the Visual Resources Coordinator at Queens College since 2015. She maintains this website while juggling her other VR responsibilities. If you find something art history related that she might find interesting, drop her a line! Archives
January 2017
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