Art of The Crusades - Painting

Painting

An example of the mixture of different styles is the Melisende Psalter, an illuminated manuscript produced in the mid-12th century, perhaps for Queen Melisende of Jerusalem. It reflects her European and Armenian heritage, and is also influenced by Byzantine and Islamic techniques. The Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai was an important centre where a school of manuscript and icon painting that blended European and local influences emerged. Fortunately it has also been a very secure home for its collection of icons (but not manuscripts in Latin, all of which were later destroyed, apparently under Russian influence), so a good number have survived there. Artists who can be identified on stylistic grounds as originating in France and Italy (Venice and Apulia) worked there, producing work mixing Byzantine and Western conventions, but usually with lettering in Greek. This was possible because by a quirk of Orthodox history the church there was in communion with both the Catholic and the other Orthodox churches, and so the normal sectarian divides that separated the crusaders from even the local Christians did not operate.

Another example of the mixture of styles is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the renovation and rebuilding of which was completed in 1149; however only fragments of the large programme of mosaics now survive. This was until the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 the institution with the main Crusader scriptorium, from which six manuscripts survive, made in a mixture of royal and church commissions. Most of the significant surviving illuminated manuscripts were produced in the 13th century, about half in the last forty years of the Latin kingdom; to what extent this is an accident of survival is unclear. Some icons in wall painting and mosaic survive from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The Hospitaller church at Abu Ghosh, apparently then regarded as the biblical Emmaus, was abandoned in 1187 but has good remains of frescos.