“Jerusalem, 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven” recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum featuring 200 objects from 60 international collections including manuscripts, maps, paintings, sculptures, architectural fragments, ceramics, fabrics, jewelry, books and even weapons. The New Yorker calls the show “captivating,” saying it represents the Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures of the time, “the three great Abrahamic faiths sharing a city holy to them all, when they weren’t bloodily contesting it.”
The exhibit is curated by Barbara Drake Boehm, senior curator for the Met Cloisters, and Melanie Holcomb, who works in the medieval art department, and is organized in the following sections representing the historic appeal of the medieval city: “The Air of Holiness” and “The Promise of Eternity,” following with “The Pulse of Trade and Tourism” and “The Drumbeat of Holy War.”
The New Yorker remarks on the exhibit: “This show, more than any other that I can immediately recall, closes mental circuitry between then and now, owing to an exquisitely managed sense of collective drives and emotions that have not ceased to influence human affairs.”
