The Madonna of the Prickly Pear Cactus: Tradition and Innovation in the 19th and 20th century Christian Art in the Holy Land

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Christian visual art and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Holy Land have received little scholarly attention, if at all. This book studies, analyzes, and presents major artistic creations of diverse Christian communities during this period. Furthermore, it also offers an extensive corpus of visual images never photographed and published previously. The book is devoted to aspects of the visual art of the Greek-Orthodox and Armenian churches of Jerusalem, and to the-mainly twentieth-century-artistic endeavors of the Latin Church. Iconographic investigations and analysis of meanings embodied in the Greek and Armenian paintings and the architecture and painting cycles of the Latin Visitation Church in Ain Karim and the Latin Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth attempt to decipher this art as an expression of the attitudes and intentions of the diverse Christian communities of the Holy Land.

Nurith Kenaan-Kedar is Professor of Medieval Art History and former Dean of the Faculty of the Arts at Tel Aviv University. She has published widely on Crusader art in the Holy Land, and on Romanesque art in Europe (Marginal Sculpture in Medieval France, Ashgate 1995). Her scholarly work focuses on iconography and imagery, their sources, role, and meanings in art. She considers the visual text to be a language with codes and symbols that can be deciphered.

Research on these subjects has led her to investigate modern Christian art in the Holy Land and the unique iconography of the Armenian ceramics of Jerusalem, as it preserves the artistic symbolic language of early Christian art and at the same time uses the traditional working methods and routines of the ancient workshops. Nurith Kenaan-Kedar is the author of Three Generations of Armenian Ceramics in Jerusalem (Jerusalem 2003).