NEWS

CHAPEL HILL -- Dr. Jaroslav Folda is ducking out of the academic grind of teaching and administration next fall to do a bit of detective work.

The N. Ferebee Taylor professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is on the scent of why Crusader art of the 13th century is so dramatically different from the preceding Crusader art.

"It’s discovery," Folda says. "You get the juices flowing and find new ways of understanding these works of art." The professor will spend the 1998-99 academic year at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park as a National Endowment for the Humanities grant recipient.

Crusader art of the 13th century has long been a puzzle to scholars of an era when a good suit of armor meant good health, and Richard the Lion-Hearted and the Knights Templar were heroes in the Middle East.

Romanesque and Byzantine religious imagery are recognizable in Crusader art of the 12th century. After the Moslem leader Saladin routed the Crusaders on July 4, 1187 and drove them from the three major Christian holy sites in today’s Israel, Crusader art got a new look.

The painted wooden panels of icons that are integral to Greek Orthodox religion, soon began appearing in Crusader art with Latin inscriptions. Later, new kinds of illustrated manuscripts on secular and sacred topics emerged, written in old French instead of the Latin used by people in the church.

Who made this new art and where was it done are questions Folda will address.

The teaching award winner, 57, calls the wooden icon panels "mysterious." They were inspired by Byzantine icon painters, "but what do you do with the panels? There was no provision for the panels in the Latin liturgy."

Speculation abounds. Were the panels for personal devotion, altar decoration for public ceremonies or gifts from Crusader pilgrims when they visited St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai?

Whatever their purpose, about 120 of the Crusader icon panels are among the more than 2,000 panels in the collection at St. Catherine’s.

Why St. Catherine’s? Again speculation. The monastery is remote, it was fortified and the dry desert climate ensures the paintings’ longevity.

The artists’ identities remain a mystery. Were they European artists who emigrated; the offspring of Crusaders who married Christians already living in the Middle East; or members of the local Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox or Coptic Christian communities?

To untangle the puzzle, Folda will work from earlier scholarship and compare imagery in the manuscripts and on the panels in their historical context.

"Stylistically speaking you can look at parallels and relationships between the styles of the icons and the styles of the miniatures in the manuscript," Folda says. The comparisons will enable him to track down the origin of some of the work.

A major challenge for the Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. is to look at the art through the Crusader’s perspective. Most scholarship has approached the work from either the European perspective, particularly the French, or from the Byzantine point of view.

"I try to look at it from the perspective of the Crusader who lived in Jerusalem or Acre," he says. Acre, a port town, became the center of Crusader activities after they were driven from Jerusalem.

Folda terms his work a matter of synthesizing his ideas with earlier scholarship to move the discussion along so that people can see such major cultural contributions anew.

Cambridge University Press published the first volume of his history of the Crusaders’ art in the Holy Land in 1995.

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Note: Folda can be reached at (919) 962-3036 (w) or 929-5577 (h).