Resumen de Sacred Stimulus: Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome by Galit Noga-Banai (review)
Art historians will relish in the precision with which Noga-Banai presents and describes mosaics, sarcophagi, wall paintings and other visual material, her constructive engagement with older scholarship (helpfully well-documented in the extensive footnotes), and the nuanced and surprising readings that emerge. Noga-Banai's preface begins with a charming vignette of a modern sculpture, "Second Temple: Jerusalem-Rome-Jerusalem," overlooked by all but the most attentive (or well-informed) viewers: a concave hourglass carved into a sidewalk in what was formerly the Jewish ghetto of Rome. Noga-Banai self-consciously disavows the necessity of such an approach: "A sociologist who adopts a cognitive approach is liberated from trying to figure out what actually happened in the past: instead, he or she observes and analyses how the event or series of events was registered and organized, and how it maintained itself in the collective memory" (4).
