13.00 – 18.10, Friday 15 March (with registration from 12.30)
09.30 – 17.40, Saturday 16 March (with registration from 09.00)
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN
God and humankind had been at one in paradise. The sanctuary of Jerusalem’s Temple, whose decoration recalled Eden, was in Jewish thought the navel of the world, the intersection of heaven and earth.
The Temple was destroyed in 70 CE. The Christian Melito was already writing of Golgotha as the world’s centre by 160 CE. Many more of the Temple’s mythologies – and supposedly of its Solomonic and later artefacts – would be transferred to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre built by Constantine and completed in the construction of its Rotunda. Justinian and his panegyrists spoke in their turn of Hagia Sophia as the new Temple.
The Dome of the Rock was probably designed to counter and surpass the Holy Sepulchre of the ‘Christian polytheists’. The Crusaders spoke of Al-Aqsa Mosque as the Temple or Palace of Solomon, and the Dome of the Rock as the Temple of the Lord in which the infant Jesus had been presented to God.
The sanctity and significance of Jerusalem were recreated throughout Christendom in centrally planned churches and architectural motifs, in liturgical forms and in civic myths. In this Forum we study the expressions of the Temple and the Sepulchre in Christian architecture, and medieval devotion – both Christian and Muslim – to the holy places.
The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Temple Church are coming together for their second joint-conference in March 2013. We will again spend time in the Temple’s Round Church, itself one of the grandest recreations of Jerusalem to survive in the West.
To book a place: £26 (£16 students, Courtauld staff/students and concessions)
BOOK ONLINE: http://courtauld-institute.digitalmuseum.co.uk Or send a cheque made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, stating the event title ‘Temple and Tomb’.
For further information, email ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk or call: 07834 521471
Organised by The Rev’d Robin Griffith-Jones (Master of The Temple; and senior lecturer in Theology, King's College London), Professor Eric Fernie (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Professor David Park (The
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