Nasleđe (Jan 2020)
Depiction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on a Jerusalem icon from Ružica Church: An example of visual culture in the context of religious practice
Abstract
Among but few icons brought back home by hajjis from their pilgrimage to Jerusalem (hence the name jerusalems) preserved in Belgrade, the one that stands out for its peculiarity and relatively early origin is the 1819 icon kept in Ružica Church in Kalemegdan. The most important element of the icon is the depiction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This paper presents and analyses numerous peculiarities of this depiction, before all by comparing its iconography and style with the usual kind of the Jerusalem pilgrimage icons of the same age. Th icon painter's method is additionally analysed through the theoretical prism of palimpsest and gloss, recently developed in art-historical studies. It has been concluded that the depiction is basically similar to that on other icons dating from after the 1808 fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but bearing an array of specificities that could be ascribed to the reinterpretation of architectural elements of the Jerusalem Church which the icon painter depicts to underline its holiness. The analysis points to a local Palestinian master as the author of the icon.
