Looking Beyond Jerusalem: A Fifteenth-Century Exercise in Image Comparison

Abstract

Critical image comparison is a widespread art-historical practice. This essay explores why a Brabantine artist encouraged viewers to exercise it in the late fifteenth century. At the time, northern European artists tested out how images could be means of transcending the visible world while simultaneously showcasing their very constructedness. The self-reflexivity that characterises such images has engendered a particularly rich field of art-historical studies. This essay focuses on a little-known image which was designed to combine two visual concepts devised more than three centuries apart – a twelfth-century map of Jerusalem, and a cityscape popularised in the fifteenth century – and required viewers to realise this combination in their minds, using external images recollected before their internal eyes. In its complex conception, the image becomes a unique contributor to the vibrant debate about the right use of images in late medieval devotion, and to the long history of image comparisons.