WORCESTER, MASS.- The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, is presenting the upcoming exhibition “Bringing the Holy Land Home: The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece.” Bringing together loans from the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston among other institutions, the exhibition is on view from Jan. 26 through Apr. 6, 2023.
“Bringing the Holy Land Home” focuses around the well-known Chertsey combat tiles, a series that was created around 1250 for the Chertsey Abbey, and most likely originally commissioned for the English royal palace at Westminster. The tiles were excavated from the ruined Abbey of Chertsey in the late-19th century, and are now housed in several different institutions across Britain, including the British Museum. The exhibition is guest curated by Dr. Amanda Luyster, assistant professor of art history in the department of visual arts at Holy Cross.
A specialist in Medieval Art from England, Luyster has been studying the Chertsey tiles for almost 20 years, her newest project involving a reconstruction of the tile floor. This project began when Luyster, as she explains: “saw echoes [in the tiles] of larger traditions, especially Islamic and Byzantine images of combats in roundels. I also realized that we now have imaging and coding resources that were simply not present in 2000, and that these new resources would allow us to solve some of the unsolved problems of the combat series: namely, their original appearance and their original accompanying Latin texts.” This insight led Luyster to the work of reassembling hundreds of broken ceramic fragments, pieced together for the first time and yielding surprising discoveries about the impact of the Crusades in England. Along with an international team, Luyster reconstructed the mosaic, including both images and lost Latin text, demonstrating not only that the theme of the entire mosaic is the Crusades, but that its composition draws from imported Islamic and Byzantine silks, often carried home by returning crusaders.
As an exhibition, “Bringing the Holy Land Home” brings the Chertsey tiles into dialogue with materials from the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, including ceramics, metalwork, liturgical objects, weapons, and textiles.
For the exhibition, labels were written by students from Holy Cross and other neighboring institutions, based on substantial research into each object and its cultural role in the period of the crusades. Students also created a website for the exhibition, which includes videos in which they explain the significance of their objects. The exhibition and accompanying catalog feature contributions from prominent scholars in the fields of medieval history and art.
Meredith Fluke, director of the Cantor Art Gallery, says “this exhibition highlights the excellence of faculty scholarship, student mentorship and collaborative, cross-disciplinary learning that is at the heart of a of liberal arts education at Holy Cross. We are thankful for the support of the College, which encourages projects such as this one, that highlights not only the significance of objects, but also cooperative scholarship, accomplished by faculty, curators, staff and students from many different backgrounds and disciplines.”
The exhibition has been awarded generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and the International Center of Medieval Art.
A robust schedule of related programming will be available throughout the duration of the exhibition, including a symposium featuring a panel of scholars with expertise in the areas of the crusades and medieval history on March 25, gallery talks and musical performances.
