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Rome, Italy - Carter Hall Lobby

Rome is both a reality and the embodiment of a long-held human dream, the dream of a world united. Both Sts. Peter and Paul were martyred there. It is the ancient center of the Church in the West. For centuries one of the main dioceses of the Christian Church, it became the official center of the Roman Catholic Church after the split with the Eastern Church in 1054. In these images Kieran focuses on the Roman past – the Tiber and the Julian Forum once filled with temples to Roman gods, some later turned into Christian churches. One of those is the Church of St. Cosmas and Damian. There an apse mosaic from 549 shows Christ returning in glory to judge the living and the dead, an image connecting eternity to life on earth.

Padua - Brock Hall (South Stairwell)

By 1222 students of law and medicine who left Bologna University looking for more academic freedom and first joined the university in Vicenza had settled in Padua. The university became known for the quality of its medical and scientific training, playing a crucial role in the Italian Renaissance. The mathematician Nicolas Copernicus was there. The university boasts the oldest surviving anatomical theatre in Europe, built in 1595. Andreas Vesalius held the chair of Surgery and Anatomy and published his anatomical discoveries in 1543. But today the city is best known for the fresco cycle by Giotto di Bondone in the Scrovegni Chapel, consecrated first in 1303 and finally in 1305. In 1300 Commissioned by Paduan banker Enrico Scrovegni purchased land where the Roman arena had once stood as the site of a private chapel and family burial place. He commissioned Giotto, who was just finishing work on the main church at Assisi to do the decoration. Most scholars consider the chapel the Florentine artist’s master work. He was 36 when he began the work, 38 at its finish. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage site, considered one of the great monuments of Western art. The first thing to arrest the viewer’s attention is the blue. So deep, rich, strong. It is everywhere. Next, as you follow the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ is the humanity, the emotion revealed in the faces of the characters. Mary weeps over the body of the dead Christ. Her suffering is real. The apse has been lost, but the Last Judgment over the original entrance and exit is intact. A majestic Christ presides as the faithful head to a peaceful, glorious eternity while the damned clamor and fall to be devoured by a greedy Satan. Scrovegni himself offers a model of the chapel to Christ. If you look closely at the top corners of the Judgment, you are given the clue as to just where you are. On either side angels are rolling up the scroll of the heavenly blue sky to reveal a golden city beyond. That is the New Jerusalem, the eternal home of the faithful. This chapel, like San Vitale, is its embassy.

Jerusalem - Chapel Lobby

There is no New Jerusalem without the original located in Israel, the City of David, the city of Solomon’s Temple, the city where Jesus Christ was crucified, buried, and risen from the dead on the third day. In these images Kieran Dodds takes us from crosses carved into the very stone walls of the Holy Sepulchre complex to the edicule over the tomb, the tomb important because it is empty, and on to the Temple Mount where since 692 the Muslim Dome of the Rock has stood on the site of Solomon’s Temple and later Ezra’s and Herod the Great’s rebuilt versions of the holiest site for Jews. Intimate images of the green door and the stairway inside the complex reveal the human life inside these sacred spaces.

Rome, Italy - Mills Hall Lobby

Another image in this exhibition shows sunlight streaming through the oculus of the Pantheon on its giant dome made of poured concrete in 126 when Emperor Hadrian rebuilt it on the site of an earlier temple commissioned by Marcus Vispanius Agrippa during the time of Augustus Caesar between 31 B.C. and 14 A.D. The dome, which may well have been designed by the emperor Hadrian himself, became the prototype for domes across the ancient world and the West. It symbolized the dome of Heaven, its oculus open to the sky looking to the gods above. For Christians, too, the dome came to mean the heaven where Christ would welcome the redeemed into their eternal home. In many churches it would be the face of Christ rather than an opening to the sky at the center of the dome, a symbol of the eternal hope of the believer.

Ravenna - Lucas Art Workshop

Ravenna is one of those places whose treasures were preserved because the city itself was off the beaten track of history after the 6th century. But in that century it was the capital of the Ostrogothic kingdom with Theodoric at its head. In 526 Bishop Ecclesius ordered the beginning of construction on San Vitale, an octagonal church (the Eighth Day again). Paid for by a local architect and banker Julius Argenterius, the church was completed under Bishop Maximian in 547. It is best known for its Byzantine style mosaics in the apse, the largest and best-preserved outside of Istanbul by most accounts. Flanking the apse are mosaics showing Byzantine Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora, who were expected to visit but never did. In the apse itself a beardless Jesus Christ looking like a young Alexander the Great sits astride a globe hovering over four rivers flowing from below the throne. He holds a crown in his right hand, the scroll with seven seals from the book of Revelation in his left. On his right is San Vitale, martyr and namesake of the church, on his left Bishop Ecclesius offers a model of the church. We are in the New Jerusalem at the end of time. This church is its embassy.

Florence, Italy - Sanderson Building

These images of Florence take you to the Duomo, begun in 1296 and completed with Brunelleschi’s dome in 1436 and the Baptistery, modeled on the Roman Pantheon, dated to the 11th or 12th century. The walkway between the Baptistery and the Duomo Cathedral, is called the Paradiso. In the early centuries of Christianity men and women were not allowed in the church sanctuary during the time of celebrating the eucharist. At Baptism, usually on Easter Sunday, they would process dressed in white robes into the church proper. They were entering an embassy of the New Jerusalem, their promised home, Paradise. Hence the name. Dante Alighieri was baptized in that baptistery, which holds special significance in Florence as John the Baptist is the city’s patron saint. Completed between 1240 and 1300 the golden mosaics of the ceiling tell the story of Redemption from Creation to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the coming Last Judgment leading some to heaven and some to hell. Though the names of many of the masters who worked on the ceiling are unknown, Meliore di Jacopo and Coppo di Marcovaldo worked on several tiers. Some scholars think that Giotto’s mentor Cimabue may have been involved in some designs.

London - Kresge Library (downstairs lobby)

The journey through the history of Christian teaching ended in London in churches where images from the ancient churches of Jerusalem, Rome, Ravenna, Venice, and more found new settings. Temple Church, located in the Inner and Middle Temples between Fleet Street and the Thames, was built in 1140 as the headquarters of the Knights Templar. Consecrated on 10 February 1185 by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem and round in shape, the church stood as an icon of the Holy Sepulchre. This was the heady century when Christians were in charge of the Holy City Jerusalem for the only period after 638 when the city was captured by Muslim armies. In 1187 Muslim armies under Saladin recaptured the city. Though it was briefly under Christian rule in the 13th century, it was ruled by Muslims until 1948 and 1967 when Israeli armies took control of Jerusalem. But this early church isn’t the only one to embody the holy history. In 1865 architect George Edmund Street was commissioned to design a church in Paddington, part of the vision of the Anglo -Catholic movement to serve the poor as this area was one of serious socio-economic suffering. In 1894 Scottish architect Ninan Comper, known for his neo-Gothic designs, was asked to create a Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre in the crypt of the church. Restored after 2020, the chapel gleams. Under a ceiling of Giottoesque blue with golden stars with tiny mirrors at their centers a plain stone sarcophagus is empty just like the one in Jerusalem. One more living example of the ideas that shaped the churches of ancient and medieval Italy and Germany is the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral completed in 1903. Designed by John Francis Bentley in Ninth-century Byzantine style, the cathedral is dedicated to the Most Precious Blood of Jesus Christ. Where San Marco has five domes, this cathedral has three, none of which has yet been decorated. Various chapels like that of the Blessed Sacrament have been completed with glowing mosaics harking back to the great Byzantine works in Rome, Ravenna, and Venice. Connected to that deep history, the church is one more icon of the New Jerusalem, a heritage its founders understood.

Jerusalem - Kresge

There is no New Jerusalem without the original located in Israel, the City of David, the city of Solomon’s Temple, the city where Jesus Christ was crucified, buried, and risen from the dead on the third day. In these images Kieran Dodds takes us from crosses carved into the very stone walls of the Holy Sepulchre complex to the edicule over the tomb, the tomb important because it is empty, and on to the Temple Mount where since 692 the Muslim Dome of the Rock has stood on the site of Solomon’s Temple and later Ezra’s and Herod the Great’s rebuilt versions of the holiest site for Jews. Intimate images of the green door and the stairway inside the complex reveal the human life inside these sacred spaces.

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