Miniaturizing monuments: Conrad Schick and his architectural models of the holy sites of Jerusalem.

Abstract

The topic of this paper is a series of architectural models of the holy sites of Jerusalem made by Conrad Schick, a German missionary and craftsman who lived in the Holy Land for the latter half of the nineteenth century. The focus of the analysis is twofold: On the one hand, it traces the life and career of Conrad Schick, from central Europe to the Middle East, and from craftsman-missionary to distinguished model-maker, archeologist, and architect. And on the other, it concerns the models he constructed (particularly those of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount). They are considered as objects and artifacts of their specific context, and compared with the multitude of other miniature objects produced in the nineteenth century - from decorative knick-knacks to educational toys, and from cuckoo clocks to battlefield maps. Similarly, the aims of the analysis are twofold. On the one hand, it shall be demonstrated that Schick’s original training as a craftsman in southern Germany and Switzerland affected the way he dealt with the task of constructing scaled models of highly contested religious sites in Jerusalem. Secondly, it shall be pointed out that his models were objects at the intersection of radically different discourses, from folk art to architecture, and from pedagogy to geopolitics.