page_title: Art of the Crusades
section_title: Mosaics, Frescoes and Panel Paintings
hierarchical_section_title: Art of the Crusades / Mosaics, Frescoes and Panel Paintings
caption_attribution_description: English: Israel, Abu Ghosh
context_page_description: Crusader art or the art of the Crusades, meaning primarily the art produced in Middle Eastern areas under Crusader control, spanned two artistic periods in Europe, the Romanesque and the Gothic, but in the Crusader kingdoms of the Levant the Gothic style barely appeared. The military crusaders themselves were mostly not noticeably interested in artistic matters, or sophisticated in their taste, and much of their art was destroyed in the loss of their kingdoms so that only a few pieces survive today. Probably their most notable and influential artistic achievement was the Crusader castles, many of which achieve a stark, massive beauty. They developed the Byzantine methods of city-fortification for stand-alone castles far larger than any constructed before, either locally or in Europe.
  The crusaders encountered a long and rich artistic tradition in the lands they conquered at the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12th. Byzantine and Islamic art were the dominant styles in the Crusader states, although there were also the styles of the indigenous Syrians and Armenians.
context_section_description: An example of the mixture of styles is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the renovation and rebuilding of which was completed in 1149; however only fragments of the large programme of mosaics now survive.  This was until the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 the institution with the main Crusader scriptorium, from which six manuscripts survive, made in a mixture of royal and church commissions.  Most of the significant surviving illuminated manuscripts were produced in the 13th century, about half in the last forty years of the Latin kingdom; to what extent this is an accident of survival is unclear.  Some icons in wall painting and mosaic survive from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.  The Hospitaller church at Abu Ghosh, apparently then regarded as the biblical Emmaus, was abandoned in 1187 but has good remains of frescos.  Some wall paintings and mosaic sections survive from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and there are frescoes at Lagoudhera on Cyprus.
caption: Frescos at Abu Ghosh.
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