The landscape of belief
Subtitle: encountering the Holy Land in nineteenth-century American art and culture
By: John Davis.
Series: The Princeton series in nineteenth-century art, culture, and society
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
Subjects: Art, American -- 19th century; Art and religion -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Palestine -- In art
Description: This book tells of the nineteenth-century American painters who, along with photographers, archaeologists, writers, evangelists, and tourists, flocked to the biblical Holy Land, a world of striking landscape vistas that reflected, in their eyes, a powerful image of the United States.

Here they saw a metaphor for their country: a New World promised land, a divinely favored Protestant nation created by and for a modern "chosen people." Taking these biblical associations as a starting point, John Davis examines the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans looked to the actual landscape of the Holy Land as an extension of their national identity.

Through close readings of panoramas, photographs, and conventional easel paintings, he shows how this "sacred topography" became a place to work out the competing ideological debates surrounding American exceptionalism, prophetic millennialism, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish sentiment, and post-Darwinian science.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [245]-255) and index.