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The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land 1098-1187. By Jaroslav Folda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxx + 672 pp. $95.00 cloth.
This massive volume, prodigiously illustrated (41 color plates and 700 black-and-white illustrations) and impressively learned, is the first of two devoted to a complete survey of the art of the crusaders in the Holy Land. (The second volume will deal with the period down to the fall of Acre in 1291.) Professor Folda began his work on crusader art in 1973, so these volumes synthesize the work of decades and will probably remain the standard account for many decades to come. Folda's overall perspective argues that crusader art was not a "colonial art" dependent on western European centers of production, but a special form of pilgrimage art that should be seen as an indigenous production, "the response of...