Miniaturizing Monuments: Conrad Schick and his Architectural Models of the Holy Sites of Jerusalem
Résumés
Cet article s’intéresse aux maquettes des lieux saints de Jérusalem réalisées par Conrad Schick, un missionnaire et artisan allemand qui vécut en Terre sainte pendant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Retraçant d’abord la vie et la carrière de Conrad Schick qui, de l’Europe centrale au Moyen-Orient, sera passé du statut d’artisan-missionnaire à celui d’éminent maquettiste, archéologue et architecte, l’étude se concentre ensuite sur les maquettes qu’il a réalisées (notamment celles du Saint-Sépulcre et du mont du Temple). Appréhendées comme des artefacts témoignant du contexte spécifique dans lequel ils s’inscrivent, les maquettes de Schick sont mises en parallèle avec les objets miniatures produits en grande quantité au cours du XIXe siècle (bibelots décoratifs, jouets éducatifs, pendules à coucou ou encore cartes des batailles militaires). L’objectif de l’analyse sera de montrer d’une part que la formation initiale de Schick à l’artisanat dans le sud de l’Allemagne et la Suisse a influencé sa manière de concevoir les modèles réduits de sites religieux sujets à de fortes dissensions à Jérusalem. Nous montrerons d’autre part que ses maquettes étaient des objets à la croisée d’une grande diversité de discours, entre art populaire et architecture, entre pédagogie et géopolitique.
Entrées d’index
Index de mots-clés :
maquette (architecture), culture matérielle, transfert de connaissances, art populaireIndice de palabras clave:
maqueta arquitectónica, arte folclórico, cultura material, transferencia de saberIndex chronologique :
XIXe sièclePersonnes citées :
Schick Conrad (1822-1901)Plan
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Introduction: Conrad Schick’s early years in Württemberg and Basel (ca. 1820s-1840s)
- 1 For an overview of Conrad Schick’s life and multi-faceted oeuvre, see Martin Gass (ed.), Drei bede (...)
- 2 Martin Gass (ed.), Drei bedeutende Bitzer im 19. Jahrhundert, op. cit. (note 1), p. 101 and 108.
- 3 Jakob Eisler, “Der Pilgermission St Chrischona im Heiligen Land,” in Haim Goren and Jacob Eisler ( (...)
- 4 Haim Goren, “‘Undoubtedly, the best connoisseur of Jerusalem in our times:’ Conrad Schick as ‘Palä (...)
- 5 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” Palestine Exp (...)
1Conrad Schick was born in 1822 in the town of Bitz and grew up in the area of Württemberg in southwestern Germany.1 At the age of 14, he moved to Korntal where he trained in crafts and mechanics, and then to Ebinger, where he worked for some time as a journeyman (Geselle).2 Nurtured in a strongly religious Protestant environment, Schick eventually decided that his skills should be used in the name of Christianity. As a result, in 1842, he joined the Saint Chrischona Evangelical pilgrim mission near Basel, Switzerland.3 Founded by Christian Friedrich Spittler in 1840, St Chrischona was organized in the spirit of a “handwerk-mission,” a missionary educational system that combined Bible study with manual labor and training in various crafts. In this environment, Schick continued his artisan education, learning a variety of crafts, from carpentry and cabinetmaking to blacksmithing.4 In 1846, at the age of 24, Conrad Schick was sent to Jerusalem by the St Chrischona mission. He spent the rest of his life (until his death in 1901) in that city, and produced an impressive oeuvre in many different fields, including topographical and archeological surveys, academic writing, building design and construction, model-making, which will be the main focus of this article. Over several decades, Schick designed and constructed many models of Jerusalem’s topography and main religious sites. The miniatures were used and shown locally, but also shipped abroad and exhibited in Europe and beyond, earning him great fame.5
- 6 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, Berlin: (...)
- 7 Ibid., p. III. Original: “verschiedene mechanische Fertigkeiten und Handwerksarbeiten” and “einen (...)
- 8 Constanze Röhl, “Conrad Schick. Leben und Werk eines deutschen Architekten im Jerusalem des 19. Ja (...)
- 9 Haim Goren, “Undoubtedly, the best connoisseur of Jerusalem in our times,” op. cit. (note 4).
2Schick’s key contribution to the archeological discourse on the Holy Land occurred towards the end of his life, in 1896, when his only monograph was published. It was an elaborate, 360-page book on “The Tabernacle, the [Solomonic] Temple in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount of Today,”6 summarizing his decades-long research and featuring many of his models of the Temple Mount. Possessing, at that point, a well-respected position among architects and archeologists in Jerusalem, and well-known in Germany, Schick opened his short foreword to the book with a brief autobiographical reference to his early years: He claimed that already while he was training in “various mechanical skills and handicrafts” as a young missionary in St Chrischona—and prior to any involvement in architectural projects and without any formal training on the subject—, he was already acquiring a “a sense of architecture.”7 His eventual involvement with architectural models and real-scale architectural projects years later in Jerusalem was as much the result of individual talent as it was the outcome of circumstance. Written at the pinnacle of his long career, this claim was nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy and a post-rationalization of his life. However, this narrative has persisted. Many authors have presented Schick as the ultimate over-achiever: arriving in Jerusalem as an underequipped “outsider,” he managed to infiltrate local institutions and become an integral member of important projects, achieving collaborations that often surpassed the established ethnic, linguistic, and religious borders.8 Moreover, Schick is often portrayed as an exceptional auto-didact, because of the way he managed to acquire and execute many projects in the fields of architecture and archeology despite his lack of formal training in these fields. He evolved from an artisan to a respected “wissenschaftler” of Jerusalem, an avid connoisseur of the city’s history and architecture, whose expertise was sought by both local and foreign scholars.9
- 10 For instance: Daniel Baud-Bovy, Schweizer Bauern-Kunst, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1926; René Creux, Vo (...)
3These biographical hero-narratives (instigated by Schick himself at the end of his life, and followed more recently by some historians of his work) are, to some extent, based on sound evidence. In a broad range of epistemic fields, Schick’s output was prolific, and his career continually ascended. However, the narratives often obscure the historical and cultural context at Schick’s roots. His early training was that of a craftsman and artisan. Moreover, it took place in the first half of the nineteenth century in Southern Germany and Switzerland, a region that was, at the time, producing an abundance of objects now classified as “folk art”; i.e., the work of “traditional,” often “anonymous” craftsmen. If Schick had never been sent to Jerusalem in 1846—if he had stayed in Basel or returned to his native Württemberg—the objects he would have produced would be the ones that nowadays fill the pages of Swiss and German “volkskunst” albums and small-town ethnographic museums.10 To understand Schick’s later work as a high-end model-maker, self-trained archeologist, and architect in Jerusalem, we must begin with his early training as a craftsman in Switzerland. And to fully contextualize his famed architectural models of the religious sites of the Holy Land, we ought to juxtapose them with objects from the contemporaneous material culture of his native southern Germany.
- 11 Martin Gass (ed.), Drei bedeutende Bitzer im 19. Jahrhundert, op. cit. (note 1), p. 109, and Haim (...)
- 12 Unfortunately, no photograph or other visual evidence of this model has survived.
- 13 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit(...)
- 14 See: Hans Reuther and Ekhart Berckenhagen, Deutsche Architekturmodelle - Projekthilfe zwischen 150 (...)
4Around 1845, one year before being sent to Jerusalem, Schick was ordered by the St Chrischona mission to make a model of the Tabernacle (the Biblical archetype of the tent-shrine of the Israelites) to be used as a teaching aid for young missionaries.11 Schick studied the rich architectural and theological literature that existed on this topic and then, helped by a carpenter who also worked in the mission, constructed a model of the Tabernacle on a scale of 1:20, mainly out of wood and fabric. Corresponding to its educational purpose, the model had movable parts which allowed views into its interior.12 Writing about it decades later, in the monograph he published in 1896, Schick claimed that this first modest attempt at model-making was the starting point of his life-long preoccupation with making models of Jerusalem’s holy sites: “Already back then,” he claimed, “the thought awoke in me, to later also represent the Temple [of Solomon] in a model.”13 Once again, this was a post-fact rationalization, written by Schick many decades after he had left St Chrischona. Nevertheless, viewed in the context to which it referred, it might bear some truth. Models of Solomon’s Temple were already being constructed and exhibited in and around Germany as early as the eighteenth century.14 Schick, as a craftsman and a missionary, had most likely seen such objects and developed the desire to make his own. He did in fact make a long series of models of the Solomonic Temples, but not until four decades later and under completely different circumstances, in Jerusalem. The statement about his intentions in the 1840s, from a book published in 1896, seems to have little relevance to what we know of his ambitions at the time.
- 15 Martin Gass (ed.), Drei bedeutende Bitzer im 19. Jahrhundert, op. cit. (note 1), p. 110 (excerpt f (...)
- 16 Ibid., p. 116.
- 17 Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Cent (...)
5Schick’s preparation for Jerusalem in 1845-6 was geared less towards model-making and more towards traditional local forms of craftsmanship. Soon after his appointment to the Holy Land was decided, he was urged to train in making the kinds of objects that his home region of southern Germany was most famous for: mechanical (cuckoo) clocks. This decision appears to have been instigated by a German priest and theologian named Friedrich Adolf Strauss. Having just returned from a trip to the Middle East, Strauss visited St Chrischona and advised the young Schick to acquire training as a clock-maker, suggesting that this craft was still unknown in Jerusalem and would be highly valued. Already possessing some training as a mechanic, Schick was a perfect fit for the job. In 1846, he was sent to the workshop of “a clock-maker in the Black Forest,” where, as Schick himself recounts, he spent four weeks learning “how clocks are made” and “the necessary tools and all the calculations for the cogs and the mechanism of the clock,” aiming to take this knowledge with him to Jerusalem.15 Less than a year later, Schick arrived in Jerusalem, where he tried to turn his house into a clock workshop and store. He ordered some cuckoo clocks from Germany, repaired them and prepared them to be sold. He managed to sell this first small batch to a handful of customers (most of them to a Jewish clock-maker), but interest for his merchandise was generally low among the locals.16 The lack of further demand and the unavailability of proper equipment in Jerusalem eventually forced Schick to abandon the complicated craft he had learned in the Black Forest (and the ambition of becoming the first clock-maker of Jerusalem), and to earn his living by manufacturing and selling simpler but more easily marketable objects, such as olive-wood carvings.17
- 18 Haim Goren, “Undoubtedly, the best connoisseur of Jerusalem in our times,” op. cit. (note 4).
6Despite these adversities, his skills as a craftsman and mechanic eventually earned him a key position. In 1850, he became a teacher in (and later director of) the English “House of Industry” in Jerusalem, an educational institution founded by the Anglican “London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.” The school aimed at educating local missionaries and workers in handicraft, construction, and other technical skills. Through this environment, Schick was able to go beyond the narrow field of the craftsman—as well as the milieu of the Swiss mission—and associate with other European specialists. A long collaboration with the British archeologists of the “Palestine Exploration Fund” (on various topographical and archeological surveys of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas) provided him with a thorough knowledge of the city and its monuments.18 Through this dual position—heading a large workshop and a team of craftsmen, and collaborating with archeologists and surveyors—Schick attracted the attention of the local political and religious authorities and received commissions for several important projects, among which were the construction of several scaled models of the city's topography and monuments.
The Holy Sepulchre models (ca. 1862)
- 19 For more on this, see: Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto-Fdeda, Oren Sagiv and Tania Coen-Uzzielli (ed (...)
7Schick’s first model commission in Jerusalem was generated by one of the city’s biggest religious and territorial debates of the time: the contested ownership of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the buildings that surrounded it. The complicated matter of the ownership division of the Holy Sepulchre (and several more of Jerusalem’s significant religious monuments) between the city’s Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities was secured by an agreement called the “Status Quo.” Drafted by representatives of the religious groups and Jerusalem’s Ottoman authorities, it dictated, in rigorous detail, who owned each different part of the Holy Sepulchre complex, as well as which could use its different spaces to perform its religious ceremonies, and when. At first the Status Quo was an oral agreement among the different religious groups of Jerusalem, but from 1757 onwards it was solidified by a series of written 'firmans' (decrees) issued by the city's Ottoman rulers. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the ownership division of the large complex of the Holy Sepulchre—divided mainly between the different Christian denominations (Greeks, Armenians, Latins, as Roman Catholics are known in the Holy Land, Russians, Ethiopians) and the Muslim authorities—was disputed. This dispute often led to violent conflicts, especially when it came to issues of repair and maintenance of the different parts of the large complex.19
- 20 Ibid., p. 27.
- 21 Turgut Saner, “Des jouets pour les sultans. Les maquettes ottomanes, entre fonctionnalité et repré (...)
- 22 Rehav Rubin, “Relief Maps and Models in the Archives of The Palestine Exploration Fund in London,” (...)
- 23 Michael Rüdiger, Nachbauten des Heiligen Grabes in Jerusalem in der Zeit von Gegenreformation und (...)
- 24 Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto-Fdeda, Oren Sagiv and Tania Coen-Uzzielli (eds.), In Statu Quo: Stru (...)
8Faced with an aggravation of these conflicts during the planning of restorations in the Holy Sepulchre in the early 1860s, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, Sureyya Pasha, decided that the best solution would be to construct an architectural model of the complex to demonstrate the ownership arrangements.20 In many respects, such a decision was neither unusual, nor unprecedented. Throughout the early-modern era, it had been common practice for Ottoman sultans and high-ranking Muslim patrons to commission models, especially when it came to approving new designs or celebrating holy sites.21 For Christians, the Holy Sepulchre had been the subject of numerous scaled models,22 in addition to full-scale replicas and reconstructions in the Holy Land and in Europe. These “models” served as settings for pilgrimage or other rituals, from the Middle Ages to the early modern era.23 However, the model of the Holy Sepulchre that Sureyya Pasha wanted to make in 1863 differed from earlier ones in that it was neither a ceremonial celebration of a holy site, nor an object of pilgrimage. Its purpose was more explicitly political and territorial. The point of it was to consolidate the written and oral agreements of the Status Quo into a precise, three-dimensional, miniature architectural diagram, in order to solve territorial conflicts. One example of the architectural intricacy of these conflicts was an incident where Roman Catholic and Orthodox monks clashed violently over who was to clean the lowest step of a staircase in the Holy Sepulchre, because the former owned the stairs, and the latter the courtyard it landed on.24 Even if this happened some decades after 1862, it gives us an idea of the intensity and intricacy of the conflict and, consequently, the precision that the model had to attain.
- 25 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (not (...)
- 26 For more on Schick’s Holy Sepulchre models, see Ibid., p. 108-111.
- 27 More on these exported models in part 4 of this paper.
9Confronted with such circumstances, Sureyya Pasha decided to entrust the construction of this model to the “industrious and professional German hands” of Conrad Schick,25 who, being a Protestant, was considered impartial. The model Schick made, completed in 1862, represented only the main part of the large complex. But it quickly became locally popular and led several more of the involved parties (the Greek Patriarchate, the Russian Church, and others) to commission Schick to make more models encompassing the entire complex of the church and its surrounding buildings.26 Schick’s models of the Holy Sepulchre quickly became known in Europe as well, through German newspapers reporting on religious and political affairs in Jerusalem. As a result, he constructed many more models, which were sent to European capitals.27 Thus, the German craftsman engaged in an almost lifelong inquiry into the architectural and territorial complexity of this holy site, constructing and perfecting his idea through numerous models.
- 28 The permanent position of the model appears to be in the Christ Church Heritage Centre in Jerusale (...)
- 29 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (not (...)
- 30 Hans Reuther and Ekhart Berckenhagen, Deutsche Architekturmodelle - Projekthilfe zwischen 1500 und (...)
10The aforementioned first model of the Holy Sepulchre, made in 1862, still survives in Jerusalem (fig. 1-2),28 providing us with detailed evidence of how Schick used his craft skills to represent the architectural and territorial complexity of this building complex. The model is made entirely of wood, on a scale of 1:96, and measures 1.32 x 1.75 m.29 It is painted in different colors representing the Christian denominations owning its sections: Blue for Greek Orthodox, brown for Latins, yellow for Armenians, green for Copts, and white for the parts that were the common property of all. The model gives an elaborate image of the architecture of the complex and fulfills its basic purpose of illustrating the property division. But its level of detailing is not particularly refined for its scale. The pieces are rather thick, and certain surfaces are rough. This might seem odd, given that Schick was considered a skilled craftsman. In fact, if compared to the refined architectural models made at that same time by other craftsmen in Schick’s homeland of Germany and the neighboring regions,30 his model of the Holy Sepulchre appears crude and unsophisticated.
Figure 1: Conrad Schick’s 1862 color-coded model of the Holy Sepulchre complex.

Photograph taken by the author in 2019, when the model was displayed in the exhibition “In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel), curated by Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Ifat Finkelman, Oren Sagiv, and Tania Coen-Uzzielli. (The exhibition was originally shown in the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2018. The permanent position of the model appears to be in the Christ Church Heritage Centre in Jerusalem.)
Source: Nikos Magouliotis.
Figure 2: Conrad Schick’s 1862 color-coded model of the Holy Sepulchre complex.

Photograph taken by the author in 2019, when the model was displayed in the exhibition “In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel), curated by Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Ifat Finkelman, Oren Sagiv, and Tania Coen-Uzzielli. (The exhibition was originally shown in the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2018. The permanent position of the model appears to be in the Christ Church Heritage Centre in Jerusalem.)
Source: Nikos Magouliotis.
- 31 The exhibition where the model was displayed did not specify the exact type of wood it is made of, (...)
- 32 Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Cent (...)
11This roughness could partly be explained through the difference in available materials: Schick was trained in southern Germany and Switzerland, where the soft, damp wood of local coniferous trees (such as fir or spruce) allowed local craftsmen to attain the fine detailing that can be seen in Central European folk-craft objects (think of the traditional cuckoo clocks whose outer cases are often miniature imitations of building forms). The hard, dry olivewood Schick had to work with in Jerusalem (and which was presumably used for the Holy Sepulchre model)31 did not allow for such intricate detailing. But by the time he made this model, Schick had been working in Jerusalem for about two decades. Certainly, he had experience in carving the local olivewood.32 The roughness of his model should thus not be attributed solely to a lack of mastery over local timber or the limitations of the material itself. It should be examined in light of the purpose for which the model was intended. Schick’s miniature of the Holy Sepulchre was not made to be displayed in an exhibition and to impress crowds with its craftsmanship; it was built to be placed on a negotiation table so that the ownership of its different parts could be discussed. The model was not an artwork; it was a tool—and as such, its flexibility and usability mattered more than polished surfaces or fine detailing.
12The aim of a conventional archeological or architectural model is to give a figurative impression of the original form of a monument; usually a construction that no longer exists or is partly ruined, or one that is far away and therefore unfamiliar to the intended audience. Schick, however, was making a model that was to be viewed by a select group of local religious leaders who were well acquainted with the site it represented; detail, therefore, was redundant. What’s more, Schick’s model of the Holy Sepulchre was made to demonstrate how the building’s different parts (the main church and all the buildings built around it, and their different ownership) fit together in three dimensions. To deal with this spatial and territorial complexity, Schick constructed the model as a three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking, movable parts. It can be taken apart, so that the pieces can be examined individually and the interior spaces of the labyrinthine complex can be viewed. Schick was able to design such a complicated model because he had thorough knowledge of the Holy Sepulchre complex (through on-site visits and measurements). But constructing this tightly-fitted puzzle of interlocking parts would have been almost impossible without his prior training in the calculation and construction of clock mechanisms in Germany. The failure of his clock-selling venture had prevented Schick from constructing these precision mechanisms in Jerusalem, but he still possessed the watchmaker’s experience and technical knowledge, and it seems to have resurfaced through the challenge of making this peculiar object. When pieced together, the form of Schick’s Holy Sepulchre model certainly bears little resemblance to the traditional forms of Black Forest cuckoo clocks with their decorated outer cases. But when taken apart, its inner structure of interlocking parts looks a lot like the complicated mechanisms that can be found inside such clocks. The big dome, when removed, reveals the famous cylindrical rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre, miniaturized and tightly interlocked with other parts of the building—as if it were a big cog in a clock mechanism (fig. 3-4).
Figure 3: One of Conrad Schick’s Holy Sepulchre models with some parts removed.

Source: photograph of the model taken by Rehav Rubin in Jerusalem ca. 1984-1985 (permission of reproduction granted to the author by Rehav Rubin himself).
Figure 4: Interior mechanism of a mid-18th-century Swiss clock.

Source: Daniel Baud-Bovy, Schweizer Bauern-Kunst, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1926.
13Transplanted far from its origins in a small workshop in the Black Forest, the mechanical craft of clockmaking was summoned for the unforeseen task of constructing an object that was supposed to solve one of the biggest religious and territorial conflicts of the Middle East. This “clock”—if we can give this nickname to Schick’s Holy Sepulchre model—was not intended to adorn the rustic interior of a German house as a reassuring keeper of time or a traditional symbol of home and hearth. It was made to serve as an instrument for the resolution of a territorial conflict surrounding one of the most hotly contested holy sites of Jerusalem. The “cogs” of this mechanism were not made to move, to keep track of the passing of time. The device held time still, immobilizing a moment, guaranteeing the stability of the Status Quo property agreement. This work of mechanical perfection and precision sealed the contract between the Muslims, Jews, and Christians of Jerusalem, representing the final phase of its consolidation. Having already transformed from oral contract to written decree, in 1862, the Status Quo acquired solid (miniature) material form.
The models of the Temple Mount (ca. 1870-80s)
- 33 The models were made in Jerusalem and then sent to Vienna (Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Sch (...)
- 34 For a more on this, see: Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto-Fdeda, Oren Sagiv and Tania Coen-Uzzielli ( (...)
14Ten years after the first Holy Sepulchre model, in 1872, the Ottoman authorities of Jerusalem ordered two more models from Schick, of prominent local religious sites: the Temple Mount (Haram el-Shariff) and the Muslim shrine of the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat As-Sakhrah) standing upon it. This time the two models were intended as showpieces for the Ottoman pavilion at the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873.33 Once again, the site that Schick was to construct in model form was hotly disputed. According to the Torah, the Temple Mount was the ancient site of Solomon’s Temple, as well as the Second Temple. It is thus a place of great significance for Judaism. At the same time, according to Islamic faith, the Temple Mount (Haram el-Shariff) was the place where the Prophet Muhammad stepped on a rock and from there began his journey towards Heaven. In honor of this event, the Muslim shrine of the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat As-Sakhrah) and the Al-Aqsa mosque were built on the Temple Mount in the seventh century CE (centuries after the demolition of the Second Solomonic Temple), thus making the site a popular place of Muslim pilgrimage in later centuries. For much of Jerusalem’s modern history, access to the plateau of the Temple Mount had been restricted for non-Muslims, leading the local Jewish population to pray daily at the foot of its wall (the famous “Wailing Wall”). This situation fueled a long-standing conflict among the Jewish and Muslim populations of Jerusalem; a conflict that escalated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and continues to be a major issue today.34
- 35 Haim Goren, “Undoubtedly, the best connoisseur of Jerusalem in our times,” op. cit. (note 4), p. 1 (...)
- 36 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (not (...)
15Already established as an expert model-maker, and once again considered impartial to the conflict, Schick was the ideal candidate for this model commission. Thus, he was allowed access to the Temple Mount, the buildings that stood on it, and a great number of underground spaces that were inaccessible for a large part of the city’s population. The original commission of the models for the Ottoman pavilion in Vienna was, naturally, focused on the Muslim history and monuments of the site (mainly the Dome of the Rock). But Schick used his access privileges to expand his research to the Christian and Hebrew precedents of the site. Through extensive surveys and with help from other archeologists, Schick embarked on a decades-long research of the history of the site and the monuments that had existed on it, from the Hebrew Temples, to Roman and Byzantine monuments, and later Muslim shrines.35 As was the case with the Holy Sepulchre model, the original commission was the starting point of a long series of further models and experiments. After completing the two models for the Vienna Expo, Schick went on to make larger and more complex ones.36 In 1885, this process led to what is considered the pinnacle of Schick’s model-making career, an elaborate wooden model of the entire Temple Mount, constructed over an eight-year period. Like the model of the Holy Sepulchre, the architectural complexity of the Temple Mount site could be demonstrated by disassembling the configuration of multiple movable parts.
- 37 Ibid., p. 105.
- 38 The surface of these platforms has several lids which can be opened to uncover underground passage (...)
16This elaborate model of the Temple Mount (or at least one of its iterations) can still be seen today in a small museum in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem (fig. 5-8). 37 Schick’s preoccupations differed significantly from those of the Holy Sepulchre model, which demonstrated property division. The Temple Mount model was made to convey the history of the site and the succession of its different monuments and layouts. Again, Schick did so by making a set of interlocking parts. The two platforms mentioned above, one presenting the site as it was in the era of the ancient Solomonic Temples (fig. 5), and the other as it was transformed in the modern, Muslim era (fig. 6), 38 are complemented (and surrounded in the museum display) by several smaller movable parts. There are removable models of buildings that existed on the site in different historical circumstances, from Solomon’s temple to the Dome of the Rock (fig. 7-8). Added to or removed from the platforms, these small models demonstrate different architectural configurations of the site through history. If the previous model “froze” the Holy Sepulchre in a particular moment in time to demonstrate the spatial division between the different religious groups that occupied it simultaneously, the model of the Temple Mount simulated the passing of time over the site in order to illustrate the succession of different cultures, religions, and architectures on it. The political and territorial implications of this object were once again intense. By moving around some of the model’s pieces, certain religious monuments and historical periods could symbolically be “removed” and others “restored.”
Figure 5: One of the two platforms of Conrad Schick’s 1885 model of the Temple Mount, showing the site in the time of the Solomonic Temples (on display at the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem).

Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display.
Figure 6: The second platform of Conrad Schick’s 1885 model of the Temple Mount, showing the site in its later form, with the Muslim shrine of the Dome of the Rock in the middle (on display at the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem).

Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display.
Figure 7: One of the many movable parts of Schick’s 1885 model of the Temple Mount: a model of a Jewish “Nach-exilischer Tempel” (as captioned in the display at the Paulus house), presumably mountable onto the main platform.

Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display.
Figure 8: Another un-captioned model belonging to the 1885 Temple Mount model, which appears to be an early form of the Dome of the Rock.

Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display.
- 39 The bishop and theologian Hermann Zschokke, who saw these models in Vienna, praised their level of (...)
17Aimed more towards archeological precision and the animation of history, Schick’s 1885 model of the Temple Mount was more figurative, more finely detailed, and certainly less diagrammatic than his 1862 color-coded model of the Holy Sepulchre. But again, one cannot call this model a “masterpiece” of miniature craft (at least not for its scale or for what had already been achieved in other models of its time). The models of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock Schick made in 1873, aimed to impress the visitors of the Vienna Exhibition, were works of finer detailing.39 But the one we are examining here, made in 1885, appears to be more like a working model on which Schick tested different archeological hypotheses about the history of the site; a tool and a work-in-progress, rather than a showpiece. This, however, is not to say that its elaborate system of movable pieces is not, in itself, an achievement. Once again, Schick’s model-making ingenuity did not rest on finely carved details on pieces of wood, but on the understanding of the spatial and historical complexity of a particular site, and on his ability to condense and reconstruct all of its topography and architecture in a three-dimensional, miniature form. The model is certainly a work of aspiration: Schick was using the skills that he possessed as a craftsman in order to become a “wissenschaftler” archeologist.
- 40 For an overview of earlier hypotheses, reconstructions and interpretations of the Solomonic Temple (...)
- 41 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit(...)
18This process of making models seems to have enabled Schick to approach the mindset of the archeologist through the habitus of the craftsman. Archeological thinking often requires a process of abstract conjectures and assumptions about the form of buildings one has never seen or of which one has very little material evidence. Because Schick came from a background in more practical thinking and handiwork, this process was not always easy for him. Much of his work on the Temple Mount consisted of hypothetical reconstructions of the Solomonic Temples, buildings which had left no material evidence, and whose exact architectural form had been the object of numerous conflicting hypotheses by archeologists and theologians since centuries.40 Schick admitted that when he tried to approach such big questions, “abstract thinking and comparisons often did not help,” and added that in such instances he was frequently “helped by [resorting to] the plastic reproduction of the known.”41 In this context, the “known” (bekanntes) referred mostly to the topography, architecture, and history of Jerusalem (which Schick knew well), as well as the archeological and theological bibliography that was available to him. But, when joined with the phrase “plastic reproduction” (plastische Nachbilden), this “known” can also be seen as an allusion to the forms and techniques that he was familiar with as a craftsman. Whenever Schick felt uncomfortable with the mindset of the archeologist, he retreated to the more familiar (tactile and visual) habitus of the craftsman. He applied his skills and techniques on solid matter (wood) in order to give form to his architectural and archeological hypotheses.
- 42 This process of central and northern-European craftsmen and cabinet makers familiarizing themselve (...)
19What I am trying to show is that the miniature forms of Schick’s models of the Solomonic temples and other monuments of Jerusalem were perhaps not far from the microarchitecture of furniture and household objects that people of similar training produced in his native Germany and Switzerland at the time. An ornate wooden cabinet from Oberwallis, Switzerland, and a miniature of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (fig. 9-10) are two objects produced in radically different contexts and for different purposes. But the people who crafted them (an anonymous Swiss cabinetmaker and Conrad Schick, who trained as a craftsman and Geselle in Württemberg and Basel) share a lot of common background and habitus. The surfaces of these two objects are, to some extent, crafted similarly and covered with the same basic repertoire of classicist elements and tropes that were commonplace in Central European folk craft by the nineteenth century.42
Figure 9: A wooden cabinet from Oberwallis, Switzerland (early 18th century).

Source: René Creux, Volkskunst in der Schweiz, Padeux: Éditions de Fontainemore, 1970.
Figure 10: One of the numerous miniatures of the Temple of Solomon, made by Conrad Schick (ca. 1885).

Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display.
- 43 We don’t know whether the clock-making workshop in the Black Forest, where Schick was trained in 1 (...)
20This affinity of Schick’s archeological miniatures with objects of folk craft brings us back to the analogy of his models with clocks. Compared to his diagrammatic model of the Holy Sepulchre, his later, more detailed and ornate model of the Temple Mount bears less of a resemblance to the cogs and wheels of clockwork. But the wooden miniatures of monuments that can be added to the Temple Mount model are reminiscent of the wooden clock casings. The outer cases of traditional cuckoo clocks, with their miniature architectural forms, were at the time one of the most famous products of Schick’s native southern Germany (fig. 11-12).43 Traditional Black Forest cuckoo clocks imitated familiar, local architectural forms to induce a peaceful (rather European) sense of “hominess” and tradition. Schick’s miniatures of the Temple Mount and its monuments (particularly of the long-lost Temple of Solomon) used to some extent similar tropes and techniques to give form to something completely different: mythical monuments of the past and archeological, religious, and territorial claims which were anything but pacifying for Jerusalem.
Figure 11: A cuckoo clock from the Black Forest (1850).

Source: Ernst Schlee, Die Volkskunst in Deutschland: Ausstrahlung - Vorlagen - Quellen, Munich: Callwey, 1978 (Volkskunst der Welt in Einzeldarstellungen).
Figure 12: Schick’s model of the Temple Mount and the Temple of Solomon (ca. 1885).

Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display.
Schick’s models in a broader nineteenth-century context
- 44 To mention a few publications on the topic: Karen Moon, Modeling Messages: The Architect and the M (...)
- 45 Hans Reuther and Ekhart Berckenhagen, Deutsche Architekturmodelle - Projekthilfe zwischen 1500 und (...)
- 46 Rehav Rubin, “Relief Maps and Models in the Archives of The Palestine Exploration Fund in London,” (...)
- 47 Alice Thomine-Berrada, “De la maquette de présentation à la maquette de conception (1850-1880): Ré (...)
- 48 Mari Lending, Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction, Princeton, NJ: Prince (...)
- 49 Ibid., p. 114-123.
21The history of architectural models and miniatures goes well beyond the cases we have examined so far.44 Schick’s models of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount were certainly not unique; neither for the rich model-making tradition of his home environment of German-speaking Europe,45 nor for the context of Jerusalem where archeologists and topographers made numerous more models of the same and other holy sites.46 More broadly, Schick’s models can be seen as symptoms of a general tendency in the nineteenth century to use scaled reproductions and miniatures of famous sites as popular media to address the general public.47 The increasing number of museums, fairs, and expositions, aimed at non-specialist audiences, gave rise to various sorts of three-dimensional, scaled reproductions of famous architectural monuments from around the world. As Mari Lending has shown, although architecture has always appears “inherently resistant to both displacement and display,” in the nineteenth-century monuments were rendered “portable” through various kinds of two- and three-dimensional representations.48 Miniaturization—the reproduction of a monument in the form of a scaled model—was one of the principal means of achieving this portability.49 Scaled models could travel easily and capture the imagination of not only trained specialists, but also the general public. Unlike drawings, which require some expertise to be understood, models gave an easily graspable and more holistic impression of buildings or historical sites, and therefore became a popular attraction for diverse audiences.
- 50 The itinerary of these models has been recounted in a footnote at the beginning of part 3 of this (...)
- 51 Philipp Wolff, “Das neue Modell der Jerusalemer Grabkirche,” Ausserordentliche Beilage Nr. 65 zur (...)
- 52 For more on this, see Ibid. and Idem, “Das neue Modell des Grabeskirche von Jerusalem in Stuttgart (...)
- 53 Idem, “Die Modelle des Haram-esch-Scherifund der Kubbet-es-Sachra (Omar-Moschee),” Beilage zur All (...)
- 54 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (not (...)
22Schick’s models of the holy sites of Jerusalem traveled far and wide. Several of them were sent to Europe to convey the image of the Holy Land to (mostly Christian) audiences. A characteristic example is Schick’s 1873 models of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock. First shown in the Ottoman Pavilion at the World Expo of Vienna, they were then moved to the St Chrischona mission in Basel. Eventually, after several decades, they traveled back to Jerusalem.50 His 1862 model of the Holy Sepulchre had a similar career. Shortly after its completion, the model acquired international fame, and was considered a valuable and “important acquisition” for European universities or city-states.51 Copies of it were made and sold to museums, religious institutions, and even to heads of European states. For example, the king of Schick’s native Württemberg acquired one around 1863, and exhibited it in his private library in Stuttgart.52 By the mid-1870s, Schick’s models could be found from Jerusalem to Istanbul, and from St Petersburg to London.53 Shortly after his death in 1901, some of his models would even travel across the Atlantic. They were exhibited at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, and then sold to the Harvard Museum.54
- 55 Ibid. p. 116.
- 56 Palestine and Syria - Handbook for Travelers, Leipzig: Karl Baedecker, 1876, p. 191.
- 57 For more context on this, see: Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, op. cit. (note 23), p. 14 (...)
- 58 Palestine and Syria - Handbook for Travelers, op. cit. (note 56), p. 191.
23Many of Schick’s models stayed in Jerusalem and became local attractions. Aside from serving as tools for archeological and topographic surveys or for the negotiation of local territorial and religious conflicts, they also attracted the attention of visitors to the city. In some cases, Schick himself (and after his death, members of his family) would show his models to European scholars in his workshop or in his home.55 The first Baedeker guide to Palestine, published in 1876, advised travelers to complement their visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with a viewing of a “large model [of the church] executed by H[err] Schick,” on display “at a bookseller’s shop adjoining the residence of Bishop Gohat.”56 With the Holy Land turning into a mainstream tourist destination for Europeans,57 Schick’s models became part of the sightseeing route, alongside the real-scale monuments. At times, they not only supplemented the actual sites, but also competed with them. The Baedeker guide recommended an examination of the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre after seeing the real one, since it provides the viewer with “a comprehensive idea of the whole of the buildings connected with it.”58 The statement implied that the monument alone, in its current state, could not convey as clear an impression of its overall form and architecture as its scaled reproduction.
- 59 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, op. cit. (note 23), p. 59.
- 60 Maarten Delbeke, “Architecture’s Print Complex: Palloy’s Bastille and the Death of Architecture,” (...)
- 61 Ibid., p. 84.
- 62 Ibid., p. 82 and 85 (Quoted from sources published in 1790.)
24Schick’s models are also interesting if seen as part of the long tradition of architectural models as symbols of political power and historical events. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have pointed out that since the Renaissance (if not earlier), the act of “miniaturization” of a famous site or building has served as a “powerful symbol of possession” of the object in question.59 An interesting example of this occurred in the context of the French Revolution: As Maarten Delbeke has shown, shortly after the Revolutionaries stormed the prison of the Bastille in 1789, a contractor and amateur architect named Pierre François Palloy manufactured a number of models of the prison, which he distributed all over France to spread the message of the Revolution.60 These miniature Bastilles were instrumental in exorcising the haunting memory of the original monument (a symbol of the old regime): in several revolutionary ceremonies, copies of Palloy’s Bastille models were ritually struck with a hammer and crushed to pieces, in front of cheering crowds.61 Written accounts of the period celebrated this miniaturization of the Bastille, claiming that “the colossus of tyranny” was “now reduced to a plaything.” One could “examine it in great detail,” but also “look down” on it and “dominate it.”62
- 63 In later years, the site of the Temple Mount continued to be the object of other scaled models and (...)
25Schick’s nineteenth-century Ottoman Jerusalem was certainly far from Revolutionary Paris. But his models of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount can be seen as similar attempts to exorcise (or, at least, to rationalize) local political and religious conflicts through the miniaturization of the buildings that embodied them. Through these models, the territorial and architectural complexities of these holy sites acquired a material, objective, and therefore operable, form. Schick’s models shrank monumental edifices such as the Holy Sepulchre or the Temple Mount to the size of a table, around which local governors, clergymen, diplomats, and other officials could meet to negotiate, argue, compromise, or provoke. The easily movable parts of the models allowed them to “play” with history and territory; to move buildings around with their hands and to materialize different architectural configurations and conditions for the conflicted religious sites of Jerusalem. By removing the Dome of the Rock, for instance, from the Temple Mount model, and replacing it with the Solomonic Temple, an archeologist could visualize the history of the site. But the same gesture could be a highly charged political provocation, given the centuries-old conflict over the site between Jews and Muslims.63
- 64 In her book about later (mostly twentieth-century) models of holy sites of Israel/Palestine, Yael (...)
- 65 Werner Oechslin, “Le modèle architectural. Idea materialis,” in Sabine Frommel and Raphaël Tassin (...)
- 66 See, for instance: The Historical Museum Basle - Guide to the Collections, Basel: Historisches Mus (...)
26Like the Bastille, the Temple Mount was turned into a “plaything” by miniaturization. Likening Schick’s models of Jerusalem’s bitterly disputed holy sites to toys might at first sound like a gross oversimplification. However, other scholars have made similar comparisons with reference to other models of the Holy Land.64 Moreover, and more broadly, in the nineteenth century, architectural models and miniatures were no longer only a matter of adult architectural and political affairs; they were also becoming an important medium in the sphere of education and the daily life of children. Schick manufactured his models in Jerusalem at a time when, in his native Germany and other places in Europe, miniatures and models were an established educational resources. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, German educators were publishing model-making books for children, claiming that constructing and observing miniatures of the house was an essential means of geometrical and, more broadly, cultural education.65 In the following decades, school classrooms were being equipped with a variety of educational toys and building kits. Consider the abstract geometric “Fröbelgaben” made by Friedrich Fröbel (dating from the 1830s) and the more figuratively architectural “Anker-Steinbaukasten” (the 1880s). There were also models of specific Biblical sites and scenes. Outside the classroom, in their spare time at home, children were encouraged to play with a variety of construction kits and doll houses,66 objects known for their didactic and normative character.
- 67 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit(...)
- 68 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, [First published as Mythologies, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957; tra (...)
27Schick was born too early to have played with such kits and models in his childhood. But as a young craftsman in Basel he must certainly have had some contact with the European boom in educational miniatures. One of his first models—that of the Tabernacle, in 1845—was made for the theological classrooms of the St Chrischona mission. Training as a carpenter and wood craftsman in Germany and Switzerland in the early nineteenth century, he had to have at least some familiarity with the educational usefulness and the technical features of architectural miniatures and building kits. If his first model of the Tabernacle was, as Schick himself claimed, the inspiration for all his later models in Jerusalem,67 then it is safe to assume that these complicated objects (made for “adult” political affairs) still held something of the instructive character of that first attempt. In this sense, Schick’s models are ambiguous objects. They were the settings of violent geopolitical and religious conflicts, yet at the same time they possessed something of the innocent appearance of toys (fig. 13-14). Roland Barthes has written that toys are “a microcosm of the adult world”: they are made to prepare the child for this world, and in doing so they can “reveal the list of all the things that the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, [etc.].”68 Schick’s models of Jerusalem’s monuments performed a somewhat similar function: By miniaturizing these heavily conflicted sites, they rendered innocuous (and thus enabled) architectural and geopolitical gestures that had violent effects in the full-scale reality.
Figure 13: An illustration from a French treatise on military affairs (late 17th century).

Source: Allain Manesson-Mallet, Les Travaux de Mars, ou L'art de la guerre, Paris: D. Thierry, 1685, tome 1.
Figure 14: An advertisement for a German building kit for children (19th century).

Source: from the Author’s collection.
Epilogue: from Württemberg to Jerusalem, from craftsman to architect
- 69 David Kroyanker, Jerusalem Architecture [revised edition], Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House Ltd.; (...)
- 70 Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Cent (...)
- 71 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit(...)
- 72 Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Cent (...)
- 73 Karen Moon, Modeling Messages: The Architect and the Model, op. cit. (note 44), p. 141. Teresa Fan (...)
28Schick arrived in Jerusalem at the same time as a wave of European missionaries and religious and archeological institutions. This influx generated a building boom in the city and its periphery.69 As a result, in addition to his business as a model-maker, he had several opportunities to become involved in designing and constructing buildings for various clients.70 Schick was a self-taught architect, just as he was in his other fields of his activity. Although he claimed to have developed “a sense of architecture” in Basel in the early 1840s,71 he had no formal training. He seems simply to have learned by doing—and also by making models. Purportedly, Schick almost never constructed a building without making wooden model of it.72 Although often seen as exceptional, Schick’s transition from craftsman to model-maker and then to architect was not unusual, because model-making was never an independent trade. Before the twentieth century, wooden models (for architectural and other purposes) were mostly made by joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers,73 people whose background was similar to Schick’s. Model-making has largely been a subservient practice, with model-makers working mainly under the supervision of architects and archeologists. And one could perhaps find other cases of craftsmen assimilating the knowledge of their employers, eventually elevating themselves above the rank of mere maker to that of the (architectural or archeological) thinker.
29Schick’s models might have been his vehicle into real-scale architectural projects, but his promotion from model-maker to architect was also largely the result of the particular context of nineteenth-century Jerusalem, and the power differentials between local and European agents. Schick went from craftsman to esteemed architect and archeologist at a time when in Europe these disciplines were witnessing increasing professionalization, through the foundation of academies and scientific institutions and the establishment of official degrees and professional titles. What Schick achieved in Jerusalem would have perhaps not been possible in his native Germany, where exercising the profession of the architect and the archeologist was increasingly reserved for those who possessed academic training and titles. But this process of professionalization and institutionalization of architecture unfolded with different intensity and speed in different parts of the world, and was subject to power differentials. Working as a European in Jerusalem, in close connection to many missionary and archeological (quasi-colonial) institutions, Schick was in a privileged position and freed from many constraints. He was able to move between different disciplines and commissions and to acquire new knowledge from various fields, gaining an ability to tackle projects for which he had not been formally trained.
- 74 Palestine and Syria - Handbook for Travelers, op. cit. (note 56), p. 191, where he is referred to (...)
- 75 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit(...)
- 76 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (not (...)
30In the quasi-colonial context of Jerusalem, European professional titles were important. By the 1870s, Schick was already referred to as an “architect.” 74 In his later days, he signed his publications with the pompous title of “Royal Württembergian Building Inspector in Jerusalem,”75 a title granted to him around 1863 by the King of his native Württemberg (King Charles I), after Charles had acquired one of his models of the Holy Sepulchre.76 The title “Building Inspector” (Baurat) implied that its possessor had some formal training or practical experience in the design and construction of buildings. However, at that time Schick had little involvement in actual architectural projects (most of his architectural commissions came in later years). It seems that the title of the Royal Württembergian “Baurat” in Jerusalem was given to him on account of a model rather than any achievement in the construction of full-scale buildings. This incident speaks as much of the captivating power of Schick’s models, as it does of the power differential between the local authorities of Jerusalem and the European powers that were establishing their missionary footholds there. A scaled reproduction of the Holy Sepulchre, sent back to Württemberg, prompted its monarch to elevate a German missionary and craftsman to the status of an architectural representative of his small kingdom in the architectural matters of the Holy Land. This honorary professional title allowed Schick to claim authority on the architectural matters of the Holy Land, and later to become the designer and supervisor of many constructions.
- 77 Constanze Röhl, “Conrad Schick. Leben und Werk eines deutschen Architekten im Jerusalem des 19. Ja (...)
31Conrad Schick’s life was defined by two simultaneous kinds of movement, or rather oscillation: One between two geographical and cultural contexts (central Europe and the Middle East), and one between two professional practices and mindsets (the craftsman/maker and the architect/thinker). His migration from Basel to Jerusalem—undoubtedly the defining moment in his life—had as much of an effect on Schick himself as it did on Jerusalem, due to his enormous output in model-making, archeological research, and architectural projects. Schick has already found his place in historical studies of how the migration of individuals has affected the architectural culture of different places. Looking at his architectural work, Constanze Röhl has demonstrated how Schick’s buildings in Jerusalem made use of construction techniques that were common in southern Germany, thus generating transplants and syntheses of local and imported elements which influenced the work of local architects after him.77 By looking at his models, I hope to have hinted at a similar transplant: the German craftsman brought a very specific (and rather European) material culture with him to Jerusalem, that of architectural models and miniatures and their increasing importance in the nineteenth century. This transplant cross-fertilized with the context of Jerusalem and its particular religious, territorial, and architectural circumstances, generating objects (models) in which radically different contexts and circumstances seem to amalgamate. European cuckoo clocks, educational building kits, exposition showpieces, and household knick-knacks intersected with late-Ottoman Middle-Eastern territorial and religious politics, in the form of hybrid, almost schizophrenic objects. The idiosyncratic oeuvre of Schick was not (solely) the result of a persistent and ambitious individual (or an exceptional “genius”). It was the outcome of a circumstantial—at times innovative, and at times self-limiting—adaptation of his methods and skills as a craftsman, a carpenter, and clock-maker, into those required of an architect and an archeologist; a process whose results are not necessarily perfect or exceptional in their execution, but certainly peculiar and interesting as cultural syntheses.
Acknowlegments
32The starting point for this paper was my encounter with some of Schick’s models and buildings during a seminar trip in Jerusalem in March 2019, with the Chair of Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke at ETH/gta. I am grateful to my colleagues (Maarten Delbeke, Anneke Abhelakh, Berthold Hub, Emma Jones, Cara Rachele, Erik Wegerhoff, and Linda Stagni) for discussing Schick’s works on site and later in Zurich, and for providing me with comments that fed the writing of this text. I am also grateful to my colleague at ETH/gta, Matthew Wells, for sharing his expertise on architectural models and for helping me to refine my understanding of Schick’s work. Lastly, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their constructive remarks and their suggestion of further bibliographic references.
33Writing this paper would have not been possible without relying on the work of Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, as well as that of many other local scholars whose research has thoroughly mapped out the life and work of Conrad Schick and laid the groundwork for further research. I would also like to thank Claudius Buser (Deputy Rector and Lecturer in Church History at the Theological Seminary in St Chrischona), who was kind enough to provide information on some of Schick’s models that had once belonged to the St Chrischona mission. Last but not least, my personal gratitude also goes to Ulf Petersson and Martin Gass, who provided me with material that would otherwise have been difficult to find.
Notes
1 For an overview of Conrad Schick’s life and multi-faceted oeuvre, see Martin Gass (ed.), Drei bedeutende Bitzer im 19. Jahrhundert: Johannes Schick, 50 Jahre Schulmeister in Engstlatt; Carl Theodor Beck, der erste Bitzer Unternehmer; Conrad Schick, Baumeister, Stadtplaner und Erforscher von Jerusalem, Albstatt-Ebingen: Fecker, 2000, p. 103-117; Haim Goren, “‘Der unstreitig beste Kenner des heutigen Jerusalems’ - Conrad Schick und sein Werk,” in Haim Goren and Jacob Eisler (eds.), Deutschland und Deutsche in Jerusalem, Jerusalem: Mishkenot Sha’ananim, 2011, p. 80-99; Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 67, January 2016, p. 7-27. URL: https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/Conrad_Schick__JQ_67_0.pdf. Accessed 06 January 2021. Constanze Röhl, “Conrad Schick. Leben und Werk eines deutschen Architekten im Jerusalem des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Heiderose Kilper (ed.), Migration und Baukultur. Transformation des Bauens durch individuelle und kollektive Einwanderung, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2019 (Kulturelle und technische Werte historischer Bauten, 3), p. 147-162. DOI: 10.1515/9783035618419-011.
2 Martin Gass (ed.), Drei bedeutende Bitzer im 19. Jahrhundert, op. cit. (note 1), p. 101 and 108.
3 Jakob Eisler, “Der Pilgermission St Chrischona im Heiligen Land,” in Haim Goren and Jacob Eisler (eds.), op. cit. (note 1), p. 65-79.
4 Haim Goren, “‘Undoubtedly, the best connoisseur of Jerusalem in our times:’ Conrad Schick as ‘Palästina-Wissenschaftler,’” in Ulrich Hübner (ed.), Palaestina exploranda - Studien zur Erforschung Palästinas im 19. und 20. Jahrundert anläßlich des 125jährigen Bestehens des Deutschen Vereins zur Erforschung Palästinas, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006 (Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästinavereins, 34), p. 105-107.
5 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, vol. 128, no. 2, July 1996, p. 103-124. URL: 10.1179/peq.1996.128.2.103.
6 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1896.
7 Ibid., p. III. Original: “verschiedene mechanische Fertigkeiten und Handwerksarbeiten” and “einen Sinn für Baukunst.”
8 Constanze Röhl, “Conrad Schick. Leben und Werk eines deutschen Architekten im Jerusalem des 19. Jahrhunderts,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 152.
9 Haim Goren, “Undoubtedly, the best connoisseur of Jerusalem in our times,” op. cit. (note 4).
10 For instance: Daniel Baud-Bovy, Schweizer Bauern-Kunst, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1926; René Creux, Volkskunst in der Schweiz, Padeux: Éditions de Fontainemore, 1970; Ernst Schlee, Die Volkskunst in Deutschland: Ausstrahlung-Vorlagen-Quellen, Munich: Callwey, 1978 (Volkskunst der Welt in Einzeldarstellungen).
11 Martin Gass (ed.), Drei bedeutende Bitzer im 19. Jahrhundert, op. cit. (note 1), p. 109, and Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 106.
12 Unfortunately, no photograph or other visual evidence of this model has survived.
13 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit. (note 6), p. III.
14 See: Hans Reuther and Ekhart Berckenhagen, Deutsche Architekturmodelle - Projekthilfe zwischen 1500 und 1900, Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1994, p. 26.
15 Martin Gass (ed.), Drei bedeutende Bitzer im 19. Jahrhundert, op. cit. (note 1), p. 110 (excerpt from his memoirs). Martin Gass mentions that this was a workshop in the town of St Georgen in the Black Forest (Ibid., p. 51). This was presumably the workshop of watch-maker Johannes Pfaff, where others from Schick’s hometown of Bitz had trained in earlier years (Ibid., p. 50).
16 Ibid., p. 116.
17 Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 8.
18 Haim Goren, “Undoubtedly, the best connoisseur of Jerusalem in our times,” op. cit. (note 4).
19 For more on this, see: Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto-Fdeda, Oren Sagiv and Tania Coen-Uzzielli (eds.), In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation, Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018, p. 27-34.
20 Ibid., p. 27.
21 Turgut Saner, “Des jouets pour les sultans. Les maquettes ottomanes, entre fonctionnalité et représentation,” in Guy Amsellem, Mireille Grubert and Sabine Frommel (eds.), La maquette : un outil au service du projet architectural, [conference proceedings] (Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, 20-21 May 2011), Paris: Éditions des Cendres; Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, 2015, p. 253-265.
22 Rehav Rubin, “Relief Maps and Models in the Archives of The Palestine Exploration Fund in London,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, vol. 138, no. 1, 2006, p. 43-63. DOI: 10.1179/003103205x63016.
23 Michael Rüdiger, Nachbauten des Heiligen Grabes in Jerusalem in der Zeit von Gegenreformation und Barock, Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2003; Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks, Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 50-96; Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York, NY: Zone Books, 2010, p. 54-61.
24 Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto-Fdeda, Oren Sagiv and Tania Coen-Uzzielli (eds.), In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation, op. cit. (note 19), p. 103.
25 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 109.
26 For more on Schick’s Holy Sepulchre models, see Ibid., p. 108-111.
27 More on these exported models in part 4 of this paper.
28 The permanent position of the model appears to be in the Christ Church Heritage Centre in Jerusalem. In 2018 it was displayed in the exhibition “In Statu Quo - Structures of Negotiation” in the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition (and the model) was then moved to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from January to June 2019. The label of the model in this exhibition verifies that it was constructed in 1862, and that it is, in fact, the one commissioned by Sureyya Pasha.
29 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 109.
30 Hans Reuther and Ekhart Berckenhagen, Deutsche Architekturmodelle - Projekthilfe zwischen 1500 und 1900, op. cit. (note 14).
31 The exhibition where the model was displayed did not specify the exact type of wood it is made of, and its thickly painted surface does not make it possible to determine the type of wood underneath it.
32 Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 8.
33 The models were made in Jerusalem and then sent to Vienna (Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 112-113). After being exhibited there in 1873, they were transferred to Schick’s old mission of St Chrischona, where they seem to have remained for years (Hermann Zschokke, “Palästina auf der Weltausstellung in Wien 1873,” Das Heilige Land, Köln: J.P. Bachem, 1874, no. 18, p. 8). Claudius Buser (Deputy Rector and Lecturer in Church History at the Theological Seminary in St Chrischona), whom I contacted via email, has informed me that some years ago the mission sold both models: One to Christ Church in Jerusalem, and the other to an unknown buyer. The exact current location of both is unverified.
34 For a more on this, see: Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto-Fdeda, Oren Sagiv and Tania Coen-Uzzielli (eds.), In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation, op. cit. (note 19), p. 113-183 and 285-314.
35 Haim Goren, “Undoubtedly, the best connoisseur of Jerusalem in our times,” op. cit. (note 4), p. 121-122.
36 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 112-118.
37 Ibid., p. 105.
38 The surface of these platforms has several lids which can be opened to uncover underground passages and other structures which existed under its modern surface but were inaccessible and unknown to large part of the city’s population at the time.
39 The bishop and theologian Hermann Zschokke, who saw these models in Vienna, praised their level of detail and accuracy (Hermann Zschokke, “Palästina auf der Weltausstellung in Wien 1873,” op. cit. (note 34), p. 7-8).
40 For an overview of earlier hypotheses, reconstructions and interpretations of the Solomonic Temple, see: William J. Hamblin and David Rolph Seely, Solomon’s Temple: Myth and History, London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, p. 165-203.
41 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit. (note 6), p. 56. Original: “Wo abstraktes Denken und Vergleichen oft nicht weiterhalf, half mir das plastische Nachbilden des Bekannten. Es machte mir die Lösung oft leicht, und dieses Suchen war mit eine Ursache, dass ich die Modelle überhaupt gemacht habe [...].”
42 This process of central and northern-European craftsmen and cabinet makers familiarizing themselves with classical decorative elements had already began through the “Säulenbücher” in the seventeenth century; and it intensified from the end of the eighteenth century and onwards through cabinet-making and carpentry manuals (disseminated in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards) which popularized Classicist architectural treatises. By the nineteenth-century, European craftsmen had assimilated and vernacularized the decorative language of classicism, adapting it to their means and purposes.
43 We don’t know whether the clock-making workshop in the Black Forest, where Schick was trained in 1846, specialized only in making the interior mechanisms of clocks or whether it also manufactured their typical decorated wooden cases. But since Schick grew up and trained as a craftsman in an area where these objects were a local tradition, he must have been familiar with them.
44 To mention a few publications on the topic: Karen Moon, Modeling Messages: The Architect and the Model, New York, NY: The Monacelli Press, 2005; Peter Cachola Schmal and Oliver Elser (eds.), Das Architektur Modell: Werkzeug, Fetisch, kleine Utopie = The Architectural Model: Tool, Fetish, Small Utopia, Exhibition Catalogue (Frankfurt, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 25 May-16 September 2012), Frankfurt: Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 2012; Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum (eds.), Modelling Time: The Permanent Collection 1925-2014, Oslo: Torpedo Press, 2014; Guy Amsellem, Mireille Grubert and Sabine Frommel (eds.), La maquette..., op. cit. (note 21) ; Sabine Frommel and Raphaël Tassin (eds.), Les maquettes d’architecture: fonction et évolution d’un instrument de conception et de réalisation, Paris: Picard, 2015.
45 Hans Reuther and Ekhart Berckenhagen, Deutsche Architekturmodelle - Projekthilfe zwischen 1500 und 1900, op. cit. (note 14).
46 Rehav Rubin, “Relief Maps and Models in the Archives of The Palestine Exploration Fund in London,” op. cit. (note 22); Yael Padan, Modelscapes of Nationalism: Collective Memories and Future Visions, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
47 Alice Thomine-Berrada, “De la maquette de présentation à la maquette de conception (1850-1880): Réflexions autour de l’emploi de la maquette au xixe siècle,” in Guy Amsellem, Mireille Grubert and Sabine Frommel (eds.), La maquette…, op. cit. (note 21), p. 243-246. For a more elaborate (and chronologically and thematically broader) reflections on public models (models displayed to the broader public), see also: Yael Padan, Modelscapes of Nationalism, op. cit. (note 46), p. 27-56.
48 Mari Lending, Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 17.
49 Ibid., p. 114-123.
50 The itinerary of these models has been recounted in a footnote at the beginning of part 3 of this paper.
51 Philipp Wolff, “Das neue Modell der Jerusalemer Grabkirche,” Ausserordentliche Beilage Nr. 65 zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, 6 March 1863, p. 1074.
52 For more on this, see Ibid. and Idem, “Das neue Modell des Grabeskirche von Jerusalem in Stuttgart,” Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 40, 16 May 1863, p. 337-338.
53 Idem, “Die Modelle des Haram-esch-Scherifund der Kubbet-es-Sachra (Omar-Moschee),” Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, 12 October 1875, p. 4455.
54 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 117.
55 Ibid. p. 116.
56 Palestine and Syria - Handbook for Travelers, Leipzig: Karl Baedecker, 1876, p. 191.
57 For more context on this, see: Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, op. cit. (note 23), p. 144-188.
58 Palestine and Syria - Handbook for Travelers, op. cit. (note 56), p. 191.
59 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, op. cit. (note 23), p. 59.
60 Maarten Delbeke, “Architecture’s Print Complex: Palloy’s Bastille and the Death of Architecture,” in Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch (eds.), The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, p. 73-96.
61 Ibid., p. 84.
62 Ibid., p. 82 and 85 (Quoted from sources published in 1790.)
63 In later years, the site of the Temple Mount continued to be the object of other scaled models and full-scale architectural projects that laid significant claims over its territory: 1966 saw the completion of a large model reproducing Jerusalem at the time of the Second Temple, originally exhibited at the recently opened Holyland Hotel. As Yael Padan has explained, the model was conceived as a “serious plaything,” whose movable pieces-buildings allowed the exploration of different archeological hypotheses and, through these gestures, serious historical and territorial claims (For more on this, see Yael Padan, Modelscapes of Nationalism, op. cit. (note 46), p. 75-119 and particularly p. 84-88). The story of such claims did not end there: According to Jewish eschatology, the Temple Mount, where the first two Jewish temples stood, will eventually be the site of a Third and final temple. In 1991, right-wing Zionists made an architectural proposal for the construction of this Third Temple next to the Temple Mount (Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto-Fdeda, Oren Sagiv and Tania Coen-Uzzielli (eds.), In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation, op. cit. (note 19), p. 178).
64 In her book about later (mostly twentieth-century) models of holy sites of Israel/Palestine, Yael Padan has refered to “the association of models with playful objects, especially miniature models which are reminiscent of doll houses and other toys.” Padan argues that this “frame of play enables models to refer to political and social problems in a mediated way [...].” Yael Padan, Modelscapes of Nationalism, op. cit. (note 47), p. 43. Padan quotes the artist Larry Abramson, who posits that the experience of a model has an “enchanted dimension that is both entertaining and magical. The model is at once an innocent toy and a powerful fetish, a voodoo doll with control over the reality it images”; and Padan adds: “Hence part of the experience of the model is framed within a seemingly innocent context of play.” (Ibid., p. 47) For more on this topic of models as objects that enable a public performance of “play,” see Ibid., p. 43-48.
65 Werner Oechslin, “Le modèle architectural. Idea materialis,” in Sabine Frommel and Raphaël Tassin (eds.), Les maquettes d’architecture, op. cit. (note 44), p. 105-108.
66 See, for instance: The Historical Museum Basle - Guide to the Collections, Basel: Historisches Museum Basel & Merrel Holberton Publishers, 1994, p. 283-291.
67 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit. (note 6), p. III.
68 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, [First published as Mythologies, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957; trans. by Annette Lavers], New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 1972, p. 53.
69 David Kroyanker, Jerusalem Architecture [revised edition], Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House Ltd.; The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 2002, p. 118-128. Haim Goren and Jacob Eisler (eds.), Deutschland und Deutsche in Jerusalem, Jerusalem: Mishkenot Sha’ b ananim, 2011. Constanze Röhl, “Conrad Schick. Leben und Werk eines deutschen Architekten im Jerusalem des 19. Jahrhunderts,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 148-150.
70 Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 11-14.
71 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit. (note 6), p. III.
72 Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 11. Nazmi Al-Jubeh also writes that the locals’ fascination with Schick’s models of holy sites was often what led them to hire him to construct models of new designs for public buildings and eventually to commission him as the designer and supervisor of new projects.
73 Karen Moon, Modeling Messages: The Architect and the Model, op. cit. (note 44), p. 141. Teresa Fankhänel, “Introducing Theodore Conrad or Why should we look at the architectural model maker?,” in Sabine Frommel and Raphaël Tassin (eds.), Les maquettes d’architecture, op. cit. (note 44), p. 259.
74 Palestine and Syria - Handbook for Travelers, op. cit. (note 56), p. 191, where he is referred to as “a German architect.”
75 Conrad Schick, Die Stiftshütte, der Tempel in Jerusalem und der Tempelplatz der Jetztzeit, op. cit. (note 6). Original: “Königlich Württembergischer Baurat in Jerusalem.”
76 Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Conrad Schick’s Models of Jerusalem and its Monuments,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 109; Nazmi Al-Jubeh, “Conrad Schick: Pioneering Architect Archeologist and Historian of Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 9-10.
77 Constanze Röhl, “Conrad Schick. Leben und Werk eines deutschen Architekten im Jerusalem des 19. Jahrhunderts,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 155 and 159.
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
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Titre | Figure 1: Conrad Schick’s 1862 color-coded model of the Holy Sepulchre complex. |
Légende | Photograph taken by the author in 2019, when the model was displayed in the exhibition “In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel), curated by Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Ifat Finkelman, Oren Sagiv, and Tania Coen-Uzzielli. (The exhibition was originally shown in the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2018. The permanent position of the model appears to be in the Christ Church Heritage Centre in Jerusalem.) |
Crédits | Source: Nikos Magouliotis. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 307k |
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Titre | Figure 2: Conrad Schick’s 1862 color-coded model of the Holy Sepulchre complex. |
Légende | Photograph taken by the author in 2019, when the model was displayed in the exhibition “In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel), curated by Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Ifat Finkelman, Oren Sagiv, and Tania Coen-Uzzielli. (The exhibition was originally shown in the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2018. The permanent position of the model appears to be in the Christ Church Heritage Centre in Jerusalem.) |
Crédits | Source: Nikos Magouliotis. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 309k |
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Titre | Figure 3: One of Conrad Schick’s Holy Sepulchre models with some parts removed. |
Crédits | Source: photograph of the model taken by Rehav Rubin in Jerusalem ca. 1984-1985 (permission of reproduction granted to the author by Rehav Rubin himself). |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-3.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 714k |
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Titre | Figure 4: Interior mechanism of a mid-18th-century Swiss clock. |
Crédits | Source: Daniel Baud-Bovy, Schweizer Bauern-Kunst, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1926. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-4.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 567k |
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Titre | Figure 5: One of the two platforms of Conrad Schick’s 1885 model of the Temple Mount, showing the site in the time of the Solomonic Temples (on display at the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem). |
Crédits | Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-5.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 300k |
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Titre | Figure 6: The second platform of Conrad Schick’s 1885 model of the Temple Mount, showing the site in its later form, with the Muslim shrine of the Dome of the Rock in the middle (on display at the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem). |
Crédits | Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-6.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 337k |
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Titre | Figure 7: One of the many movable parts of Schick’s 1885 model of the Temple Mount: a model of a Jewish “Nach-exilischer Tempel” (as captioned in the display at the Paulus house), presumably mountable onto the main platform. |
Crédits | Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-7.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 850k |
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Titre | Figure 8: Another un-captioned model belonging to the 1885 Temple Mount model, which appears to be an early form of the Dome of the Rock. |
Crédits | Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-8.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 297k |
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Titre | Figure 9: A wooden cabinet from Oberwallis, Switzerland (early 18th century). |
Crédits | Source: René Creux, Volkskunst in der Schweiz, Padeux: Éditions de Fontainemore, 1970. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-9.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 418k |
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Titre | Figure 10: One of the numerous miniatures of the Temple of Solomon, made by Conrad Schick (ca. 1885). |
Crédits | Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-10.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 725k |
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Titre | Figure 11: A cuckoo clock from the Black Forest (1850). |
Crédits | Source: Ernst Schlee, Die Volkskunst in Deutschland: Ausstrahlung - Vorlagen - Quellen, Munich: Callwey, 1978 (Volkskunst der Welt in Einzeldarstellungen). |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-11.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 326k |
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Titre | Figure 12: Schick’s model of the Temple Mount and the Temple of Solomon (ca. 1885). |
Crédits | Source: photo of models taken by Nikos Magouliotis in 2019 in a small exhibition in the basement of the Paulus Haus in Jerusalem, where these models are permanently on display. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-12.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 705k |
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Titre | Figure 13: An illustration from a French treatise on military affairs (late 17th century). |
Crédits | Source: Allain Manesson-Mallet, Les Travaux de Mars, ou L'art de la guerre, Paris: D. Thierry, 1685, tome 1. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-13.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 420k |
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Titre | Figure 14: An advertisement for a German building kit for children (19th century). |
Crédits | Source: from the Author’s collection. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/10216/img-14.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 803k |
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Nikolaos Magouliotis, « Miniaturizing Monuments: Conrad Schick and his Architectural Models of the Holy Sites of Jerusalem », ABE Journal [En ligne], 18 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 juillet 2021, consulté le 15 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/10216 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.10216
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