Showing the cultures of the East
Piet Gerrits and the Biblical Museum of the Holy Land Foundation
p. 215-238
Résumés
In 1915 the Biblical Museum near Nijmegen, the Netherlands, opened its doors to the public. Its artistic advisor was Piet Gerrits, an all-round artist and craftsman. This article discusses how the experience-based knowledge gathered by Gerrits through the Latin missions in the Middle East from 1906 to 1911 was reproduced, materialized, transmitted and transformed in the museum and the churches he decorated in the Netherlands. It also shows how his artwork was recently re-appropriated by Jordanians to restore their damaged local cultural heritage and Christian identity. In the analysis of Gerrits’s visualizations of the East in paintings, statues and architecture, three types of experience-based knowledge are distinguished and illustrated: embodied knowledge, material heritage and religious coexistence. Such an approach was not easily assimilated in Europe, as representations of intimate knowledge of everyday life in the Levant clashed with Catholic iconographic norms and the assumptions, dominant representations, and religious aims of other authorities involved.
En 1915, le musée Biblique près de Nimègue, aux Pays-Bas, ouvre ses portes au public. Son conseiller artistique est Piet Gerrits, un artiste et artisan accompli. Cet article traite de la façon dont les connaissances fondées sur l’expérience recueillies par Gerrits, au travers des missions latines au Moyen-Orient de 1906 à 1911, ont été reproduites, matérialisées, transmises et transformées dans le musée et les églises qu’il a décorés aux Pays-Bas ; et comment les Jordaniens se sont réapproprié l’œuvre de Gerrits pour restaurer leur patrimoine culturel local endommagé et identité chrétienne. Dans l’analyse des visualisations de l’Orient dans les peintures, statues et architecture de Gerrits, on distingue trois types d’approches basées sur l’expérience et démontrées ici : la connaissance incarnée, le patrimoine matériel et la coexistence religieuse. Cette démarche n’est pas facilement assimilée en Europe, où les représentations de la connaissance intime de la vie quotidienne au Levant se heurtent aux normes iconographiques catholiques et aux assomptions, représentations dominantes et objectifs religieux des autres autorités impliquées.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : Transmission de connaissances fondées sur l’expérience, Jordanie, patrimoine culturel, art religieux, réappropriation
Keywords : Transmission of experience-based knowledge, Jordan, cultural heritage, religious art, re-appropriation
Texte intégral
1On September 19, 1915 the Biblical Museum near Nijmegen, the Netherlands, opened its doors to the public. The museum’s collector, designer, builder and curator was Piet Gerrits (1878-1957), an all-round artist and craftsman who had stayed from 1906-1911 in the Middle East. He had been invited by the Dutch missionary Adriaan Smets to come and decorate the newly built Roman Catholic church in al-Husn, a small town seven kilometres south of Irbid in what is now northern Jordan. Gerrits stayed on in the region to decorate several other Christian churches, familiarize himself with Middle Eastern culture, gather information by making notes and sketches, and start collecting for a museum to be founded in the Netherlands. Gerrits saw it as his mission to transfer his new knowledge of oriental Christian culture to the Dutch Catholics. It was not academic, scholarly, or intellectual knowledge that he wanted to convey, rather he wanted the Dutch Catholics to become familiar with the forms, smells, colors, touch and feelings of other peoples, countries and religions.
2Gerrits left a unique imprint on the Biblical Museum, now called Museumpark Orientalis, as well as the colorful Cenacle Church and the graveyard next to it. Together, they are called the Holy Land Foundation, which is also the name of the founding organization as well as the village where the complex is situated, near the town of Nijmegen. The circulation of knowledge generated by Gerrits in the Dutch missions in the Middle East, and kindled by my own role as anthropologist, is presently being completed by Jordanians visiting the church, museum and archives of Gerrits in the Netherlands. It has nourished a new awareness of local Arab Christian heritage in Jordan and led to internationally supported projects to restore Gerrits’s artwork in al-Husn. His drawings are thus re-appropriated to sustain local heritage-making.
3What are the characteristics of the experience-based knowledge gathered in the Levant, and what has Gerrits done with this in the Netherlands? In the following analysis of Gerrits’s visualizations of the East in paintings, drawings, furniture, statues, shrines, wooden Nativity scenes, and architecture, three types of experience-based knowledge are distinguished and illustrated: embodied knowledge, material heritage and religious coexistence. The article furthermore shows that Gerrits’s artistic understanding of the Christian Middle East was not easily assimilated in Europe. I argue that his ways of representing the Levant and conveying intimate knowledge of everyday life repeatedly clashed with both his Catholic upbringing, his artistic training, dominant Church teachings and representations, as well as with the Dutch authorities involved in the Holy Land Foundation. The history of the museum, the Cenacle Church and its graveyard, presents an interesting case of the conflict-ridden dynamics between the experience-based knowledge generated in the Levant mission on the one hand, and the assumptions, dominant representations, and religious aims of Europe on the other.
4Data for this study was gathered through repeated anthropological fieldwork in al-Husn, Jordan (1988, 1989, 2001, 2006, 2011) ; archival study in Jordan and the Netherlands on the Dutch mission and Piet Gerrits ;1 observation in the museum, church and graveyard of the Holy Land Foundation ; study of primary and secondary literature and meetings with Gerrits’s heirs and the board of the Piet Gerrits Foundation.2
Background
The mission in Jordan
5The Dutch role in the Latin Mission in al-Husn started with the arrival of Adrianus (Adriaan) Smets (1867-1947). Trained at the seminary of the Latin Patriarchate, shortly after his ordination he was appointed chaplain in al-Husn in 1892 to assist the Italian priest Don Teobaldo Navoni, the first to start the Latin al-Husn mission in 1885. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem had been reinstated in 1847 by Pope Pius IX. The bishopric of Jerusalem, founded in 1099, had left Palestine after 1291. Only the Franciscans (OFM) had returned in 1321 and protected the Holy Places since 1333 when the Custody of the Holy Land was installed. The Franciscans hosted pilgrims to the Holy Land, ran schools and orphanages and took care of the souls of the Catholics in Palestine, Cyprus and Egypt. Under the first bishop Mgr. Joseph Valerga after the reinstatement the Latin mission took hold.3 Neither the Turks nor the Muslims were seen as a danger to the few surviving Latins, but rather the arrival of the Anglicans in 1842. It was the spread of the Anglican mission that had prompted this Roman Catholic action. Muslims were seen as notoriously difficult to convert. Christians and Muslims managed to remain largely endogamous, due to strict marriage rules. Similarly, the different Christian denominations tried to enforce endogamy among their brethren but were less successful in doing so. I have shown in other articles that internal tribal conflicts, preferences for parallel cousin marriages, and the desire for schooling and economic benefits led to many intra-Christian conversions.4
6It was within this context of recently opened mission fields across the river Jordan that Smets succeeded Navoni as parish priest in 1897. He worked there until 1910 after which he had a successful career including becoming honorary archbishop of Gangra.5 At the end of his career, when his health became problematic, Smets worked in Rome as consultor of the Congregation of the Eastern Church until his retirement in 1936. He died in Rome, on July 31, 1947.
7With money collected in the Netherlands, in particular Smets’s hometown Dommelen, a new church and school were built in al-Husn.6 Smets’s first ten years in the mission were turbulent for both the Latin Church and the school due to the competition with the other Christian denominations for converts as well as the Ottoman government’s opposition to Christian influence from abroad. Despite this, the Latin community flourished. Navoni had reported in 1896 to his superiors in Jerusalem that there were ninety-nine new members of the Latin community, in addition to the 210 Latins already there. When Smets revisited his former parish in 1931 and 1934, he concluded in his letters to his brother not only that people were very much impoverished, but also that he had been mostly struck by the fact that the Latin community had expanded to over 700 souls.7 In the clamor for converts, the provision of education was essential. For Latins, the Sisters of the Rosary, Rahbât al-Wardiyya founded by Sultane Rattas (1843-1927), were very effective in setting up a school in 1902. This school for both boys and girls is still functioning today and remains highly respected.8 The government banned Muslim boys from Christian schools in al-Husn when a state school was opened in Irbid, but the people of al-Husn, Muslim and Christian alike, resisted state schools because they were associated with military service.9
8In his interview with the Dutch journal De Tijd in 1942, Smets recounted how, after the Latin church in al-Husn was completed, he had asked his young Dutch friend and artist Piet Gerrits to decorate the interior. They had met when Smets served as guide and interpreter for Dutch pilgrims to the Holy Land in 1905; this was Gerrits’s first voyage to the Middle East. Gerrits agreed and on May 23, 1906, started his second journey over Vienna, Constantinople and Beirut to arrive in al-Husn, Hauran, Transjordan, three weeks later. He was originally planning to stay for a year but extended it – with only a few months break in 1909 when he went on holiday to Rome and to the Netherlands to visit his family – until 1911. In his first report of his visit in 1906, Gerrits writes that Smets was assisted by a Syrian chaplain and three sisters who lived in a little house across from the church.10
Piet Gerrits: why a Dutch artist came to the Middle East
9Petrus Henricus (Piet) Gerrits was born in Nijmegen on November 13, 1878 as the son of a carpenter and former zouave for Pope Leo XIII. His father taught him carpentry and brought him up with a strong religious passion.11 Young Piet loved to draw from childhood. In 1895 he started studying architectural drawing in Amsterdam with Pierre Cuypers, a famous Dutch architect of Catholic churches and the Rijksmuseum. There, Gerrits also met Jan Stuyt (1868-1934), the architect who, like himself, would participate in the first pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1905. On this pilgrimage to the Middle East, Stuyt visited the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and was so impressed by its dome that he used its structure in several churches he built in the Netherlands, including the Cenacle Church in 1913 in the Holy Land Foundation and that Gerrits would elaborately decorate.
10In September 1896, Gerrits moved to Antwerp to continue his art studies at the Royal Academy of Beaux Arts, where he was an average student. Back in Nijmegen he set up a workshop as “décorateur,” a specialist in religious art. Note that he does not register himself as an artist but as a craftsman. He was not only able to paint murals, but could also design and make the complete inventory of a church building, from the ciborium to the ceiling. He illustrated praying leaflets, books, and journals, designed mosaics, stained-glass windows, stage decors and era-appropriate garb for passion plays, Nativity scenes, and house art. For him, art was not a goal in itself but a means to convey the Gospel; he never made anything without a religious message. In May 26, 1913 he married Francisca Weijers (1880-1942).12 They had eight children. After Francisca died in 1942 he married her sister Gerardina (1884-1968).13 He is buried with both his wives in the graveyard of the Holy Land Foundation where he himself had designed and built many sandstone graves.
11The purpose for his second journey to the Middle East was first to provide artistic work for the mission. He painted murals in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in al-Husn (1906-7, now being restored), Salt (mostly painted over), Rumaymin (1907, paintings destroyed when the church was torn down in the beginning of the twenty-first century), Beit Jala (1907), Beit Sahour (1908), Ain Karim/Jerusalem (1908) in the chapel of the White Fathers (seriously damaged by Egyptian soldiers in 1948), the chapel of the French hospital in Jaffa,14 and other places. In the beginning he was inspired by Dutch visualizations of the Catholic teachings, painting the saying of mass as it was performed in Europe. In depicting holy images he was also heavily influenced through his artistic training and contacts by the strict, symmetric and stylized ways of the German Beuronic School. But probably inspired by the more naturalistic drawings he supplied for children’s magazines and books in the Netherlands and at the insistence of Smets that his work should be accessible for local parishioners, he started to include his observations of local culture. Local parishioners in regional dress stood model for his murals. According to the modern Catholics in al-Husn, he painted the Nimri, the first family to convert to Roman Catholicism and still an important and influential family in town, in the row of believers coming to Jesus. They are depicted next to a Dutch family. His work was highly appreciated and he was rewarded by Mgr. Filippo Camassei in April 1908 with the honorary title of “Knight of the Holy Sepulchre”15 and given the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice before his return home.
12Gerrits’s second, and not lesser purpose was to gather information, ideas and objects to reconstruct the Holy Places in the Netherlands and teach the Dutch about the Holy Land. For this purpose, he studied the people, material culture and customs. Using Smets’s house in al-Husn as a base, Gerrits, who called it El Hosson in East-Palestine or Syria, sketched people and objects, took notes, bought objects and travelled between 1906 and 1911 in northern Jordan and Palestine. He regularly sent sketches and notes of his observations home to be published in Annalen der Heilig-Land-Stichting and ‘t Heilig Land, a bi-weekly journal, to inform believers on the Holy Land and to raise money for the Holy Land Foundation, as well as in the children’s journal The Engelbewaarder and other publications for adults and children. From the very first day he took on local dress, became an apt horse rider and quickly learned to speak and write Arabic.
13In this second purpose, Gerrits was much supported by the White Father Nicolaas Van der Vliet (1876-1966) who was based in Jerusalem from 1901-1950. Van der Vliet not only enabled Gerrits to paint murals in the chapel of the White Fathers in Ain Karim and the Seminary of St. Anne in Jerusalem, but became also very much involved in collecting materials for the new museum.
14After his return to the Netherlands, Gerrits took on a range of projects, such as providing illustrations for journals or decorating churches, though he was mostly doing all kind of jobs for the Holy Land Foundation near Nijmegen. In 1922 and 1927 he once again made short trips to the Middle East. After being wounded due to an accident in which he lost one eye and his left arm in World War II, he continued his work at a slower pace until his death on January 15, 1957.16
The Holy Land Foundation’s founders, aims and development
15The Holy Land Foundation, initiated in 1907 and officially established in 1920, was to offer Dutch labourers a devotional focus away from communism and a cheap alternative for the pilgrimage to the Holy Land.17 It was part of the emancipation movement of the Catholics, predominantly living in the southern part of the Netherlands versus the Protestants in the north. The rich widow Jeanne M.L.H. Vroomans-Leclerq (1856-1927) and chaplain Arnold Suys (1870-1941) from Waalwijk first made plans together in 1907 to buy the Bakkersberg, a barren unproductive hill near Nijmegen,18 to establish The New Holy Land with a Holy Heart Basilica for 17,000 pilgrims and a pilgrimage park that partly was to subsidize the building of the Basilica. Both initiators had been inspired to do so after they visited the grave of Margaretha-Maria Alacoque and the basilica of the Holy Heart in Paray-le-Monial in France. Vroomans said she had a vision there in 1898 in which Jesus had admonished her to start a devotion to the Holy Heart in the Netherlands. And during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1906 she felt commanded from above to "honour God on the holy mountains" which inspired her to rebuild the sacred places of the Holy Land on the hills near Nijmegen. This endeavor was blessed by Pope Pius X during a private audience in Rome and could partly be financed by the inheritance from her husband who had willed that 10,000 guilders were destined for the building of a church. Suys, too, had plans for a pilgrimage park and like Vroomans advocated the devotion to the Holy Heart of Jesus. Their grand plans were not supported by the bishop who did not want to finance such an endeavor. Soon the cooperation between Vroomans and Suys shattered. Vroomans continued alone for a while, building a small church on the acquired property in which she exposed the relics she had obtained during her pilgrimage to Palestine and Rome and ordering designs for the basilica from the architects J.Th.J. Cuypers and A.E.A. Cousin. The first pilgrims started to come. But Vroomans overplayed her hand and after she lost a court case to reclaim some of her investments from Suys, she had to withdraw. Suys continued alone to realize their dreams.19
16The originally planned Holy Heart Basilica proved far too expensive to complete. Only its entrance court was finished and now functions as main exposition hall for the museum. But the Cenacle Church, intended as pilgrim and parish church, under the architecture of Jan Stuyt, started to be built from 1913 onward.20 At the request of the main funder, the securities dealer Jan Grewen, the church was dedicated to St. Antonius of Padua, but it is better known as the Cenacle Church, referring to the Hall of the Last Supper, represented in the mosaic above the front door. Gerrits was hired to design this mosaic as well as the colorful decoration of the interior between 1921 and 1932.21
17Behind the church a burial park was laid out, with Golgotha, Jesus’ tomb and the Ascension chapel. Many statues and tombs were made by Gerrits. These monuments and its hilly, wooded and peaceful character make it an attractive and restful place.22
18In the parish house next to the church came the first museum room with showcases filled with Palestinian dresses, earthen ware, coffee pots and other items brought from the Middle East. Over the years and due to Gerrits’s work it was expanded to a large museum park with replicas of places where Jesus walked, such as Nazareth village with a carpenter’s workshop, the palace of Pilatus, the Lake of Tiberias with a fishing village, and a street in Jerusalem. Other scenes were also included from the Middle East, like a small desert with a Bedouin tent, a caravanserai and a toll house. The original devotion park included a Way of the Cross with the same dimensions and layout as the Way of the Cross in Jerusalem. The museum park is locally called the Holy Land Museum and still active under the name Orientalis.23 Gerrits became the artistic advisor and curator, and built himself a house in Jordanian style, with an arched gate, flat rooftop and screened windows, next to the museum. Up to this day it draws over 100,000 visitors a year. Part of the donated lands for the park were later sold to build houses and this township is also called Holy Land Foundation.
19Throughout its history, there were differences of opinion about the main aim and method of the pilgrimage park. On the one hand, were those who focused on the increase of popular devotion in particular for the Holy Heart of Jesus, by offering masses, perpetual worship, and following the Way of the Cross, as was the original aim of its main founder Arnold Suys, backed by some church officials On the other hand, were those who focussed on bringing people emotionally near to the life of Jesus by letting people follow his footsteps, visualizing his environment and narrating his life, as was the aim of the guides of the museum. The Montfortans (Societas Mariae Montfortana) had been welcomed to serve as guides for the open air museum and led by Jean Eyckeler, they did so with passion but with their own interest in practicing Bible exegesis by visualizing and narrating the life of Jesus.24 Over time, the devotional constructions on the site either never materialized (the basilica) or disappeared (the open-air Holy Heart chapel), and other elements slowly deteriorated or disappeared from the itinerary, such as the Way of the Cross that is now defunct. The narrative elements, however, through which Gerrits and the Montfortans sought to emotionally involve the visitors, remained and were being restored.
20Recently, the historical conflict between devotional and narrative religious functions, represented by different parties involved, took a new turn when the bishop, intending to defend Catholic devotion, reacted against the plans to give more information on Islam. The synagogue in the Jewish village of Nazareth was accepted as part of the context of Jesus’s early life. But the decision to turn the fishing village into an Arab Muslim village and add a mosque, tableaux on Islam and a sûq, with funds received from the government of Oman, led to serious conflicts with the bishop. Nevertheless, these activities to broaden the attention to other religions expanded, and nowadays expositions are organised not only on Nativity scenes around Christmas, but also Buddhist temples, humor in religion or events for Middle Eastern refugees.
Devotion and narrative as styles in Gerrits’s work
21The ambivalence in aims is also visible in the use of two different styles in Gerrits’s work. A quick look at his artistic background sheds light on his mix of quite different artistic styles as well as the impact his work was to have.
22In the early twentieth century a discussion was going on about the innovations in church architecture and art. In 1901, some young artists who made religious art – statues of Mary, Jesus and saints, ways of the cross, stained glass windows, furniture, procession flags, wall paintings, praying cards, and such – set up the Catholic Art Circle De Violier to jointly search for a renewal in church art, away from the neo-gothic dominance at that time. The production of church art was commanded by priests following papal rules laid down in the Codex Iuris Canonici according to which religious art needed to be elevating, worthy and narrating. Piet Gerrits joined in 1902. Jan Stuyt, the architect, was also a member of De Violier and through him and Jan Verkade – the later monk Dom Willibrord and Gerrits’s fellow artist in Palestine –25 Gerrits became familiar with the School of Beuron set up in 1894 by Peter Lenz – later Dom Desiderius. The Beuroner style was based on geometric principles, lines drawn with compass and ruler, stylized, symmetric and two-dimensional. Simple forms like circles, squares and triangles were used.26 All these elements return in Gerrits’s work.
23Depending on the purpose of the image and the time period, this formal style alternated with another one, a narrative and accurate depiction of humans and objects. Whereas the Beuroner style was more often used for depiction of the supernatural – Christ, the Virgin, angels or God –, the naturalistic or narrative style was applied in particular in the open-air museum and in narrative paintings in the church. In Jordan as well as in the Netherlands both styles were used and at times mixed. For the museum the narrative style dominated. Over time, however, Gerrits seems to have lost touch with the sketches of everyday life made in the Middle East and in his work for several churches in the Netherlands more standardized pictures with some Beuroner elements took over.
Circulating knowledge
24What did Gerrits learn during his years in the Middle East? And how did the knowledge he acquired in the mission affect his work and the way he depicted religious ideas and stories? After a close analysis of his visualizations of the East in paintings, drawings and architecture, in the buildings and layout of the Holy Land Foundation, I could distinguish three types of experience-based knowledge that Gerrits transported from the Middle East to the Netherlands: embodied knowledge, material heritage and religious coexistence.
Embodied knowledge
25Spending several years in Jordan and Palestine and trying to integrate as much as possible in the culture had a bodily impact on Gerrits and led to an acute awareness of the differences in bodily comportment. Not only in humans but also in animals. He used to dress like an Arab, sit cross-legged and use a horse for transport like his hosts. Several photographs testify to his urge to go native.27 He became so used to the local diet and entertainment that he copied this at home upon his return. His children remember that he got them olives and rye bread for breakfast, that he slept outside on the flat roof in good weather, and received visitors and smoked water pipe with them in the Eastern room that he had fitted out with benches along the wall. When important visitors or journalists came, he dressed his children and even his horse up in Middle Eastern dress.28
26He not only brought this bodily knowledge to his family, but also applied it in his artwork. When Fr. Nicolaas Van der Vliet commented on Gerrits’s mural art in the chapel of the White Fathers in Ain Karim, he was exuberant about the movement and natural in the camels and their riders, so unlike other depictions of camels he knew. Other artists, in his view, lacked the actual long-term lived experiences among the people. And, according to Van der Vliet, a visiting sheikh was equally struck by the accuracy of the mural as any other foreigner would not have noticed how they tied the ears of little donkeys together.29
27Elsewhere I have shown how Gerrits used the experience of seeing a woman mourn her murdered son to provide an alternative interpretation of the Pietà in the church in al-Husn – not in the uncomfortable and rather unnatural posture that has become famous with Michelangelo’s Pietà in Rome where a sitting mother holds the dead body of her son on her lap, but as the mourning mother who kneels next to her dead son lying on the ground.30 We see similar alternatives to the centuries-old standard religious depictions in the biblical museum.
28Gerrits’s depiction of mother and child in the Nativity Cave in the museum shows his close observance of Middle Eastern village women with their infants. Mary is not kneeling devotedly, hands folded in praying gesture before the child in the crib, as in standard representations of Nativity scenes, rather, she is sitting cross-legged on the floor, the child resting in her lap and swaddled with the arms close to its body as is still customary in Jordanian villages.
Fig. 1 – P. Gerrits, Cave of birth, 1906 (photo: W. Jansen from original drawing in Archives Museum Orientalis).

Material heritage
29Gerrits not only closely observed and reproduced bodily behaviour and movement, but also material objects. In a mural on the Annunciation Chapel he gave a Middle Eastern version of the Annunciation, in which Mary is seated on the ground, surrounded by common items in a Jordanian peasant household: a grain bin, a lamp, a woven flat bread tray, and a storage trunk. The mural was destroyed when the chapel was taken down, but printed versions of the drawing were hand-colored and framed to decorate many house interiors, including mine, and sold as postcards in the museum (cf. Fig. 2). The interior depicted here is the same as that of a peasant house reconstructed in the Museum of Jordanian Heritage at the Institute of Anthropology and Archaeology of Yarmouk University in Irbid.31
Fig. 2 – P. Gerrits, Annunciation, 1919 (photo: W. Jansen from original in possession of the author).

30At his instigation, and with the help of Fr. Nicolaas Van der Vliet who helped him to buy and ship a wide range of objects to the Holy Land Foundation, many items representative of the Middle Eastern cultural heritage found their way to the Netherlands. And if they could not be shipped, Gerrits made copies of them. A good example is the replica of a caravanserai in the museum. He published many of his sketches of local objects. While he was still in Transjordan, Dutch children learned from his drawings in De Engelbewaarder, and supporters and donors of the Holy Land Foundation from his contributions to Annalen der Heilig-Land-Stichting and ‘t Heilig Land, about manifold details of life in the Holy Land: bread baskets, wooden locks, coffee pounders, grain bins, pointed slippers, Bedouin tents, a laden camel, an old woman smoking a pipe, or a herdsman playing flute. Often these were accompanied with written explanations, such as how the grain was ground on a stone hand mill, how the common lands were divided among the farmers, or how wool was spun. In this sense, Gerrits worked as a proto-ethnographer of northern Jordan.32 Later on he used all these detailed sketches for his murals for Dutch churches and in the museum. He was certainly anachronistic in presenting them as part of the world Jesus had lived in, but they do give a much better sense of Middle Eastern life than many other religious depictions. As Gerrits based his visualizations of the Middle East as closely as possible on his bodily experience and the people and material he encountered, he also included in this transported knowledge their religious coexistence.
Religious coexistence
31At the time Gerrits arrived, al-Husn was a multi-religious community, half Muslim and half Christian. The balance in numbers between Muslims and Christians, and their mutual dependency and joint concern in resisting the raids of the Ottoman government for conscripts, made that the separate groups lived rather peacefully together. The Christians were internally divided into several denominations and although frequently in competition with each other for souls, they united as a minority in this predominantly Muslim region. This religious coexistence, or what Driessen calls convivencia, “the ideology and practice of living together (often apart) peacefully of several ethnicities, faiths and ways of life” that marks life in many Mediterranean communities,33 influenced the work of Gerrits. His immersion in Christian Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish culture left an imprint on his work, as we see elements of various faiths return in his artwork in Jordan and the Netherlands. Without giving it much attention and presenting and justifying it as how life in the Middle East looked like, it made him step out of the standard Catholic paradigms of representations of the sacred.
32From the Greek Orthodox he took the two-dimensional iconic representations of Jesus and Mary. He also gave a larger and different role to Mary as was customary in the 1900’s. The mosaic in the loggia above the entrance of the Cenacle Church, his first work for the church, depicts the Last Supper. Apart from the adaptations of the material culture visible in the oil lamps and the fact that the apostles are not sitting on chairs but lying on cushions, there is an additional element few people notice. Above Jesus thrones a Mary in Orante position. The Orante is an early Christian praying position with open hand-palms held upwards, still visible in the Roman catacombs representing the soul of the deceased and prominent in Greek Orthodox iconography. This praying position is still used by Latin priests, representing the praying church. But for Mary, Catholics have replaced it in later ages by a far less powerful posture of humility and submission. The nineteenth century was an era of negotiation of new images of Mary, with a strong tendency to reduce the strong imperial Mother of God into a devout, submissive and pure little Virgin, who could be implored to mediate with her son but certainly should not be given power in her own right. And putting her in a dominating position above Christ and his apostles is certainly not common.34 But Gerrits, likely inspired by the many Greek Orthodox icons he had seen on his trip, reinstalled the overarching Maria Orante.
33He also ignored another contemporary Catholic convention in the way he depicted the Deathbed of Mary with apostles and crying women. Rather than choosing for the then customary Assumption of Mary into Heaven, he returned to an Eastern Christian representation of the Dormitio Mariae for the large golden mosaic in a side chapel of the Cenacle Church. The Dormitio Mariae, representing by the name of sleep instead of death the belief that Mary is taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, is celebrated as a large feast in the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches on August 15. The Latins took longer to take on this belief. During the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) a large number of bishops requested the dogmatic definition of the bodily ascension to heaven of Mary but only in 1950 did Pope Pius XII announce the dogma fidei of Mary’s Ascension and reconfirmed it in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus. In the meantime, church art had already adapted to this dogma in process, and preferred images in which St. Mary rose to heaven above those in which she was lying on her deathbed. The latter was mainly found in Greek Orthodox art.
34From the Muslims, Piet Gerrits learned the aesthetic and spiritual value of using text as decoration. Given the ban on human figures in Islam, mosques have traditionally been decorated with verses of the Qur’an. Christian churches in the Middle East often followed this practice. In the Latin church in al-Husn, most images are illustrations of the Biblical verse above or below it. I do not expect Gerrits to have had great calligraphic skills in Arabic, so these texts probably were provided by someone else. This textual element, however, was reproduced in the Cenacle Church in the Netherlands with sentences from the Scriptures.
35I had not been aware of what he took from the Jews until one Catholic man in al-Husn asked me after a lecture I gave in the church about the artist: “Was he a Jew?”. I denied this and asked what gave him that impression. The man pointed out that he painted the Jewish star everywhere. And indeed, the Jewish star appears in many of his drawings and murals. In the design for churches in Jordan and Palestine, especially those made in Beuroner style, we see the star on the shield of the archangel and representing divine glad tidings for Mary (cf. Fig. 3), but also in the Netherlands the star seems to be everywhere. For instance, a star marks the apex of the inside dome of a side chapel and it reappears in the gate of a gravesite constructed by Gerrits. The ideology of convivencia is most visible in the memorial chapel for Nazi victim doctor Daniël Van Vugt in the graveyard of the Holy Land Foundation, commemorating Van Vugt’s resistance work in World War II. Gerrits designed this Catholic chapel as a domed shrine for an Islamic saint with a Jewish star engraved in the floor.
Fig. 3 – P. Gerrits, El-Hosson, 1906. Design in Beuroner style (photo W. Jansen, original drawing in KDC archive).

36The menorah, too, a seven-armed candleholder and one of the oldest symbols of Judaism that functions in many Jewish rituals, frequently figures in his art. There are two menorahs in front of the Last Supper table in the mural in al-Husn, and another on the Last Supper mosaic above the Cenacle Church in the Holy Land Foundation.
37These examples show that Gerrits borrowed freely from the different religions coexisting in the Middle East and that his mission to show life in the Orient as it really was gave him ample excuse to neglect Catholic conventions in the Netherlands and add elements of not only other branches of Christianity but also Judaism and Islam.
38The analysis of the three types of experience-based knowledge that Gerrits brought home and expanded with his work in the Netherlands show that, especially when using a narrative style, he managed to convey the bodily and material culture of the Middle East. But elements of experienced multi-religious coexistence also show up in his more stylized work. Up to the point where people consider it as belonging to that style rather than to Gerrits’s experience in the Middle East, such as the use of the Jewish star and menorah, or the employment of (Arabic) texts.
Vanishing effects
39Gerrits’s clash with Catholic iconographic norms was not the result of an active political stand nor an explicit aim to change church art in this direction. Although Gerrits in his youth (between 1905 and 1907) had been a member of De Violier, the group of artists who wanted to renew church art, this affected mostly his newly found Beuroner style and less his reproductions of Middle Eastern life. After his work in the interior of the Cenacle Church, its graveyard and the museum, he decorated many Dutch churches and produced mainstream work that was increasingly losing its Middle Eastern touch.
40His insistence on showing the real, living cultures of the East, had few lasting effects. His alternative representations of the Pietà or Mother Mary in the grotto has not had any followers, its body language not understood or even recognized. Over the years, also Gerrits himself seems to have forgotten the bodily postures so meticulously observed and applied in his work after he had just returned. For instance, in the ply-wood board Nativity scenes he later made for convents such as the Good Shepherd in Zoeterwoude,35 Mary is no longer seated cross-legged on the floor but on a bench, and the child’s arms are flying wildly rather than being properly restrained by swaddling strips. Also, the material items are no longer reproduced with precision in his later craftwork. In the later Nativity scenes, Mary’s dress lacks the region-specific embroidered front, her scarf is no longer folded around her head in the Middle Eastern way, and her slippers no longer stand outside the matted area. The dominant imagery set in Europe in the Middle Ages is too strong to counter. Gerrits’s ease in expressing convivencia equally has found few followers, although present-day museum demands still allow for multi-religious reality, but as in real life only in separate villages on the compound or during separate events.
41Earlier on I mentioned the divergence of interests among those involved in the Holy Land Foundation roughly between those in favor of inspiring devotion and spirituality in pilgrims, and those in favor of informing visitors of life in the Holy Land. This ambivalence was also felt by Gerrits in his efforts to combine two styles. As an artist with fiery religious zeal he was spiritually drawn to the stylized and heavily symbolic Beuroner style, but when he applied it for instance in 1906 in drawings for the children’s magazine De Engelbewaarder, it was denounced as unsuitable for children.36 Smets also pushed him to use a narrative style for the church in al-Husn that was deemed more suitable for common people, including children. Over time, it was this narrative style that was appreciated the most. It made that the Cenacle Church, due to its lavish and unusual decorations, was considered so exceptional that it could become accepted as national monument, win funds for elaborate restauration in 2010, and get elected in 2017 as one of the thirteen most beautiful churches in the Netherlands.37
Return to Jordan
42During my first fieldwork in Jordan, people in al-Husn told me that the murals in the Catholic church were painted by an Italian artist, which I accepted as a fact. However, while conducting research on Smets in the Catholic Documentation Centre of Radboud University, I discovered that the artist had not been Italian but Dutch and had actually lived a few hundred meters up the road from where I lived in the Holy Land Foundation. Now it was my turn to become a knowledge transmitter and relay information from the Netherlands back to Jordan. To show the Dutch connection, I wrote a booklet for the parish priest, the Sisters of the Rosary and some other respondents and gave it to them on a return visit to al-Husn in 1991.38 It sank into oblivion until several years later one of the recipients mentioned it to the new Dutch ambassador Gajus Scheltema, who contacted the new parish priest of al-Husn, Fr. Imad Twal, who in turn contacted me for a copy, setting into motion a whole project for restauration of the murals in Jordan. After a report was written on the feasibility of restauration, the Dutch ambassador in Jordan decided to fund it. 39 Fr. Twal and later his uncle Fouad Boutros Twal, from 2008-2016 patriarch of Jerusalem, came to the Netherlands to visit the Holy Land Foundation and to see the drawings of Gerrits in the museum.40 Fr. Twal built a website for his congregation, where he posted Gerrits’s drawings. He invited me to give a talk about Gerrits in the church when I revisited Jordan in 2006 and had a calendar and postcards made of the work of Gerrits in 2007.
43The beautiful mosaic in the apsis of the Cenacle Church must have inspired the Jordanian visitors to restore the apsis in the Jordanian church to its former glory. The most recent request in 2016 and 2017 from Fr. Firas Nasrawin of the parish church in al-Husn was to provide the original design of the apsis decoration in al-Husn, which had been whitened over in 1970s. Despite the joint efforts of the Piet Gerrits Board, the museum’s present curator and the historians of the HLF archives and the Catholic Documentation Centre, the original drawings unfortunately were not found. But based on older pictures taken at weddings, a reconstruction was made and a mosaic was installed.
Discussion and conclusion
44Much has been written recently on the destruction and revitalization of religious heritage as part of political, economic and social developments. In the Netherlands, the decline in practicing believers and church attendance, in particular for the traditional Christian churches and the autochthonous population in the Netherlands, has led to the destruction or alternative use of many Dutch churches, including several that Gerrits decorated. It is a form of silent iconoclasm that is not done for political symbolic reasons but because no one cares enough anymore. The Cenacle Church lost its own parish priest after the beloved Fr. Toon Rabou died in 2016, but the building remains strong since it was declared a national monument, received funds for restauration in 2010, and saw its visitors increase substantially after it was proclaimed as one of the most beautiful churches in the Netherlands in 2017. Orientalis, the open-air museum, is struggling hard to stay alive and has turned to multi-religious projects and events to adapt to a multi-religious society. The only profit-making part of the Holy Land Foundation complex presently is the graveyard. But despite these signs of decline, the complex has given thousands of Dutch and foreign visitors a view of Gerrits’s representations of the Middle East.
45In Jordan, the revival of interest for Gerrits came after a similar period of destruction. A destruction for a variety of reasons: neglect, changed artistic tastes, natural disasters, and war. A destruction of religious heritage that, just like in the Netherlands, went far less noticed than the explicit symbolic destruction of the Taliban or IS. Presently, the Christian population in Jordan and Palestine is more than ever under pressure. The Catholic Church has tried to support this minority, for instance by proclaiming sainthood for several Arab women and men or stressing the Arab identity of the Catholics.41 The Jordanian Catholic community tries to salvage whatever little is left. The restauration of Gerrits’s work has not been done for its great artistic value but far more as an identity strengthening project for this suffering minority while simultaneously retying relations with Europe.
Bibliographie
Archives
ARCCIC = Archives Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception (parish registers 1890-1930, period photographs collected by Fr. Twal, drawings by Gerrits).
KDC = Archives Catholic Documentation Centre (KDC), Radboud University Nijmegen. Collection Gerrrits. This collection is now divided over the Valkhof Museum (artwork) and Nijmegen Regional Archives (publications and other items).
AMO = Archives Museum Orientalis (AMO).
Private Archives Jan Smets.
Primary sources
Annalen der Heilig-Land-Stichting. Nijmegen, vol. 1-5, 1913-14.
De Engelbewaarder, 1906-1908.
Dijkman – Crèvecoeur 2007 = P. Dijkman, R. Crèvecoeur, De restauratie van de schilderingen van de hand van Piet Gerrits in de ‘Latin Church’ van Al Houson. Plan en begroting, Amman, 2007 (Concept report to the Netherlands Embassy in Amman).
Eyckeler 1933-1934 = J. Eyckeler, Palestina in beeld. Nieuw hulpmiddel bij ‘t onderwijs der bijbelsche geschiedenis voor de hoogere klassen der lagere School en het Middelbaar Onderwijs, serie I-X, Nijmegen, in ‘t Heilig Land 1933-1934, with illustrations by Piet Gerrits.
Gerrits 1906 = P. Gerrits, Mijn reis naar het Oosten, in De Engelbewaarder, 22 (16), 1906, p. 249-265.
Gerrits 1907 = P. Gerrits, Uit Palestina, in De Engelbewaarder, 22, 1907, p. 472-477.
Pfund 2005 = H. Pfund, Wall Paintings in Al-Houson. Decorated by the Dutch painter Piet Gerrits. First campaign to preserve the wall paintings. Investigation and action plan, Amman, 2005.
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Alofs 2000 = G. Alofs, Jean Eyckeler en de Heilig-Land-Stichting. Onbegrepen gedrevenheid en nieuwe idée, Amersfoort, 2000.
Barendsen et al. 2000 = J. Barendsen et al., Van Heilig Woud tot Heilig Land. De geschiedenis van Heilig Landstichting en omgeving, Utrecht, 2000.
Beke et al. 2010 = J. Beke et al. (ed.), De Cenakelkerk 1911-2011. De kerk van de Heilig Land Stichting, Nijmegen, 2010.
Driessen 2015 = H. Driessen, ‘Convivencia’ between Mediterranean parochialism and universalism, in M. Derks et al. (ed.), What’s left behind. The lieux de mémoire of Europe beyond Europe, Nijmegen, 2015, p. 94-98.
Ewals 2020 = L. Ewals, Schilderingen van Piet Gerrits in de kapel van Aïn Karem, 2020, https://pietgerrits.nl/ainkarem2020, accessed 22-2-2021.
Goichon 1972 = A.-M. Goichon, Jordanie réelle., Paris, vol. 1, 1967, vol. 2, 1972.
Jansen 1991a = W. Jansen, Piet Gerrits. Dutch painter and proto-ethnographer in northern Jordan, in Newsletter of the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Irbid, 11, 1991, p. 4-6.
Jansen 1991b = W. Jansen, Grensoverschrijdingen voor godsdienst en kunst. Een Nederlandse pelgrim in het Midden Oosten, in W. Jansen, H. de Jonge (ed.), Islamitische pelgrimstochten, Muiderberg, 1991, p. 127-138.
Jansen 1992 = W. Jansen, Christelijk onderwijs in een islamitische gemeenschap. De gevolgen voor Jordaanse meisjes sinds 1900, in K. den Dekker et al. (ed.), Een tien voor vlijt. Meisjesonderwijs vanaf de oudheid tot de MMS., Zutphen, 1992, p. 87-101.
Jansen 2000 = W. Jansen, Fragmentation of the Christian minority in Jordan. Conversion, marriage and gender, in A. Borsboom, J. Kommers (ed.), Anthropologists and the missionary endeavour: experiences and reflections, Sarrebruck, 2000, p. 81-104.
Jansen 2001 = W. Jansen, A Dutch artist in Jordan. Souvenirs of Jordan in the Netherlands, Nijmegen, 2001.
Jansen 2004 = W. Jansen, Conversion, marriage, and gender: Jordanians and the Christian mission, in Swedish Missiological Themes, 92-1, 2004, p. 99-122.
Jansen 2006 = W. Jansen, Arab women with a mission. The Sisters of the Rosary, in M. Tamcke, M. Marten (ed.), Christian witness between continuity and new beginnings: modern historical missions in the Middle East, Berlin, 2006, p. 41-61.
Jansen 2009 = W. Jansen, Marian images and religious identities in the Middle East, in A.K. Hermkens, W. Jansen, C. Notermans (ed.), Moved by Mary. The power of pilgrimage in the Modern World, Farnham-Burlington, 2009, p. 33-48.
Jansen – Notermans 2010 = W. Jansen, C. Notermans, From vision to cult site. A comparative perspective, in Archives de Sciences sociales des religions, 55 (151), 2010, p. 71-90, http://assr.revues.org/22334?lang=fr.
Médebielle 1963 = P. Médebielle, Le diocèse patriarcal latin de Jérusalem, Jerusalem, 1963.
Stolz 1968 = B. Stolz O.S.B., A handmaid of the Holy Rosary. Mother Mary Alphonsus of the Rosary, Jerusalem, 1968.
Van der Leest 2008 = C. Van der Leest, Conversion and conflict in Palestine. The missions of the Church Missionary Society and the Protestant Bishop Samuel Gobat, Leiden, 2008, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/12957/Thesis.pdf, accessed 13/10/2017..
Van Raay 1989 = E. van Raay, Piet Gerrits 1878-1957, M.A. thesis, Nijmegen, 1989.
Rogan 1999 = E. Rogan, Frontiers of the state in the late Ottoman Empire, Cambridge, 1999.
Twal 2016 = Fr. I. Twal, Chrétien arabe en Terre Sainte. Réflexion personnelle. Jerusalem, 2016.
Verkade 1935 = W. Verkade, In blijde gebondenheid. Herinneringen van een schilder-monnik, Hertogenbosch, 1935.
Van der Vliet 1910-1911 = N. Van der Vliet, Piet Gerrits in het Heilig Land, in Sint-Lucas. Tijdschrift gewijd aan de kunst en het ambacht, 8, 1910-1911, p. 244-251.
Willemsen 2014 = J. Willemsen, Het Heilige Land van Piet Gerrits. Kerkelijk kunstenaar in Palestina en Nederland, Nijmegen, 2014.
de Witte 1984 = I. de Witte, De Heilig Land Stichting. De periode van Arnold Suys, 2 vol., M.A. thesis, Nijmegen, 1984.
Notes de bas de page
1 In Jordan, archives of the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in al-Husn, including period photographs and drawings and paintings by Gerrits, were kindly made available to me by the successive parish priests Nasir, Na’oum and Twal. In the Netherlands, clippings, contemporary publications, drawings by Gerrits etc. were studied at the Catholic Documentation Centre (KDC), Nijmegen (much of the artwork was recently handed over to the Valkhof Museum and the publications and other materials have moved to Regionaal Archief Nijmegen) and the archive of Museum Orientalis (AMO). Father Smets’s personal letters were provided by his nephew Jan Smets, Eindhoven, from his private archive.
2 Special thanks to Jan van Laarhoven who, in 1990, took me to see Gerrits’s drawings then deposited at the Museum Commanderie van Sint Jan; Jan Willemsen, the historian and archivist of Orientalis, for his help in searching the archives and his detailed biography of Piet Gerrits that allowed me to fill in a lot of details, Tim Graas and Vefi Poels of the Catholic Documentation Centre for allowing and helping me to search their collection and that of Museum het Valkhof, the members of the Piet Gerrits Foundation and Gerrits’s heirs: Marisca Gerrits, Leo Ewals, Peter Vermeulen, Pepijn Gerrits, Natasja Werner and Rudolf Gerrits; the people from Orientalis: Linda Scholte Lubberink and Resi Wijnen, and the group involved in the restauration process of Gerrits’s work in al-Husn and later Imad Twal’s visit to the Netherlands: Gajus Scheltema, Peter Dijkman, and Rob Crèvecoeur. Many thanks also to the people of al-Husn, in particular Fr. Imad Twal and the Abandah family, and the discussant and participants in the conference “In partibus fidelium. Missions in the Levant and understanding the Christian East”, held in Rome on November 27-29, 2017.
3 The Patriarchate mission started in Beit Jala (1853), followed by Jifneh (1855/56), Lyddah (1856), Ramalah (1856/57), Bir Zeit (1859), Taybeh (1859/60), Beit Sahour ((1859), Nablus (1860), Rafidai (1865), Ain Arak (1882), Zababdeh (1883), Salt (1886), Ermémin (1873), Fuheis (1874), Karak (1875/76), Reneh (1878), Madaba (1880), El Hosson (1885), Ajlun (1897) Anjara (1897), Smakieh (1909) and Abud (1910). Place names in the French transliteration of Médebielle 1963, p. 59-61. See also Van der Leest 2008, p. 248; Willemsen 2014, p. 285.
4 Jansen 2000 and 2004.
5 Het Missiewerk, 1922-23, vol. 4, p. 114 and 129-130. A picture of the new archbishop appeared in De Katholieke Illustratie 15-11-1922.
6 De Tijd, 30-9-1942.
7 Private Archive Jan Smets. Letter from Smets to his brother and sister-in-law of August 5, 1934.
8 Goichon 1972, p.125-150; Jansen 1992 and 2006; Stolz 1968.
9 Rogan 1999, p. 136-145.
10 Gerrits 1906.
11 For a concise overview see: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Gerrits_(kunstenaar) Accessed 14-4-2020, and the website on Piet Gerrits made by the Piet Gerrits Foundation http://pietgerrits.nl/ Accessed 14-4-2020.
12 Francisca Joanna Maria Weijers was born on July 23, 1880 in Tilburg as daughter of a stone manufacturer. She followed her husband to Nijmegen and obliterated herself as a dedicated housewife who enabled her husband to work at all times. Willemsen 2014, p. 112 and p. 222.
13 Willemsen 2014, p. 56.
14 Ewals 2020; Beke et al. 2010, p. 21
15 Despite an elaborate account by N. Van der Vliet of how Gerrits became knight of the Holy Sepulchre in April 1908 (https://pietgerrits.nl/ridderslag Accessed 19-2-2021), no proof of this could be found in the Livre d’Or, the book with the names of all the knights of the Holy Sepulchre, according to Willemsen 2016, p. 90-91. Karène Sanchez Summerer, however, showed me a group portrait titled ‘Piet Gerrits, chevalier du St Sépulcre, 1909’ she found in the photographic collection of the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem (Private correspondence with Sanchez Summerer, April 19, 2020).
16 Jansen 1991 and 1992; Willemsen 2014; de Witte 1984, p. 61; Van Raay 1989.
17 Similar initiatives to promote religious tourism, cheap alternatives for spiritual and physical pilgrimages, and religious-entertainment can be found elsewhere in the world, e.g., the Holy Land Experience (founded in 2001 in Orlando) and Holy Land USA (1955-1984 in Waterbury Connecticut) or the Christian theme park Heritage USA (1978-1989). In several countries one can also find religious museums and passion plays.
18 In Nijmegen, the majority of the population was Catholic, but most positions in power were held by Protestants. In 1923, as part of the same emancipation movement, a Catholic university was founded here. It was also the place of study for Peter Hans Kolvenbach SJ (1928-2016), 29th superior general of the Society of Jesus, who contributed to a far more intellectual knowledge transfer by translating Arabic texts from the Jesuits into French (information provided by B. Heyberger, 29-11-2017).
19 Willemsen 2014, p. 67-71.
20 Beke et al. 2010.
21 www.grootstemuseum.nl/en/all-churches/cenacle-church/ Accessed 14-4-2020.
22 www.heiliglandstichting.com/ Accessed 14-4-2020.
23 www.museumparkorientalis.nl/en/ Accessed 14-4-2020.
24 Alofs 2000, p. 62; Eyckeler 1933-1934.
25 Verkade 1935, p. 248-249. Gerrits worked together with Verkade on religious frescos in Jaffa (1910), Bir Zeit (1910) and Salt (1911).
26 Willemsen 2014, p. 38-41.
27 Willemsen 2014, p. 32 photo section.
28 Willemsen 2014, p. 220-225.
29 For the text in Dutch see https://pietgerrits.nl/ainkarim, Accessed 14-4-2020. Van der Vliet 1910-1911, p. 244-251.
30 Jansen 2009; Gerrits 1907, p. 556-557, where he recounts how he was inspired by the Bedouins.
31 https://archaeology.yu.edu.jo/index.php/it-faculty/success-stories/385-the-museum-of-jordanian-heritage Accessed 14-4-2020.
32 De Engelbewaarder, 1906 and 1907 passim; Annalen der Heilig-Land-Stichting, 1914, passim; ‘t Heilig Land 1916, passim; Jansen 1991a and 1991b.
33 Driessen 2015, p. 94.
34 Jansen 2009; Jansen – Notermans 2010.
35 Property of Marisca Gerrits and exhibited in the Christmas exhibition of Orientalis, December 2017.
36 Willemsen 2014, p. 59.
37 www.grootstemuseum.nl/en/all-churches/cenacle-church/ Accessed 14-4-2020.
38 Jansen 2001.
39 Pfund 2005; Dijkman and Crèvecoeur 2007.
40 He was not the first patriarch to visit the Holy Land Foundation in the Netherlands. Also Mgr. Barlassina, patriarch of Jerusalem, visited the Holy Land Foundation, as can be seen on a photograph taken in front of the house of Piet Gerrits, which includes some of his children in Eastern dress, Barendsen et al. 2000, p. 177.
41 Jansen – Notermans, 2010; Twal 2016.
Auteur
Professor Emerita Radboud University, Nijmegen – w.jansen@maw.ru.nl
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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