Orientalist artists often preferred inherited fantasy to firsthand observation of the actual Holy Land

Evidence

Once there, he was quite shocked to find the reality to be quite different from what he had been imagining. His was perhaps the same kind of disappointment that had compelled the Tirolean crèche maker Franz Pernlochner the Senior (1847–95) to construct his work without any reference to the Orient, after he had been to Jerusalem to seek models for his art. Čeloud, however, preferred to solve the cognitive dissonance between orientalist fantasy and a visitor’s reality in favor of the fantasy. He went on working as before, making orientalist references to the Doré tradition rather than to what he himself had seen. He grumbled, for example, that there were too many black sheep in Palestine, and decided to stick to making white ones. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 200

Categorization

• SEED: The tale of a crèche maker choosing fantasy reality (grumbling about too many black sheep in Palestine) is a vivid micro-anecdote for an essay on how tradition outweighs direct experience in religious visual culture.
• CANDY: The black-sheep grumble is a perfect dinner-table joke with a genuine point behind it.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Čeloud’s ‘too many black sheep’ complaint connect to era color ideologies in depicting biblical figures?
• XREF: connects to: Mediated images of the Holy Land reinforced Christian supremacy beliefs; Orientalist painters invented imagery of Eastern despotism they never witnessed; Mediated images of the Holy Land confirmed Christian superiority to Americans