ABSTRACT
Developing new knowledge from the material culture of the Jewish past presents a variety of challenges for the historian. The visual arts do not come with an accompanying guidebook or footnotes to explain the artists' meaning, intent, or desired interpretation. The medium viewed retrospectively inherently risks reading too much or too little into the artwork. The art of a people is a repository of its history and a statement of its aspirations, acting as the cultural glue across time and space. Art can be political and inciting, or it can be created and intended simply for the sake of beauty, not rhetoric. There are many ways to parse or categorize the loci of visual arts. If one makes the analogy to the blueprint of an art museum, there can be "halls" of antiquity, of portraiture, of paintings, of metallurgy, of sculpture, or of textile arts.
