Painting a more-realistic Jerusalem

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s newly-acquired Renaissance triptych puts the land in Holy Land.

By the time an artist—whom we call Master of the Krainburg Altar for want of his real name—painted Jerusalem in the background of a c. 1500 painting, Christian artists had depicted the sacred city for centuries. But pilgrims would have found these prior symbolic works useless for navigating the holy city, despite the appearances of the Tower of David, t…