The twin aspects of Jerusalem, the backdrop to the life of Christ and the setting for the end of time, co-existed in western Christian art from the earliest days. For much of the time one image captured both concepts and contained them in a tension that emphasised the decisive position of the city in Christian thought. Jerusalem, in all its possible meanings literal and metaphorical, was deeply embedded in the culture of the Medieval and early Renaissance West. Representations in the visual arts, including sculpture and architecture, drew inspiration from religious texts, meditations, liturgy, performance and pilgrimage; but iconographical and pictorial themes also provided continuous feedback. The interaction, or inter-animation, between different media was mutually reinforcinq. Collectively these different elements formed part of a memory world in which mnemonic coding was explicitly designed to consolidate this inter-action. A person kneeling at prayer before a painting with a meditational text drew information from both. The complexity ofthe relationship between depictions of Jerusalem in the visual arts and other manifestations of the city's importance in the wider religious and social context can be examined through individual paintings, the work of particular artists, and the connections to textual and liturgical sources in particular. In their depictions of Jerusalem, artists gradually complemented the metaphorical with recognisable topographical details. This development can be traced into the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when gradually metaphor began to re-assert itself- proving to be surprisingly resilient, surviving into the modern era in some unexpected ways.