Download PDF | Jews and Muslims Made Visible in Christian Iberia and Beyond, 14th to 18th Centuries: Another Image. Borja Franco Llopis and Antonio Urquízar-Herrera, eds. The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 67. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
406 Pages
Introduction
Borja Franco Llopis and Antonio Urquizar-Herrera*
De rebus Hispaniae, the history of Spain written by Archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (ca. 1240), announced the imminent Islamic conquest of the Peninsula through a number of stories about Roderic, the last king of the Goths, who suffered defeat at the hands of the Muslims. These stories were part of a providentialist tradition, according to which the sins committed by Don Roderic operated as a symbolic incarnation of the fall from grace that embodied the “loss” and “destruction” of Spain.! One of these well-known stories describes a mysterious palace in Toledo that had been locked since time immemorial.
Although no previous king had dared to open it, Don Roderic, against everybody’s advice, was unable to resist the temptation, thinking that he would find great treasures inside. Once inside the palace, the king found a coffer, inside which was a cloth bearing a Latin inscription that stated that, at the moment the coffer was opened, people like those painted on the cloth would invade and conquer Spain. On unfolding the cloth, Don Roderic and the courtiers accompanying him saw pictures of “men with faces, appearances and dresses like those of the Arabs of today, mounted on horseback, wearing clothes of various colours, carrying swords, crossbows and holding banners high, and this painting frightened the king and his court.”
Here we have an early example of a (fictitious) description of an (also fictitious) painting where the Muslim enemy is visually characterised as a foreign Other. From the outset, this text was disseminated on an extraordinary scale throughout the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Jiménez de Rada was the essential point of reference for the entire national historiography, and the authority on Islamic presence in the Peninsula. In 1545, a printed Latin edition appeared of Jiménez de Rada’s history, but multiple manuscript copies of the Castilian translation prepared by the Bishop of Burgos, Gonzalo de Hinojosa (ca.1240), had been available since much earlier. Hinojosa faithfully reproduced Rada’s text, although he highlighted both the difference in appearance of the Arabs and the fear that their representation had caused the Christians: the diversity that Rada expressed through the colour of the clothes extended to the colour of their skin (“figures”) and to their characterisation as “frightful people in face and look.”* Authors from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries kept Jiménez de Rada’s views in circulation and his story of the painted Muslim knights continued to be repeated in later accounts of the conquest.
It can be assumed that this story of medieval origin was disseminated via the main texts recounting the Peninsula’s Islamic past, including those written by Pedro del Corral, Diego de Valera, Pedro Antonio Beuter and Juan de Mariana. Significantly, Mariana acknowledged that, although in his time (late-16th-early 17th-century) many authors considered the story false, he himself preferred not to comment on its veracity, and, of course, did not refrain from retelling it and describing the “faces and extraordinary clothes” of the men painted on the cloth which by this stage had become a canvas.5 The treatment given to the story by Pedro del Corral in his Crénica del Rey Don Rodrigo was particularly interesting (throughout the 16th century, there were numerous printed editions of his manuscript, written around 1430). Corral connected the story of the painted cloth to other old Toledo legends, turning the locked building into a palace founded by Hercules and decorated with a monumental statue of the Roman hero and mosaics representing earlier historical battles.®
This historiographical insistence on a story that linked the premonition of the fall of Spain into the hands of the Muslims and the contemplation of their painted image is of considerable relevance. The appearance of the Muslims must have been practically unknown to Goth King Roderic and his courtiers, who responded to it with “awe,” but it was nevertheless common in the times of Jiménez de Rada and his later readers, when those warriors did indeed resemble “the Arabs of today.” The entrance of the Muslims in Spain was announced and rendered visible by a visual (and architectural) metaphor that set the terms of the story within a framework that, on first reading, was of difference and opposition. However, from a hermeneutical perspective, this framework now appears to be a more complex space that cannot be encapsulated exclusively within the idea of otherness.
This is particularly true if we consider, for instance, that the clothes of those feared painted Arabs would not have been very different from the clothes in which Jiménez de Rada ordered himself to be buried in the 13th century; and that those Islamic swords that were supposed to so frighten Don Roderic and his court were similar to the ones used in the 16th and 17th centuries by Christian nobility in their juegos de carias (game of canes), or to those featuring in their inventories as symbols of their triumphs in medieval wars or as family relics in the case of Christian nobility of Muslim origin. It becomes more complex still if we consider that Jiménez de Rada’s characterisations of clothing and ethnicity are linked to the representations in paintings where Muslims — as well as the Jews — were already an interior Other as far as religious conversion processes were concerned.
Connecting with these interpretative nuances offered by the reception of Jiménez de Rada, in recent years, terms such as “otherness,” “hybridity,” “cul-
tural homogenisation,” “appropriation,” “diversity,” “ethnicity” and “identity” have loomed large in diverse scholarly and public conversations. Whether in the field of history, art history, cultural studies, philosophy or anthropology, the need to define, or re-define, the relations between all the members of multicultural societies who lived together in one period has emerged as crucial for our understanding of the past and its significance for the present. Yet in the pre-modern world of the Western Mediterranean — as Jiménez de Rada suggests in his text — the language used to articulate difference, hybridity and assimilation was overwhelmingly visual. Pictorial representations, architectural monuments and material culture converged with, but sometimes also resisted, literary depictions, to cast Otherness in physical form. Engaging with these visual objects — their status, function and impact — can shed new light on that multi-confessional world and provide us with another, different image.
Jews and Muslims Made Visible in Christian Iberia and Beyond, 14th to 18th Centuries: Another Image aims to review the existing scholarly discussion through the example of the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean connections. In this specific case, literature has remarked on the particularities of a historical situation signalled by both opposition and integration, one where conversion was a common event and negotiation an unavoidable context. However, approaches coming from different disciplines have not paid enough attention to the role of images and architecture in this process, nor to how works of art can help us to reconstruct this complex period, marked by the coexistence of several faiths in Europe. Consequently, our intention is to show, through various case studies, how the interrelations between Jews, Muslims and Christians were negotiated in the field of images, objects, and architecture during the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period.
By looking at the ways pre-modern Iberians envisioned diversity, we can reconstruct several stories, frequently interwoven with devotional literature, poetry or Inquisitorial trials, and commonly diverse from the one binary story of simple opposition. The book’s point of departure narrates the relationship between images and conversions, analysing the visual negotiation mechanisms of hybridity, and proposing a new explanation for the representation of Otherness as the complex outcome of a negotiation involving integration.
A key question in the formulation of Jews and Muslims Made Visible in Christian Iberia and Beyond, 14th to 18th Centuries: Another Image is geographical and time framing. It has been known for some time that the study of the Early Modern Period is basic for a more nuanced understanding of the history of cultural encounters, as shown, for instance, by David Blanks and Michael Frassetto when they highlighted breaks and discontinuities with regard to Modern stereotypes.
It has also been clear for some years that the Iberian Peninsula was avery important space for just such encounters. The history of the final period of conflict, the Conquest of Granada and the centuries that immediately followed, oscillating between assimilation and expulsion of difference, gives us an extraordinarily rich time-frame within which to analyse colonial logic with a somewhat removed approach. As has been said on several occasions, namely by Miguel Angel Bunes Ibarra, José Antonio Gonzalez Alcantud, and Mercedes Garcia-Arenal and Fernando Rodriguez Mediano, the Iberian Other is an Other within and this has direct consequences for the perception of Otherness, both on the proposal of this construction and on the media used.
Iberian society in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries was a complex entity whose heterogeneity became visible or was disguised between periods of integration and expulsion; where, in spite of the particular official discourses of homogeneous Christianity, a meaningful percentage of the population not only had diverse religious origins but in many cases remained indeed conscious for a long time, as Enrique Soria has recently remarked for descendants of both Muslims and Jews. The more recent social and cultural historiography of the Iberian Peninsula has shown greater understanding of this complexity and has offered important points to support an understanding of the period.!°
However, since Felipe Pereda’s influential study, Las Imdgenes de la discordia (2007), there have only been short, isolated works (many of them from authors included here), but no other major publication about the role of images in this process.
The first key question the book wishes to address is the importance of images in conversion processes. Certain images were directly conceived to promote the integration of the converted population, while others had the intention of ensuring the memory of victory through construction of the visual representation of difference. Furthermore, the cultural diversity in the way images were experienced certainly played a role in the assimilation of the different communities and in the management of their cultural legacies. Thus, texts by Amadeo Serra, Maria Portmann and Fernando Marias are dedicated to conversions and converts, with the artists themselves included in this population group. This focus on conversions has a complementary counterpoint in Yonatan GlazerEytan’s study of the representation of Jewish host profanations in late medieval Aragon, where the differences and connections between the real Jews and the imagined Jews are examined. The sources used in these case studies are extremely varied. Serra’s and Portmann’s texts use altarpieces as sources to probe into the society in which they were created, and show how different works of art can be crucial in discovering complicated processes of religious coexistence and assimilation. Glazer-Eytan’s work offers a comparative survey of the pictorial and judicial treatments of the topic that leads to the key issue of the inquisitorial texts. This source, which is always contentious, has recently been used to define the theology of the image in early modern Castile and the essential role it played in the execution of not only Jews and Muslims, but also of Old Christians who had departed from Christian orthodoxy. Understanding of the images exhibited in the judicial processes of the Inquisition and other coeval texts becomes a key tool, as shown by Pereda and Franco,” in learning how Jews and Muslims were evangelised. Comprehension or repudiation of these images can be seen as a sign of conversion and assimilation or, by ontrast, of resistance. Finally, Marias’ study combines both inquisitorial proceedings, paintings and other contemporary sources to put forward a methodology for studying converso artists and the significance of their religious origin in the conception of their work, an aspect which current historiography has yet given little attention. In short, in this part of the book, we have selected a series of essays where conversions are a central element linked to the power and use of images, and in the creative process behind them, which will enable us to understand them as historical evidence of interreligious cultural negotiation in the modern and medieval world.
The negotiation of visual hybridity is the second focus of our analysis, based on examples from the history of architecture and, to a lesser extent, on interpretation of the significances of material culture, represented in studies by Nicola Jennings, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, Elena Paulino, Ivana Capeta, and Antonio Urquizar. Buildings constituted elements with an enormous capacity to visually represent the cultural and religious heterogeneity of the Iberian Peninsula. On the one hand, in the conversion context, it will prove fruitful to study new architectural commissions from a twin perspective. The first considers the religious origin of the promoters and analyses the reasons behind the use of the architectural form of Islamic origins among the Christian elites, as Jennings suggests in her examination of Castilian conversos and their religious concomitance.
The second is the capacity of the old monuments of al-Andalus to maintain the memory of a multicultural past after Christian conquest, and to deal with managing strategies that tried to reconfigure their meaning, as argued by Ruiz Souza, whose timely line of study considers architectural heritage on the Peninsula to analyse peoples’ identities. Finally, in a similar vein to the above, we should not forget the material culture which decorates or is held within these buildings. Many of the artworks in question had their origins in Jewish or Muslim artistic tradition, but were recontextualised with new significance by Castilian and Andalusian nobility in their power spheres. Following in the footsteps of Jerrylinn Dodds, Maria Rosa Menocal and Abigail Balbale,®
Paulino and Urquizar take a new approach to diverse case studies that show a more nuanced understanding of hybridity. Their studies of the uses of nonChristian architecture and objects by the Castilian elites focus on the cultural and artistic resemantisation. On the other hand, Capeta’s study offers a Mediterranean counterpoint through the analysis of the representation of Oriental rugs in the Dalmatian Renaissance in connection to Venetian painting. The text deals with the conditions of interpretation of Islamic material culture in the Christian religious context.
Finally, the third theme running through this collection of essays proposes a new approach to understanding cultural and religious Otherness in early modern Europe. In studying the Iberian case, the binary narratives of opposition, which have sustained a great deal of European historiography working on the Western image of the Orient, are not viable as a central approach. In particular there are problems of adaptability with those discourses on images contemplated almost exclusively as a mirror of the foreign Other, even when this Other has been considered as an internal part of Europe as in Victor Stoichita’s L'image de Autre. In the Iberian space, the domestic nature of the Other is a key element. Furthermore, its constant overlap and negotiation with “us” (or the self) requires clear definition of the methodological horizons when analysing the co-production of meanings in images and architecture.
These ideas emerge in an exemplary manner in some of the work presented in this book. One of the key aspects to take into account is that, although there are diverse “Others,” because the Jews and Muslims living in Granada did not profess their faith in the same way as those in Castile or Valencia, there are also diverse “selves,” in other words, different Christian stakeholders who, depending on their relationship with other faiths or their political and social intentions, could distort the vision they had of their cohabitants. Although literature — particularly studies on Cervantes, Lope de Vega and apologists of the expulsion — has highlighted this, until recently, art history has kept out of the debate.
This book includes a number of texts which deal with alterity not only from the standpoint of the creator (the artist or patron) but also from the perspective of the observer, approached through diverse artistic genres and manifestations which enable us to create a unique comparative framework unexplored to date. Contributions by Baskins and Franco-Garcia focus on triumphal entries, one of the cultural manifestations that most clearly linked the city’s ideology with that of the monarchs visiting the different enclaves of their kingdom.
These will enable us to study how Muslims were perceived in the commemorative and festive sphere, if they were stereotyped and the concomitance between these creative processes and other artistic genres like battle paintings or modern portraiture. For their part, Spissu, Capriotti, and Stagno analyse diverse Italian enclaves within the Habsburg domains, or allied to them, to compare enemy visualisation strategies, based on Lepanto and the battle against the infidel, and show how the shadow of the Turk soon stamped its imprint on the islands, continuing, with diverse modifications, until well into the 18th century. The texts of the authors quoted deal with the images of communities in conflict from a perspective that does not merely record the representation of Otherness but analyses the negotiation and permeability of models across the Mediterranean.
If we consider the geographic context of the book’s studies, we should indicate that, although we have focused on the Iberian Peninsula, as mentioned, we have considered it necessary to include other Mediterranean territories connected to Spain (particularly Sicily, Genoa, Venice and Naples) as well, in order to enhance comparison and explore different policies in this respect. One of the aims of this book is to place the study of cultural diversity within the methodological discourse of the debate surrounding centre and periphery, with a diachronic comparison of local strategies of assimilation and construction of the Other with the actions of the Hispanic monarchy in relation to these matters. In this comparative approach, the territory of the Papal States has also been included, as the Papacy was an important ally, if not a promoter of the war against the infidel (whether Jew, Muslim or Protestant), This has allow us to establish intra-Mediterranean and supranational links.
An important issue affecting all three sections is the common methodological approach adopted in this collection of essays, which in turn draws on the understanding that the meanings assigned to visual objects (including architecture) are the result of a process of co-production. Their semantic construction is related to the interaction between artists, their clients and the public in a way that the meanings, in addition to being variables, depend on the horizons of interest of each of the agents involved. This idea is very important in the specific study of intercultural relations in the Early Modern Period, and in particular in how it allows for the fine-tuning of historical analysis.
Historiography had often fostered the identification of certain aesthetics with concepts of Otherness in the medieval and early modern periods, but this idea warrants further debate, since written sources and the visual objects to which they are related do not always belong to the same period, nor were the latter always interpreted in connection to them. Moreover, these objects can be unburdened of, or re-charged with, different associated meanings, sometimes remote from simple opposition. New evidence relating to recreation and the concept of the past on both sides of the Nasrid border, and a new interpretation of travelling and the re-contextualising of Islamic objects in Christian Peninsular kingdoms, offer more nuanced ways of looking at these phenomena and also broaden our comprehension of the general context of the Iberian Peninsula of the Middle Ages, moving beyond notions of conflict and alliance.
In short, the book’s main aim is not only to reflect upon the visual representation of diversity, Otherness and integration in the Mediterranean World, but also to map how these images (literary, architectural and pictorial) can be a particularly rich source of information about the past. It is assumed that there was not only one single image of the Jews, conversos or the Muslims but several, and several different readings of these images, and that all played a part in the creation of these communities’ identity. What is proposed is not merely a book on images, but a reflection on the process of coexistence and cultural negotiation of the Islamic, Jewish and Christian populations, and how this situation can be studied through visual culture.
We hope that the evidence presented in this study will be useful not only for art historians and historians but also for scholars coming from other disciplines, as it offers a new framework for discussions about Otherness in the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods.
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