Art and Artifice in Twelfth-Century Iberia
Sculptors and painters produced exceptional, and sometimes eccentric works of art in the middle decades of the twelfth century in Iberia. The high-level artistic expertise needed to produce such works could be gifted, loaned, and even stolen in the same way as other precious items. It could be moved, like a commodity, across networks forged by reforming churchmen and rulers that traversed the Pyrenees and the Peninsula. Much of this sculpture and wall-painting shows an ability to play with the different repertoires that emerged from these established routes of exchange.
The pilgrimage roads of the Codex Calixtinus have had a strong imaginative pull and even been invoked to explain such artistic production. By contrast, this book argues that the more playful and satirical aspects of that manuscript – the pseudonyms, exaggerated claims, and pointed selections – resonate not only with a wider culture of forged charters and re-invented institutional histories but also with the imaginative, eclectic, and sometimes ludic art of these decades. This art encompasses sculpted church façades, painted interiors, illuminated missals and cartularies, as well as carved Atlas figures that encapsulate the complex status of the artists who made them.
Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One – Cluny and ‘Spain’ in the twelfth century
- Chapter Two – Camaraderie, confraternities and canons
- Chapter Three – Art and the friendship circle of reformers
- Chapter Four – The power of paint: royal women and the infantado
- Chapter Five – Façades: refashioning and collecting
- Chapter Six – Façades: ‘disordered’ portals
- Chapter Seven – Expertise as a commodity: itinerant artists?
- Epilogue
Recent articles
“Narratives of Hagiographic Imagination and the Camino”, in Imagining the Road to Santiago: Itineraries, Narratives, Myths, eds. Robert A. Maxwell and Manuel A. Castiñeiras González, Ad Limina (16/1, 2025) 153–69.
Abstract: This essay proposes that the ‘pilgrimage’ roads of the Pilgrim’s Guide can be viewed as routes of hagiography, and that the main author of the Jacobus, ‘Calixtus’, was writing for a network of fellow authors. It builds on Christopher Hohler’s approach of 1972, which highlighted the rhetorical and ludic aspects of the texts and, in that light, it examines the framework of the roads as presented on the first folio of the Guide. It re-imagines those roads as links between centres of hagiographic invention, some run by friends others by rivals.
“Order and disorder through the eyes of scribes and illuminators in the kingdom of Pamplona c. 970–c. 1000”, in Romanesque and the Year 1000, eds. Gerhard Lutz, John McNeill and Richard Plant (Abingdon and New York, 2025) 85–104.
Abstract: Scribes at the monasteries of San Martín de Albelda and San Millán de la Cogolla in the kingdom of Pamplona created some remarkable books in the last decades of the tenth century. Their legacy is dominated by two large and richly illuminated legal manuscripts: the Codex Albeldensis of 976 and its close copy, the Codex Aemilianensis of c. 992. At the turn of the century other artists executed two exegetical codices, a Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus (Patrimonio nacional, Biblioteca de El Escorial &.II.5) and a copy of the Expositio psalmorum of Cassiodorus, (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Cod. 8).
This paper will analyse how these books imposed order in a febrile environment, under regular attack from Córdoba, through the creation of a neo-Visigothic identity and the visual codification of knowledge. At the core of this will be expressions of the natural order. In contrast, transgressions of that order appear in representations of serpentine and hybrid creatures. It will be argued that these derive from the displacement and deformation of figures in cosmographical maps. The divergent styles of illumination, from attempts at plasticity to the highly abstract, will be viewed in part through the text of Cassiodorus.
“Reimagining relics and reliquaries between al-Andalus and the Northern Kingdoms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries”, in The Visual Culture of al-Andalus in the Christian Kingdoms of Iberia, ed. Inés Monteira (New York and London, 2025) 27–43.
Abstract: This chapter has two parts. The first analyses hagiographical narratives of relic transfer from al-Andalus to the Christian north. It will employ an anthropological approach, as opposed to a more literal and historical reading of these texts. The translation of the relics of St Pelagius, St Eulalia, St Isidore and St Zoilus provides case studies that often involve not only sumptuary objects but also exemplify methods of exchange between Christian and Islamic rulers, including paria, ransom, and mercenary payments.
The second part of the chapter interrogates the repurposed objects associated with these cults, as in each instance a casket or silk enshrines the relics. A 2015 article by Mariam Rosser-Owen proposed that the arrival of some Andalusi objects in the north could be seen as an integral part of relic translation, and thus should not be viewed through a triumphal lens. In light of the earlier analysis of the hagiographical texts, the reliability of the links between the transfer of relics and objects will be re-examined. Without reverting to a triumphalist reading, other relationships between the objects, the hagiography, and the visualisation of the cults will be proposed.