Spanish Medieval Art: Recent Studies (review)

Hourihane, Colum, ed. Spanish Medieval Art: Recent Studies. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 346. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies and The Index of Christian Art, 2008. 244 + xxv pp. This attractive collection contains interdisciplinary articles offering compelling new perspectives founded on solid research and well-developed arguments . Numerous black-and-white illustrations support and enhance the text throughout the volume. The lucid, direct style of the essays and the transparent documentation of authoritative sources attest to the reputability of the authors and the skill of the editor, Colum Hourihane, who directs the Index of Christian Art at Princeton. Hourihane confesses that he pondered the inclusion of a reference to Santiago de Compostela in the title, and indeed, the influence of the pilgrimage route looms over much of the collection; yet there are other articles on the art and architecture of Catalunya and Toledo. On the other hand, the designation Spanish Medieval Art may be too broad in light of the absence of a primary focus on Iberian Islamic or Jewish art in any of the articles of the volume. It would have been more precise to say that this book addresses Romanesque and Gothic art (religious and secular) in the Christian kingdoms of medieval Spain. Nonetheless, the articles by Jerrilynn Dodds and Pamela Patton do exemplify the cultural hybridity of the Iberian Peninsula during the medieval period . Dodds explores why a church containing an intriguing admixture of Christian and Islamic artistic and architectural elements – San Román in Toledo – would have been created under the auspices of Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s monolithic crusader agenda. She observes that any potency the Islamic decorations might have had was neutralized by their incorporation into the unifying artistic program of the church, and that San Román’s syncretism is a microcosm of the multilingual and multicultural Mozarabic community that Rodrigo had to win over in order to rule effectively. Patton’s essay uses the minute but intriguing detail of a carved Islamic book-cover flap in a capital of the Romanesque cloister of Santa María la Mayor in Tudela as a touchstone for a broader discussion of the Christian tendency to conflate Jewish and Islamic attributes when portraying the non-believing “other.” Within the scheme of the iconographic program, the portrayal of a Jewish book (probably the Talmud ) contained inside an Islamic cover visibly defines both populations as being in opposition to Christianity. While Toledo is the furthest south this volume ventures, Catalunya and France are the furthest east it goes. For instance, in his capacity as curator of Romanesque art in Barcelona’s National Museum of Catalan Art, Manuel Casti ñeiras marries a contemporary analysis of the physical components of artistic Reseñas 107 production (informed by a twelfth-century manual from Ripoll) to more traditional methods of Art History in his study of several Catalan altarpiece frontals . Castiñeiras emphasizes the diverse backgrounds and broad training of the artists that created these complex works. Meanwhile, Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras analyzes the Sarmental portal of the Burgos Cathedral in connection to the portals in Amiens that served as models. Sánchez Ameijeiras argues that the Sarmental portal was intended for a semi-private ecclesiastical audience, and that the uniformity and severity of the character of both the Sarmental portal and Amiens are a consequence of the austere reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). The rest of the articles pertain to locales connected to the Camino de Santiago . Rose Walker, for example, examines the remains of the cloister of Las Claustrillas in Las Huelgas in Burgos. Walker considers it probable that the cloister in Santo Domingo de Silos was used as a model for Las Claustrillas, and that this cloister was conceived as a model of Heaven on earth. In parallel fashion, Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo’s essay on the Emmaus and Thomas reliefs in the cloister at Silos uses historical and liturgical sources to illustrate that this space was designed to remind the viewer of Jerusalem, the setting of these scenes. Valdez del Álamo concludes that the location of the Finojosa family ’s burial chapel in the center of...