The Art of Medieval Iberia at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Met Cloisters

Abstract

This essay reflects upon the rich holdings in medieval Iberian art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, acknowledging both the organizational challenges and intellectual rewards of delving into this multifaceted collection. Focusing on the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, it highlights a selection of artworks that reveal encounters between people of different faith traditions in medieval Iberia. In so doing, it argues for the importance of looking to the visual arts for layered, complex, and nuanced testimonies of interfaith interaction in the medieval peninsula.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art possesses the finest and widest-ranging collection of Iberian medieval art in the western hemisphere, and one of the great joys of exploring its holdings is experiencing the sheer variety of material on display at any one time—though comfortable walking shoes and a MetroCard are a must for the Iberomedievalist in hot pursuit of the Museum's treasures. At The Met Fifth Avenue, the Museum's massive flagship location, two sets of galleries separated by the distance of a city block display the arts of the Iberian Middle Ages: those of the Medieval (Galleries 304–307) and Islamic (Gallery 457) Art Departments.¹ Even more Iberian material is to be found at The Met Cloisters, the Museum's satellite location at the northern tip of Manhattan dedicated to the art and architecture of medieval western Europe. Iberomedievalists, used to their research leading them all over the library in search of books separated by both discipline and field within discipline, may be unfazed by the physical distance between artworks. A result of the department-building process that has shaped the Museum over the course of its 150-year history (in parallel with similar processes in academia), classification of The Met's medieval Iberian material has occurred largely along confessional lines, with Islamic material going to the Department of Islamic Art and Christian objects going to the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. Of course, these categories are themselves problematic, and the distinctions between them quickly become complicated. For instance, what happens to objects created in a Jewish context? Where is the secular material housed?² Wherever objects "live" in the museum, there are many examples that reasonably could (and do) find a home in different departments at once, like the silk textiles woven in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus that ended up in Christian treasuries. That said, the aim of this essay is not to make a case for rethinking the museum's administrative arrangements. Instead, I seek to advocate for the objects themselves, wherever they may be displayed, and specifically for those that connect different silos of art history.

Fortunately, the spirit of cooperation shared among Met curators makes it possible to bridge the divides between departments and locations, and many creative solutions already have been found, particularly over the past 30 years, to bring together the different visual traditions of the Iberian Middle Ages despite departmental and disciplinary boundaries. The early 1990s marked a new era in this material's interpretation at The Met, inaugurated by the exhibition Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain (1992), which displayed the full breadth of Iberian material across departments. A related exhibition, Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, took place at the Jewish Museum in the same year. The following year, The Art of Medieval Spain, 500-1200 A.D. also aimed to provide a broad overview of the time and place, this time tipping the scales toward the art of the Christian-ruled north. Although ultimately not carried out, its curators produced a highly influential catalogue (The Art of Medieval Spain; see also Little, "Making Sense" 199-218). More recently, 2012 saw the redesign of the permanent collection galleries devoted to the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia (as the Islamic Art Department's space is formally named). The room devoted to the western Mediterranean particularly highlights works made by and for multi-confessional audiences, many of which are secular items like chess pieces and lusterware plates. At the same time, Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts, including some on long-term loan from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, are displayed side by side. The arrangement communicates the intensity of artistic exchange not only in the Iberian Peninsula, but also in the Maghrib and in southern Italy. Finally, over the past decade in the Fifth Avenue Medieval Art galleries and at The Cloisters, displays of Hebrew manuscripts on loan from the Jewish Theological Seminary have brought to light connections between late medieval Jewish and Christian books.

There are still many more opportunities for further exploring multiconfessional interaction in The Met's medieval Iberian collection. In what follows, I highlight a selection of works from my home department, Medieval Art and The Cloisters (a single department that spans two locations), focusing on notably "in-between" objects that either breach curatorial categories through their components, content, or craftsmanship, or tell stories transcending departmental boundaries. Some of these works are already well known among Iberianists, while others await their moment in the spotlight. In all instances, I believe that these works would benefit from greater scholarly attention, and especially from those researchers with interdisciplinary interests. Far from the only such objects at the Museum, the works discussed below especially signal to me complex interactions effected via trade, pilgrimage, conquest, and diplomacy. Hopefully, they will spark readers' curiosity about the rest of the collection.

Just as encounters with objects number among the most powerful, multilayered experiences with the past that one can have, the "in-between" objects of medieval Iberia bring viewers directly to the people responsible for them in unique ways. As a curator, I tend to think about medieval artworks in terms of the human relationships that went into their making because focusing on the people behind the objects can help to concretize for museum visitors processes of stylistic and iconographic transfer that might otherwise appear dismayingly abstract. As a native New Yorker, I also keep in mind the resonance that medieval Iberia may have for the Museum's local audience, used to navigating cultural and confessional differences every day. Of course, the anonymity of many medieval artists and patrons means that often it is not possible to identify the specific relationships leading to a work of art's creation. Yet stories spin outward from objects, nonetheless. The works themselves suggest possible scenarios of creation, some of which are firmly validated by other sources, while others float in the air as suggestions, uncertain in their details or conclusions. Thus, objects' interpreters must be honest with their audiences about the quantity and quality of sources available.

Some "In-Between" Objects

The first artwork I will put forward is the well-known fresco of a dromedary from the monastery church of San Baudelio de Berlanga in Soria (Plate 1). The church was constructed in the late eleventh century, probably just after Alfonso VI seized Toledo in 1085, when Soria was still a contested territory subject to Andalusi incursions. It was decorated a generation or so later in the early twelfth century, when Berlanga was in Aragonese hands, and painters were brought from work sites in Catalonia (Guardia 67-83, 129-45). The frescoes were executed in the Romanesque style associated above all with the Latin west in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and no less so with northern, Christian-ruled Iberia. The camel was one of a series of paintings of animal and hunt scenes that decorated the lower walls of San Baudelio's nave. To its primarily monastic viewership, this large-scale image, executed in a flattened, typically Romanesque manner, may have symbolized the virtue of humility, following St. Augustine's writings (De Ávila 359). Yet, in this instance, it is difficult to believe that a Church Father's symbolic interpretation was the primary reason behind the choice of animal. Camels were by no means popular subjects in Romanesque art, appearing only in certain Bible illustrations, compendia of Marvels of the East, and in bestiaries. In Iberia, however, camels brought to al-Andalus from North Africa roamed the land. Given that these animals were named as spoils of war in contemporary Christian accounts of conquest, perhaps the San Baudelio camel carried a political significance. The fresco may allude to the recent triumph of Christian forces in Soria, which at the time of the painting's execution was just emerging from a long period as a frontier region (Dodds 103). Alternatively, or additionally, it could reflect a notable aspect of life within the (former) frontier zone, registering the artists' encounter with an actual camel, whose presence in Iberia was jarring for some and mundane for others, depending on where in the peninsula they came from.

Unusual iconography like this can speak eloquently of encounters between different faith groups, and the same can be said of objects transformed over time through reuse. In The Met's collection one of a pair of devotional panels, gifted by Queen Felicia of Aragón and Navarra to the convent of Santa Cruz de la Serós in the late eleventh century, is an agglomeration of disparate objects that reveal royal connections far beyond the foothills of the Pyrenees (Plate 2).³ The impetus for the creation of the panel may have been the queen's acquisition of a tenth-century Byzantine ivory relief depicting the Crucifixion, affixed at the center. The ivory perhaps came from Italy, where the royal family had significant diplomatic and familial ties (Abenza Soria 183-86). The frame of the panel also displays, to the right of the figure of John the Evangelist, a faceted sapphire engraved in Arabic with four of the ninety-nine "Beautiful Names" of God (Plate 3). Clearly a reused object like the ivory, the sapphire is of unknown origin. Its acquisition could have resulted from a taifa king's tribute payment, or from a shopping spree on the luxury market, to name just two possibilities. How did Aragonese Christians—namely Queen Felicia and her circle and the nuns of Santa Cruz de la Serós (many of whom were royal relations)—receive and understand the sapphire and its message? Although tiny, the inscriptions are legible, and some elite Aragonese could speak and read Arabic. Even for those to whom the inscription was unreadable, just knowing that it was there could have been highly significant. The impulse might be to view the stone as a trophy-like emblem of Aragón's increasing domination of Muslim-ruled lands, given that the Aragonese received taifa tribute and by the late eleventh-century had intensified their efforts to conquer Zaragoza. But to my mind, it is well worth considering other possibilities over the triumphalist. Would the inscribed message, a glorification of God, have appealed to its Christian owners? Would the laudatory names have further sanctified the panel? Perhaps the sapphire was valued by Christians as a talisman, as stones inscribed with the "Beautiful Names" often were in an Islamic context (Porter 132-37).

Another instance of object reuse and modification is found in a small ivory pyx depicting the Miracle of Christ's Multiplication of the Loaves, believed to have been carved in North Africa in the sixth century (Plate 4). Typically displayed in the Byzantine galleries of the Department of Medieval Art at The Met Fifth Avenue because of its date, location, and style of manufacture, in fact this container spent centuries of its "long life" in Spain, in the treasury of San Pedro de la Rúa in Estella, Navarra (Quintanilla 86-88). There, the pyx may have served as a reliquary, together with a trio of Siculo-Arabic ivory containers of the eleventh-thirteenth century (De Madrazo 83). The pyx itself lacks its original lid; its current lid, assembled from thin sheets of ivory and simply decorated with incised bands of concentric circles, is difficult to place. Its grouping at Estella with the Siculo-Arabic boxes, similarly constructed of thin ivory sheets and slender, attenuated copper alloy fastenings,⁴ suggests that at some point it passed through Sicily or southern peninsular Italy, where it was repaired before eventually making its way to Spain. It is also possible that the lid was fashioned in Spain, or, indeed, somewhere else in the Mediterranean during the long journey from North Africa. Wherever it was made—and we may never know for sure, given its simple design—the box certainly underwent an epic journey across the medieval world and today stands in for the people who accompanied it at different stages along the way. Beyond bearing witness to trans-Mediterranean traffic, it also affirms how broadly connected the towns along the Camino de Santiago were during the Middle Ages.

The transport of manufactured objects like the pyx across long distances occurred in parallel with the movement of art makers and raw materials. A small octagonal box usually displayed at The Met Fifth Avenue reveals the breadth of western Mediterranean trade networks (Plate 5). Decorated using the technique of marquetry—the fitting of small pieces of different materials together, jigsaw-like, to create a design—the box is covered with a variety of geometric patterns responding to its overall octagonal form. The intricate surface decoration attests to the skill of western Mediterranean woodworkers based in both Iberia and the Maghrib, who were known particularly for their fine carving and marquetry work. When the box entered The Met's collection in 1950, it was dated to the fifteenth century and attributed to Andalusi artists living under Nasrid rule. Recent research on a related object that appeared on the art market in 2020, however, has prompted me to suggest that the Met's box might date much earlier, perhaps to the late twelfth or thirteenth century and the period of Almohad rule, making it a rare survivor from a period of Iberian history not well represented by the visual arts (Raby). Comparisons with the few other surviving marquetry works of the medieval period connect this object to a group of minbars now in Morocco, such as that of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakech, which was in fact made in Córdoba around 1137 (Bloom 3-6). In fact, the band of linked, rotated squares on the sides of the box's lid most strongly resembles a pattern on the late twelfth-or early thirteenth-century minbar of Marrakech's Kasbah Mosque. Thought to have been made by Andalusi craftsmen, this minbar—and indeed, if it is contemporary, The Met's box—equally could have been made by Maghribi woodworkers under Almohad rule. Also of note is the impressive variety of woods (some stained green), combined with ivory or bone, used to make both the minbar and the box. The marquetry patterns of the Kutubiyya and Kasbah Mosque minbars include tree species imported from various locations around the Mediterranean and Africa, resulting from very long-distance trade relationships (Soultanian et al. 72-74). If the box's materials can be tested, the results likely will be similar.

Style also plays a paramount role in communicating interfaith interaction, and its complexities are on full display at The Cloisters in a recent acquisition, a fourteenth-century Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). Medieval Judaica historically has not formed a large part of The Met's collection, which had no medieval objects from an explicitly Iberian Jewish context until this manuscript's 2018 acquisition. The book's decoration speaks to medieval Iberian viewers' uncanny ability to code-switch, moving from one distinct visual language to another with ease. Copied in Castile sometime before 1366 (the date of the earliest note on its annotated flyleaves⁵), the Bible's opening pages feature illuminated frames executed in the Gothic style of northern Europe that dazzle the eye with gold and ultramarine accents (Plate 6). The predominant decorations include flowers interspersed with undulating vines and a simple color block pattern alternating blue and pink fields covered with white calligraphic flowers. Delicate micrography complements the bold illuminations. Turning to the back of the book, the closing pages display an entirely different style of decoration, chiefly comprising paired columns of text framed with horseshoe arches at bottom and top and set into a field of stunning micrographic strands woven into a dense interlace (Plate 7). Together, the horseshoe arches and interlace unmistakably point to the Andalusi visual tradition associated above all with Islamic objects. While the styles are separated by the hundreds of pages of writing between the opening and closing of the book, and while each may have signaled a slightly different idea to the Bible's makers and original owners, they nonetheless coexist unproblematically within it, serving the same overall function of textual embellishment.

Other objects in the collection, such as the remains of a dazzling necklace probably made in Granada in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century, attest to both the complexities of language use during the later Middle Ages and their ramifications for the modern museum. Delicately crafted using the combined techniques of filigree, granulation, and cloisonné enamel cultivated in the Nasrid period, the necklace's tubular beads alternate with shaped pendants (Plate 8). On the sunburst-shaped central medallion, an inscription reads Ave Maria Gracia Plen [sic]. The other pendants, which resemble hands, have also been described as stylized lotus blossoms (Zozaya 302). Within the green and blue enamel beds decorating each of the tubular beads, shaped gold wires suggest the word "Allah" in Arabic or Arabicizing script (Plate 9; Bush 78). The pendant categorizes the necklace as a Christian object, and the evocation of the Arabic for God, repeated in bands on either end of each bead, does not contradict this description; again, as with the carved sapphire of the Felicia plaque, the bead inscriptions could have served a talismanic function, especially in light of the role that Arabic writing and pseudo-writing played in the Iberian Christian imagination during the medieval and early modern periods (Balbale 212-14). The necklace entered the museum's collection in 1917 along with a group of other gold jewelry pieces said to have come from a hoard discovered in Granada. Yet despite the reported archeological integrity of this find (which, in fact, has never been proven), the necklace forms part of the Medieval Art Department, keeping company with Christian objects, while at some point in the museum's history, the rest of the hoard's several treasures passed to the department of Islamic Art.⁶ Superficially, the objects' use of language seems to have recommended their separation, yet clearly they cannot be so easily categorized by religious affiliation.

Finally, we can turn to two other works in The Met's collection that further bear witness to encounters among faiths, though perhaps not in a way we might expect. Both examples can be traced to the Santa María family of conversos. One is a lavishly embroidered cope (Plate 10) made ca. 1438 for Alfonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos (1435-56) with his coat of arms embroidered on the hood. The other is a sculpture from ca. 1490-1510 depicting the Miracle of the Palm on the Flight into Egypt (Plate 11), of unknown provenance but said to come from the Cathedral of Calahorra. This sculpture, which may in fact be of northern European manufacture, displays on the Virgin's brocaded gown a distinctive monogram suggested in an unpublished note by Ronda Kasl to be that of the same Santa María family. Each of these objects speaks powerfully to ways in which patronage of the visual arts could confirm and visualize conversion. The members of the Santa María family lived their new religious life in a variety of ways—joining the Church was just one path—and their artistic patronage helped to define that life.

Future Directions

This idiosyncratic selection of objects—by no means a fully representative sample—aims to demonstrate the material, chronological, technical, and iconographic breadth of the medieval Iberian art collection in The Met's Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. It also seeks to reveal the range of interpersonal relationships that these objects highlight or suggest. Recently, I myself have begun to explore these relationships in earnest. In the fall of 2021, I staged the exhibition Spain, 1000-1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith, which, for the first time, and with the essential inclusion of very generous loans from The Met's Islamic Department, brought to

The Cloisters a significant selection of artworks that were either made or used in al-Andalus or otherwise associated with Muslim artists, patrons, or viewers in order to communicate the artistic impact of interfaith exchange during a critical period of Iberian history. In this exhibition, Andalusi textiles, ivories, manuscripts, and metalwork were placed in dialogue with the monumental works of Romanesque art permanently on display in The Cloisters' Fuentidueña Chapel Gallery. Further down the road, redesign of The Met Fifth Avenue's permanent collection galleries will also provide new opportunities to foreground and interpret Iberian material, and especially those objects that, through their liminality, resonate so acutely with modern audiences. Above all, the collection remains continually available both in person and online to students and scholars looking to tease out the stories behind the objects. This rich vein of material particularly calls for interdisciplinary scholarship, and The Met's curatorial staff welcomes researchers interested in exploring medieval Iberia in new ways.