Architecture Space and Society Research Centre, Birkbeck (University of London) Friday 1st March 2019
Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conquest-and-construction-tickets-55022443610

The subject of this article is the mantle of the kings of Sicily, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Made in Palermo in the 1130s, it is often known as the mantle of Roger II. Following his coronation in 1130, King Roger II saw the need to ensure the succession of his sons. As part of his strategy to consolidate dynastic succession,…[Read more]

Pseudo-Arabic is a form of ornament, derived from Arabic script, which appears in both Islamic and Christian contexts from the 10th century onwards. The city of Bari in south-east Italy, and its hinterland, boasts a number of examples of this motif. This article explores how pseudo-Arabic was employed in Bari and how the circulation of luxury…[Read more]

Identifies the book held by the Priests and Scribes in the Temple on a capital in the cloister of Santa María la Mayor in Tudela as an extremely early representation of an Islamic envelope-flap binding, the earliest evidence of such a technique in the northern Iberian peninsula, and interprets its significance for a monastic community in the…[Read more]

Traces the legendary and visual roots of a well-known tale of the Little Jewish Boy in the Cantigas de Santa María.

For historians of medieval Iberian art and architecture, María Rosa Menocal’s most important legacy lies in her work’s normalization of a culturally decentralized, multidisciplinary frame through which medieval visual objects became part of a broadly shared network of cultural production that was unrestricted by firm boundaries between part…[Read more]

An unconventional portrayal of the serpent of the Temptation in the Florence codex of the Cantigas de Santa María (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, MS B.R. 20) manifests significant developments in the visual and epistemic norms of late medieval Castile. The satanic serpent’s black face and stereotyped African features link to cultural tr…[Read more]

A capital with an unusual scene of the Baptism of Jesus has recently been excavated in the late twelfth-century cloister of San Juan de la Peña (Huesca). Remarkable for its depiction of a youthful Saviour seated in a footed baptismal font, the image deviates significantly from the traditional Romanesque formula of an adult Jesus baptized in the…[Read more]