Mozarabic Art refers to art of Mozarabs The Mozarabs were Iberian Christians who lived under Moorish Muslim rule in Al-Andalus. Their descendants remained unconverted to Islam, but did however adopt elements of Arabic language and culture. They were mostly Roman Catholics of the Visigothic or Mozarabic Rite (from musta'rab meaning “Arabized”), Iberian Christians A Christian (pronounced /ˈkrɪstʃən/ ) is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians believe is the Messiah (the Christ in Greek-derived terminology) prophesied in the Hebrew Bible, and the son of God. Most Christians believe in the doctrine of living in Al-Andalus Al-Andalus was the Arabic name given to a nation in the parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania governed by Muslims (given the generic name of Moors), at various times in the period between 711 and 1492, the Muslim A Muslim or Moslem is an adherent of the religion of Islam. Literally, the word means "one who submits (to God)". Muslim is the participle of the same verb of which Islam is the infinitive. All Muslims observe Sunnah, but differences in the definition of what is and what is not Sunnah has led to the emergence of sectarian movements.[ conquered territories in the period that comprises from the Arab invasion of the Iberian Peninsula The Umayyad conquest of Hispania began as an Umayyad Caliphate army consisting largely of Berber Northwest Africans recently converted to Islam invaded the Christian Visigothic Kingdom located on the Iberian peninsula (Hispania). Under the authority of the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I of Damascus, and commanded by Tariq ibn Ziyad, they disembarked in (711) to the end of the 11th century, adopted some Arab customs without converting to Islam, preserving their religion and some ecclesiastical and judicial autonomy. Initially, it can be said that all the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula The Iberian Peninsula is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes modern-day states Portugal, Spain, Andorra, the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar and a very small area of France. It is the westernmost of the three major southern European peninsulas—the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan peninsulas. It is bordered on the professed the Christian religion, because all of them were submitted to the Muslim power, with the exception of some Jewish collectives that existed in the country.
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Context
The Mozarabic communities maintained some of the Visigothic The Visigoths were one of two main branches of the Goths, an East Germanic tribe; the Ostrogoths being the other. Together these tribes were among the barbarians who disturbed the late Roman Empire during the Migration Period. The romanized Visigoths first emerged as a distinct people during the fourth century, initially in the Balkans, where they churches that were older than the Arab occupation for the practice of their religious rites and were rarely able to build new ones, because, even though a certain religious tolerance existed, the authorizations for building new churches were very limited. When permitted, new churches were always in rural areas or in the cities' suburbs, and of modest size.
When the living conditions in Muslim Iberia The Iberian Peninsula is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes modern-day states Portugal, Spain, Andorra, the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar and a very small area of France. It is the westernmost of the three major southern European peninsulas—the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan peninsulas. It is bordered on the became less tolerable and the Christian kingdoms of the north of the peninsula initiated an expansion which needed populations to replace the displaced Muslims in the conquered lands, some of these Mozarabs opted to emigrate towards these territories where they were offered land. Their Hispano-Visigothic culture had been mixing with the Muslim and it is to be supposed that this contributed to the emerging cultures of the new Christian kingdoms in all fields. However it is unlikely that they were responsible for all of the artistic innovations brought to maturity in the kingdoms of the north during the 10th century.
Concluding the first phase of the artistic process that are generally comprised in the ample concept of "Pre-Romanesque Pre-Romanesque art and architecture is the period in Western European art from either the emergence of the Merovingian kingdom in about 500 or from the Carolingian Renaissance in the late 8th century, to the beginning of the 11th century Romanesque period. The term is generally used in English only for architecture and monumental sculpture, but" and that corresponds with the Hispano-Visigothic art, another stylistic current was initiated in Iberia, inheriting in many aspects of the earlier style, that is known as "Asturian art" and that was identified with the artistic creations that were being produced during the 9th century in the so-called "nucleus of resistance", specifically in the territories that comprised the kingdom of Asturias. But the artistic activity, in general, and architectural, specially, was not limited to this area nor to this century, however encompassed all the northern peninsula and had continuity during the next century.
The displacement of the Christian-Muslim border to the Douro The Douro or Duero is one of the major rivers of the Iberian Peninsula, flowing from its source near Duruelo de la Sierra in the province of Soria across northern-central Spain and Portugal to its outlet at Porto. Its total length is 897 km, of which only sections on the Portuguese river are navigable by light rivercraft basin allowed the construction of new temples (works on which all the artistic capacity available was concentrated) in demand of the necessities of re-settling. The now prosperous Northern kingdoms were in conditions to undertake that task, as they had already been doing, without depending on the hypothetical contributions of the incorporated Mozarabs, by which it could hardly be thought that all the religious buildings and all the artistic creations are owed to these mainly rural immigrants who, on the other hand, arrived in limitation of means and of resources. It does not appear that they were in conditions to bring to completion great artistic achievements those who had barely left any evidence of this in their place of origin.
After the publication in 1897 of the well-informed work in four volumes "History of the Mozarabs of Spain" (Historia de los mozárabes de España) by Francisco Javier Simonet, the professor and investigator Manuel Gómez Moreno published 20 years later (1917) a monograph about The Mozarabic Churches. And it is here where the Mozarabic character is applied to the churches constructed in Christian territory from the end of the 9th century until the beginning of the 11th, and where the term "Mozarabic" is instituted to designate this architectural form and all of the related art. The denomination had success and it is the one that has been used commonly, although without much rigor.
The Mozarabic character of the temples that Gómez Moreno referred to in his book has been questionad by modern historiography, including by the not so modern, that already José Camón Aznar in his Spanish Architecture of the 10th Century (Arquitectura española del siglo X) showed himself to be against such an interpretation, and after him Isidro Bango Torviso and many others have done so, to the point that the present-day tendency shows a trend towards the abandoning of "Mozarabic Art" denomination and its substitution by "Repopulation Art" (Arte de Repoblación) to refer to that period.
Literature
Beatus of Facundus: Judgement of BabylonThe principal exponent is religious literature: Mozarabic missals, antiphoneries and prayerbooks, created in the scriptorium The history of books follows a suite of technological innovations for books. These improved the quality of text conservation, the access to information, portability, and the cost of production. This history has been linked to political and economical contingencies, the history of ideas, and the history of religion of the monasteries. Examples of quality and originality of the miniatures and illuminated manuscripts An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations. In the strictest definition of the term, an illuminated manuscript only refers to manuscripts decorated with gold or silver, but in both common usage and modern scholarship, the are the Commentarium in Apocalypsin (Commentary on the Apocalypse) from Beatus of Liébana, Beatus of Facundus or Beatus of Tábara. Or antiphonaries like the Mozarabic Antiphonary of the Cathedral of León (Antifonario mozárabe de la Catedral de León).
Toledo and Córdoba were the most important Mozarabic centers. From Córdoba was the abbot Speraindeo, who wrote an Apologetic Early Christian writers who defended their faith against critics and recommended their faith to outsiders were called apologists against Muhammad. And very important for the history of philosophy studies is the Apologetic of the abbot Sansón (864).
Architecture
The principal characteristics that define the Mozarabic architecture are the following:
- A great command of the technique in construction, employing principally ashlar by length and width.
- Absence or sobriety of exterior decoration.
- Diversity in the floor plans, certainly the majority stand out by the small proportions and discontinuous spaces covered by cupolas In architecture, a cupola is a small, most-often dome-like structure, on top of a building. Often used to provide a lookout or to admit light and air, it usually crowns a larger roof or dome. The word derives, via Italian, from the lower Latin cupula small cup (Latin cupa) indicating a vault resembling an upside down cup. Cupolas often appear as (groined, segmented, ribbed of horseshoe transept, etc.).
- Use of the horseshoe arch An arch is a structure that spans a space while supporting weight . Arches appeared as early as the 2nd millennium BC in Mesopotamian brick architecture and their systematic use started with the Ancient Romans who were the first to apply the technique to a wide range of structures in the Islamic style, very tight and with the slope being two-thirds of the radius.
- Use of the alfiz.
- Use of the column A column in structural engineering is a vertical structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. For the purpose of wind or earthquake engineering, columns may be designed to resist lateral forces. Other compression members are often termed "columns" because of as support, crowned by a Corinthian capital The Corinthian order is one of the three principal classical orders of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The other two are the Doric and Ionic. When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, two more orders were added to the canon, the Tuscan order and the Composite order. The Corinthian, with its offshoot the Composite, is decorated with very stylized vegetable elements.
- The eaves extend outwards and rest on top of corbels of lobes.
The Mozarabic architecture interpreted strictly in its definition, that is to say, that the Mozarabs in Muslim Iberia brought to completion, would be reduced to two examples:
- The Church of Bobastro: rock temple located in the place known as Mesas de Villaverde, in Ardales Ardales is a town and municipality in the province of Málaga, part of the autonomous community of Andalusia in southern Spain. The municipality is situated approximately 62.5 kilometres from the city of Málaga. It has a population of approximately 2,700 residents. The natives are called Ardaleños (Málaga Málaga is a city and a municipality in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain. With a population of 568,305 in 2009, it is the second most populous city of Andalusia and the sixth largest in the country. This is the southernmost large city in Europe. It lies on the Costa del Sol (Coast of the Sun) of the Mediterranean Sea, about 100 km (62.1), of which only some ruins remain.
- The Church of Santa María de Melque: located in proximity to La Puebla de Montalbán (Toledo). With respect to this temple, its stylistic parentage is in doubt, because it shares Visigothic features with other more proper Mozarabic features, nor its date being clear.
Nevertheless, at a popular level, including in encyclopedias and books, the denomination that has kept prevailing is Mozarabic Art and among the most important that can be cited in Spain and Portugal, the following can be counted as Mozarabic:
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- - San Miguel de Escalada (León)
- - Santiago de Peñalba (León)
- - Santo Tomás de las Ollas (León)
- - San Baudelio de Berlanga (Soria)
- - San Cebrián de Mazote (Valladolid)
- - Santa María de Wamba (Valladolid)
- - San Salvador de Tabara (Zamora)
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- - Santa María de Lebeña (Cantabria)
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- - San Juan de la Peña (Huesca)
- - Church of the Serrablo (Huesca), as the Church of San Juan de Busa
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- - San Millán de Suso (San Millán de la Cogolla)
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- - San Quirce de Pedret (Barcelona)
- - Santa María de Marquet (Barcelona)
- - Church of San Cristóbal (Barcelona), in the municipality of Vilassar de Mar, at 30 km from Barcelona Barcelona is the capital and the most populous city of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia and the second largest city in Spain, after Madrid, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of 101.4 km2 (39 sq mi). The urban area of Barcelona extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of over 4
- - San Julián de Boada (Gerona), located in the small hamlet of the same name, in the comarca of Baix Empordà (Gerona)
- - Santa María de Matadars (Barcelona), in the municipality of El Pont de Vilomara i Rocafort
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- - San Miguel de Celanova (Orense)
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- - São Pedro de Lourosa (Lourosa da Beira)
- - Catedral de Idanha-a-Velha (Idanha-a-Velha)
Gallery
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León Antiphonary Folio (XIth century, León Cathedral) |
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Mozarabic arches of Santiago de Peñalba (León León is a province of northwestern Spain, in the northwestern part of the autonomous community of Castile and León) |
Inside of San Millán de Suso (La Rioja La Rioja is a province and autonomous community of northern Spain. Its capital is Logroño. Other cities and towns in the province include Calahorra, Arnedo, Alfaro, Haro, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, and Nájera) |
Painting: combat elephant, from San Baudelio de Berlanga (Soria) |
See also
| Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mozarabic Art |
External links
Categories: Medieval Spain | Medieval Portugal | Spanish art | Portuguese art | Mozarabic art | Al-Andalus
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Gringo
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:40:33 GM
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