Art and Artifice in Twelfth-Century Iberia

"This innovative, wide-ranging and erudite book illuminates the sophistication of artistic exchange at this time and place. " Costanza Beltrami, Stockholm University.


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.

Contributor: Rose Walker ROSE WALKER has published widely on the art and architecture of medieval Spain. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Courtauld, and from 2018 to 2020 she held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship for the project that led to this book.