Institute of America

MOZARABIC ART IN ANDALUCIA

THE art of the Andalucian Mozarabs1 seems to have received as yet little attention from students of the Mohammedan occupation of Spain, although much has been written about the Mozarabs of Toledo. I hope, therefore, that some observations on the beautiful sculptures and mural paintings of these mediaeval Spanish Christians may be of interest.

Eighteen years study of the subject has left me with the conviction that this art was not implanted by invaders from the East, whether Greek, Roman, or Arab, but is in its essence traditional to the soil, and handed down from so remote a period that it would be rash to attempt to date it, although of course influenced from generation to generation by the political changes which took place in Spain. One must go to country villages, lonely manors, and granges among the mountains remote from cities if one desires to form a just idea of the astonishing persistence of tradition among the native Andalucians, who are as different in many characteristics from the practical Basques or Catalans as from the laissez-faire aristocrats of proud Castile. In the fertile vegas and precipitous sierras of the Southwest the true Iberian race, as apart from the Celt-Iberian, survives with habits and customs in some respects hardly changed since before the time of Christ. They produce corn, oil, and white wine in certain districts as did their forefathers under Carthage or Rome or their own King Arganthonius in the sixth century B.C.; and certain details of the advanced agricultural science of the ancient Tartessus have been handed down in such perfection that travellers conversant with e.g. olive culture elsewhere have told me no other system excels the traditional Andalucian, the origin of which is lost in the mists of antiquity.

The same must be said of the irrigation systems generally attributed to the Moslem influence in Spain. I have found no

1 Moçtereb was a Christian who lived among the Arabs and was on friendly terms with them. Cf. Diccionario de la Academia de la Lengua española. 2 Herodotus, I, 163 ff.

American Journal of Archaeology, Second Series. Journal of the
Archaeological Institute of America, Vol. XXV (1921), No. 4.

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fewer than four examples of proto-historic, or Bronze Age, or megalithic hydraulic works, easily recognizable by the cutting and placing of the stones. Three of these conduits still convey drinking water from headlands miles away to towns the "Cyclopean" foundations of which I have seen in the course of excavations undertaken for scientific or other purposes. That these remarkable works were not inspired by Rome is proved by the glaring contrast of the Roman repairs with the rough-hewn stones employed in the parent conduits, most of which lie at least four meters below the present level of the soil. And we have the authority of Strabo1 for the high civilization of the Turdetanians (the name given to the Tartessians after their conquest by Carthage in or about the fifth century B.C.) in his time.

As another instance of the survival of tradition we have the proto-historic method of construction commented on by Caesar, known to the Arabs as tapia, and in the present day as terre pisée. I am writing this essay in a modern house built of tapia, i.e. damp earth trodden between boards, and it is attached to a great fortress tower also built of tapia, with walls two meters thick and foundations of stones rough-cut in the Cyclopean style. This tower has Roman arches 7 meters high within, and Arabic horseshoe arches outside, of stone ingenuously and visibly dove-tailed into the Roman facing; and at the back of an Arabic arcature still more ingenuously introduced above the horseshoe arch on the existing façade. We have the original Iberian façade of earth stamped between boards and rubbed smooth on the surface by way of ornament. Where some of the Roman work has fallen away we see the holes where the proto-historic scaffold poles were fixed before Phoenicians or Carthaginians came to destroy, so far as in them lay, the proto-historic or Mediterranean civilization of Tartessus.

The tower is one of the five gate-towers of the ancient fortified city of Niebla, the Liblah of the Arab historians and the Ilipla2 of the classics, and local tradition carries the history of this, the main gate, and the city back to the destruction of Tartessus at the hands of Carthage. Certain it is that the town existed when the Sun was the deity of Tartessus, for each one of these gates opens 1 Strabo, III, 146 ff.

2 Strabo, III, 141 ff., Polybius, XI, 20, Livy, XXXV, 1, and Pliny, N.H. III, 1, 3, read, apparently, Ilipa, not Ilipla. Pliny, loc. cit., mentions another town, Ilipula. H. N. F.

at right angles to the great fortress wall-which still completely encircles the town-and has its outlet facing the rising sun.

These earthern walls, of which whole villages, including even edifices of some importance, are still constantly constructed, become extraordinarily hard in a short time under the burning Andalucian sun, while the proto-historic remains such as those of Niebla, and Seville also, are indestructible by any means short of dynamite. I had a skilled stonecutter at work a whole month opening a window in the wall of my tower, which when it cameinto my possession had no light and no ventilation. Both the great archways leading one into and the other out of the town had been built up by the peasant families who had lived in its shelter for hundreds of years, leaving only a small door to obtain access. In the middle of the wall we found, near the remains of some of the wooden pegs and a cord of esparto grass used to support the boards which confined the earth, a section of a very early flatbottomed plate with a sun symbol traced on it in metallic lustrematerial evidence of the height of civilization attained by the primitive inhabitants of Andalucia.

The construction of the fortress walls of Seville-now regarded as built over the remains of the lost city of Tharsis-is precisely similar to that of Niebla. These walls and the Alcazar, the palace of the rulers of Spain throughout history, are built of beaten earth on foundations of Cyclopean work five meters deep, and parts of the actual palace walls are no less than five meters thick. Behind the Renaissance façade of the garden front of the magnificent hall known as the Salon of the Emperor Charles V., because it was redecorated for his wedding, a stretch of the Arabic façade has been found, and behind this again General Tavira, Governor of the Palace, has discovered quite recently the primitive stone front of the original building with Iberian signs, doubtless mason's marks, on several of the stones. Very little of the original building is now visible, for the walls naturally have been faced again and again in the course of so many centuries; but in the palace gardens may yet be seen the remains of a massive tower in its primitive condition, and in the beaten earth of which it is constructed bits of Stone Age pottery have been discovered. The true history of the Alcazar of Seville will only be written when the extensive investigations set on foot by King Alfonso and superintended with keen interest by General Tavira reach the vast extent of subterranean chambers and galleries yet to be

opened up beneath the Arabic palace which was built by Motamidibn-Abbad in the eleventh century on what then remained of the five-meter thick outer walls overlooking the junction of the Guadalquivir and the Guadaira. Then we may hope to learn more about the proto-historic or Mediterranean civilization of the Iberian race, which has preserved, together with its irrigation systems, its methods of construction, and the details of its agricultural science, the tradition

of its sacerdotal garments and the racial type of its women in a series of sculptures and paintings unique in Christian

art.

Although the Southwest of Spain was cut off from the march of northern Romanic art down to the reconquest in the thirteenth century, it is a mistake to suppose that religious art here developed solely along Mohammedan lines. In Arabic Spain (Chapter I, 'Christianity under Islam') evidence of unimpeachable authority will be found that Andalucia always had a Christian art of her own, nurtured and developed by thousands of Andalucian Christians (Mozarabs) who lived here and practised their religion right down to the coming of the Almohades, or Moors of Morocco, as distinct from the Arabs from the East, in the second half of the twelfth century. So powerful was the Christian element in all this region that the Christians were able to retain their own rite, their churches and their priests, until the reconquest in 1248, even the bishops having held their sees in many cases until close to that event. Curious relics of the ancient Isidorian or Hispalian (Mozarabic) rite persist to this day in the Cathedral services at Seville, to the bewilderment of Catholics from other countries.1 1Cf. Glorias Sevillanas, by Don Manuel Serrano y Ortega.

To convince ourselves whence sprang the art of these Andalucian Christians, true to their faith through so many centuries of

FIGURE 2.-THE "LADY OF ELCHE"
RECONSTRUCTED BY DON JOSE PIZJOAN.
(By permission from the Burlington Magazine,
November, 1912.)

alien pressure, we need only compare the sculptured Virgin of Carmel (Fig. 1) with the "Lady of Elche" (Fig. 2). The general cast of the countenance, the peculiarly stately poise of the head, and the beautiful shape of the oval heavy-lidded eyes, proclaim the survival of a racial type.

The alabaster image of Our Lady of Carmel was found, together with a church bell, in digging for the foundations of a new convent for the Carmelite nuns of Seville in 1414 or 1415.1 On the secularization of this convent in the last century, the image was given into the charge of the Hieronymites of Buena Vista, on the bank of the Guadalquivir a mile out of the city, and when this monastery in its turn suffered the same fate, the exquisite statue was taken to the church of San Lorenzo, together with two sets of embroidered vestments of the fifteenth century. At San Lorenzo I had the good fortune to see it before it was placed on the altar where it now stands. Thus I was able to make a detailed study of

the dress (now, alas, hidden under heavy draperies of velvet and satin, according to the religious mode in Seville today), although I could not get the modern crowns and adjuncts removed.