Adoration of the Magi
Spain (1465-1480)
Book of Hours, MS M.854 fol. 90v - Images from Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts - The Morgan Library & Museum
Seville, Spain at the height of the Renaissance bustled like a chocolate city–to borrow from Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson‘s masterful work that defines “chocolate cities” as Black enclaves and neighborhoods. Seville embodied this definition extremely well. The city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere, global economic glory, and, at other times, its rampant structural corruption, earned it the ignominious epithet of the “Great Babylon.” For example, literary works such as Lope de Vega’s play Servir a señor discreto (1610/1615) and Luis Vélez de Guevara’s prose work El Diablo cojuelo (1641) refer to Seville as the “Gran Babilonia de España.” The short-skit interlude Los mirones (attributed to Cervantes, 1623), for instance, casts Seville as the ancient Assyrian “Nínive,” another kind of Babylon, whose infinite Black population’s African diasporic cultural presence and languages reverberated in the streets of the Santa María de la Blanca neighborhood.
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Diego Velázquez Portrait of Juan de Pareja Spain (c. 1650) Oil on canvas; 81.3 cm × 69.9 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Initial S: The Baptism of a Moor
Artist Unknown
Vidal de Canellas, Feudal Customs of Aragon
Northeastern Spain, about 1290-1310
JPGM, Ms. Ludwig XIV 6 (83.MQ.165), fol. 242v
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo Three Boys Spain (c. 1670) Oil on canvas, 168.3 x 109.8 cm Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
Paintings of the Virgin of Montserrat (images of statue +more info at link), submitted via Twitter
Gorgeous stonework from Ávila Cathedral (12th Century), featuring an Adoration of the Magi scene. submission via twitter.
submission via Twitter
[placard reads: Diego Velázquez, Spanish, (1599-1660). Kitchen Scene, 1618/20. Oil on Canvas. This is one of a number of strikingly naturalistic scenes that Diego Velázquez painted at the beginning of his career, before he left his native Seville for Madrid. The picture has suffered abrasion over time, with the areas of dark paint being more damaged than the light highlights. Another version of the subject in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, includes a biblical episode, The Supper at Emmaus, in the background. This narrative lends a moralizing solemnity to the simple objects and serving girl that are the. main subject. Such a background vignette was probably never part of the Art Institute’s picture.]
[mod note]
Paolo Veronese
The Finding of Moses
Italy (1580)
Oil on canvas, 57 x 43 cm.
This scene from the Old Testament (Exodus II, 5-6) depicts the moment when the Pharaoh´s daughter and her ladies-in-waiting remove from the Nile River the basket in which baby Moses was placed by his Hebrew mother in order to save him from the slaughter of boy children ordered by that ruler.
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Adoration of the Kings
Spain (1613)
Oil on canvas, 315 x 174.5 cm.
Netherlands/Spain (1628)
This painting was commissioned to represent the hope of peace between Spain and the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. The meetings and negotiations that took place in Antwerp in 1608-9 resulted in the Twelve Years' Truce. Preparatory sketches for this work include Head of a Black Man:
medievalpoc reblogged
🔵 Here’s a little BLUESDAY inspiration from our Arts of the Americas collection, currently on view in Infinite Blue.
The blue background of these twelve portraits of Inca kings could have been produced with a variety of pigments that were available in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the eighteenth century: Prussian blue, from Germany; indigo, from the Americas; and smalt, imported from Europe.
In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the choice of a blue background for these portraits was strategic, elevating the subjects as blue did in European paintings of rulers and nobles. Following the European tradition, Cuzco’s surviving Inca aristocracy likely commissioned these portraits to document their royal heritage and thus legitimize their political and social authority.
Unknown. 14 Portraits of Inca Kings, mid-18th century (probably). Oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum
This is one of my favorite series of portraits!!! Also, a fabulous and fascinating addition to the “Blue” tag here. Perhaps “Bluesday” is something I should start doing here...
Samuel ibn Naghrīla was an eleventh-century Hebrew poet in the Spanish city of Granada. Like many Jewish poets of his day, he wrote in a style of poetry that had been adopted from Arabic poetics in the tenth century and that, by his lifetime, was flourishing amongst Hebrew-language writers and was simply the way to write poetry in Spain. It wasn’t seen as something foreign even though its origins were in the poetic tradition of another language. Samuel was the nagid, or head of the Jewish community, as well as a high-ranking vizier to the Muslim emir of the city-state of Granada. His known in historical sources as “twice the vizier,” which refers to his twin prowess in poetry and in military leadership. The research done by my doctoral advisor at Cornell, Ross Brann, has shown that Samuel was largely held in esteem by his contemporaries; and even when he is the object of religious polemic, these are largely superficial charges that simply conform to the rhetorical standards of the day and by conforming to those standards, authors could actually indicate their esteem for Samuel in between the lines.
1800s Week!
A Tangerian Beauty
Spain (1876)
“A Tangerian Beauty is a splendid example of Tapiro Baró’s North African ethnographic types that showcase the artist’s skill and remarkable attention to detail. In this vivid watercolor, the silken gleam of the headscarf, colorful feathers, the glint of gold, glow of pearls, elaborate costume, and the careful study of a particular physiognomy contribute to the remarkable immediacy of the image. The frame is original to this work, and apart from several decorative motifs, contains the number 1309, which probably refers to the Muslim Hijri calendar, which started counting in 622 AD to commemorate the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina. If converted to the Gregorian calendar, the year would be about 1891 AD.”
-Dahesh Museum of Art
If you can read Spanish, this is a very interesting article about a documentary illustrating the cultural influence of African peoples on Spain, with a particular focus on musical traditions. I’ve done a translation of a small portion to English here:
"They were part of the culture that forced them to be here. There was slavery, colonization and now, immigration. We have to break that barrier of separation between Africa and southern Europe that has been created without understanding that we have values and shared history," muses Miguel Rosales, director of the documentary Gurumbé: Songs of your Black Memory, with the intention that the public ensconced in the present, in the political and cultural sphere, (understand the) legacy and consequences of the enslavement of Black peoples in Spain.