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Javier E

Prado show examines how images helped fuel centuries of antisemitism in Spain | Spain |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...os-medieval-spain-prado-madrid

spain anti-Semitism images prado exhibition culture history

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Taken together, they chronicle the shifting lenses through which Spain’s Catholics saw the country’s Jewish population between 1285 and 1492. As the title suggests, the show also explores how, as time went on, Catholic Spain propagated the otherness of its Jewish inhabitants as a means to affirm, forge and galvanise a Christian identity. “The relationship between the Christian and Jewish communities in the middle ages is one of the key themes in the history of our country,” said Miguel Falomir, director of the Prado. “If ever there was an exhibition that showed how vividly and eloquently images can be used, then this is it.”
  • Noble portrayals of Old Testament prophets give way to depictions of Jews as wilfully blind – and often literally blindfolded – before the divinity of Christ. By the late 13th century, something more sinister is under way: an illuminated parchment created around 1280 shows a Jew stealing an icon of the Virgin Mary in Constantinople and dropping it into a latrine. The offending Jew is killed by the devil, but the icon survives its fetid dip and remains fragrant, thereby prompting the local Jewish community to convert to Catholicism.
  • Fast forward 100 years and an altarpiece shows a Jew – who has been given a communion wafer by a Christian woman hoping to get back her pawned dress – profaning the bleeding, if miraculously resilient, host. According to the exhibition’s curator, Joan Molina, head of Spanish Gothic art at the Prado, the increasingly “militant and virulent” brushstrokes came to mirror the beatings, hackings and burnings.
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  • “In the 14th century, there was a systemic violence against the Jews and that’s when we see series of images that are conceived as expressions of anti-Jewish feeling,” he said. “But we need to realise that they are above all a means of building Christian ideas and beliefs: they are images that underline and reinforce the Christian identity.”
manhefnawi

Madrid: City of The Enlightenment | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...madrid-city-enlightenment

Enlightenment Spain Architecture Culture

shared by manhefnawi on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • In 1785 Tomas Lopez, Royal Geographer to King Charles III and Spain's foremost cartographer, published his Piano Geometrico de Madrid
  • That Lopez should include on his map uncompleted structures is not surprising. Since the accession of Charles III (1759-88) to the throne of Spain and its extensive and increasingly prosperous overseas empire, much of Madrid had been turned into a dusty construction site.
  • Madrid had only been Spain's capital since 1561, when Philip II made what had been a town of purely secondary importance the political centre of his empire
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  • Despite its demographic growth, it remained throughout the old regime period a court city, dominated by the king's household and government and their interests, as well as by the courtiers and other nobles and commoners attracted by the prospect of jobs, pensions, good marriages and high status
  • The threat this implied to order inspired some of the most significant of the reforms undertaken under Charles III
  • Not surprisingly, when Charles III -who had lived in Italy since 1731 as Duke of Parma and, from 1734 to 1759, as the first Bourbon king of Naples - arrived in his capital for the first time since he left it as a young boy, he was depressed by almost all that he saw. His determination to impose change provided a major impetus for the coming reforms
  • To Charles III and his ministers they seemed unworthy of the greatness of the Spanish imperial monarchy. Equally significant, they seemed to reinforce too strongly the presence of the church in an era in which enlightened thought set out to undermine baroque religiosity and clerical influence in secular life
  • The Enlightenment was as varied and multifaceted in Spain as in most other European societies, the ideas and programmes of enlightened reformers moulded by differing social and cultural conditions
  • But the characteristics which most typified Enlightenment reform in Spain were - apart from the heavy the arts as means of improvement -the impetus it received from Charles III and most of his ministers and the significant role played by some noblemen
  • Only during the reaction of the 1790s against the excesses of the French Revolution did most progressive thinkers find themselves effectively hedged in by the ministers and inquisitors of the new king, Charles IV (1788-1808). Under Charles HI, however, the king and his family, his ministers, sundry aristocrats in Madrid and elsewhere, many clerics and royal officials and some men and women of the professional and commercial middle classes harboured reformist ideas and patronised broadly enlightened artists and writers
  • This culture of the wealthy, enlightened elite, so heavily gallicised and secular-minded, was increasingly alienated from the ordinary people of Madrid, as well as the more traditionalist middle and upper ranks who chose to play no role in enlightened society
  • High food prices and the shortage of necessities could easily spark riots, as they did in the spring of 1766. The so-called Esquilache uprising, named after the Sicilian-born minister who was a principal target of the crowd's anger, spread from Madrid to many cities across Spain
  • The Manzanares was canalised and the Municipal Charity Committee, devised by Armona, was so successful that Charles III ordered similar bodies to be set up elsewhere. Free primary schools, essentially vocational, were established in each neighbourhood
  • Charles III, who had added numerous important buildings to Naples and nearby towns during his years as king there, sought from his first months in Spain to enhance his new capital
  • Travellers describing the capital in the 1770s and 1780s were impressed by its well lit, clean and impeccably paved streets; by the Paseo del Prado, which became one of Europe's finest thoroughfares; and by most of the structures Charles III had had built
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