Pre-romanesque art

Curious98 · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 4:54 pm Post subject: Pre-romanesque art

contin ued:

Mozarabic art, art of mixed Arab-Spanish heritage made by the Mozarabs, the Christians under the Islamic rule.

The Mozarabs (in Spanish: mozárabes; in Portuguese: moçárabes; from Arabic: musta'rib, “arabicized”) were Iberian Christians who lived under Muslim rule in Al-Andalus. Their descendants remained unconverted to Islam, but did however adopt elements of Arabic language and culture

As Christians were regarded by the Muslims as dhimmi or tolerated non-Muslims living under the rule of a Muslim government, they and Jews were allowed among Muslims if they paid the jizyah, a personal tax.

As the universal nature of Roman law was eroded, most ethnic groups in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages expected to be judged by their own judges, under their own law: Mozarabs had their own tribunals and authorities.

Some of them held high offices in Muslim courts. Conversion to Islam was encouraged, but not demanded under the tolerant regime of the Ummayad caliphs and emirs of Córdoba. Apostasy, however, for one who had been raised as a Muslim or had embraced Islam, was a crime punishable by death.

Until the mid-ninth century, relations between Muslims and the Christian population of al-Andalus, still in the majority, were cordial. Christian resistance to the first wave of Muslim conquerors was unsuccessful. In Murcia, a single surviving capitulation document must stand for many such agreements to render tribute in exchange for the protection of a traditional liberties; in it, Theodomirus (Todmir in Arabic), count of Orihuela agrees to recognize Abd al-Aziz as overlord and to pay tribute consisting of a yearly cash payment supplemented with specific agricultural products.

In exchange, Theodomir received Abd al-Aziz' promise to respect both his property and his jurisdiction in the province of Murcia (Wolf). There was no change in the composition of the people on the land, and in cases like this one, even their Visigothic lords remained.

In the generations that followed the conquest, Muslim rulers promulgated new statutes clearly disadvantagous to dhimmi. The construction of new churches and the sounding of church bells were eventually forbidden.

But when Eulogius recorded the martyrology of the Martyrs of Cordoba during the decade after 850, it was apparent that at least four Christian basilicas remained in the city, including the church of St. Acisclus that had sheltered the only holdouts in 711, and nine monasteries and convents in the city and its environs (Wolf); nevertheless, their existence soon became precarious.

Restrictions that forbade Christians to occupy any position in control of Muslims did encourage Christian slaves to gain their freedom by declaring conversion to islam; this had a dampening effect on Christian position in the social structure. Eulogius comments repeatedly on the burdensome tax that Christians bore.

Eulogius' writings documenting stories of the Cordoba martyrs of 851-59, encouraged by him to defy Muslim authorities with blasphemies and embrace martyrdom, contrast these Christians with the earlier official Christianity of Reccared, by Visigothic, the previous bishop of Cordoba, who counseled tolerance and mutual forbearance with the Muslim authorities.

However, Christians became increasingly alienated not only because they could not build new churches or ring church bells, but primarily because they were excluded from most positions of political, military, or social authority and suffered many other indignities as unequals under the Islamic law. By the mid-ninth century, as the episode of the Córdoba martyrs reveals, there was a clear Christian opposition against the systematic pressure by a variety of legal and financial instruments of Islam, resisting their conversion and absorption into Muslim culture.

The initial official reaction to the Córdoba martyrs was to round up and imprison the leaders of the Christian community. Towards the end of the decade of the martyrs, Eulogius' martyrology begins to record the closing of Christian monasteries and convents, which to Muslim eyes had proved to be a hotbed of disruptive fanaticism rather than a legitimate response against a slow but systematic elimination of Christianity.

As previously with the Muslims, so as the Reconquista advanced, the Mozarabs integrated into the Christian kingdoms, where the kings privileged those who settled the frontier lands. They also migrated North in times of persecution.
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During the early stages of Romance language development in Iberia, a set of closely-related Romance dialects was spoken in Muslim areas of the Peninsula by the general population.

These are known as the Mozarabic language, though there never was a common standard.
This archaic Romance language is first documented in writing in the Peninsula in the form of choruses (kharjas) in Arabic and Hebrew lyrics called muwashshahs. As they were written in Arabic alphabet (aljamiado), the vowels have had to be reconstructed.
Mozarab had a significant impact in the formation of Portuguese, Spanish and Valencian Catalan, transmitting to these many words of Andalusi Arabic origin. The northward migration of Mozarabs explains the presence of Arabic toponyms in places where the Muslim presence didn't last long.

The cultural language of Mozarabs continued to be Latin, but as time passed, young Mozarabs studied and even excelled at Arabic.

The Mozarabs remained apart from the influence of French monks and conserved in their masses the Visigothic rite, also known as the Mozarabic rite. The Christian kingdoms of the north, though, changed to the Latin rite (Castile in 1080) and appointed northerners as bishops for the reconquered sees.

Nowadays, the Mozarabic rite is allowed by a papal privilege at the Mozarab Chapel of the Cathedral of Toledo, where it is held daily. Poor Clare Nuns church in Madrid, La Inmaculada y San Pascual, also holds weekly Mozarabic masses. A Mozarab brotherhood is still active in Toledo.

Conversion to Islam opened new social horizons to Mozarabs. Some Christian authorities (Alvaro of Cordoba and Eulogius) were scandalized at how the young ones preferred the Arabic culture and language and, in 851, tried to raise confrontation by publicly offending Islam. They expected that, by becoming martyrs, they would draw attention to the conflict. There were executions of Christians until 11 March 859. The Islamic authorities, however, often chose to consider them as madmen, thus deflecting tensions.

The Mozarab Missal of Silos is the oldest Western manuscript on paper, written in the eleventh century

Repopulation art (Spanish, arte de repoblación), art on the increasing Christian frontierlands. Most of the formerly called Mozarabic buildings receive nowadays also this denomination.

The art and architecture of the Repoblación refers to the creative works, predominantly architectural, which accompanied the expansion of the Asturian population into the valley of the Duero in the ninth and tenth centuries. As an art period it is subset of the preromanesque in Spain.

In Catalonia and Aragón, a style ancestral to the Romanesque developed early in parallel with the region of Lombardy and it has become common to refer the formerly called late Catalan Pre-Romanesque as "first Romanesque" after the suggestions of Josep Puig i Cadafalch.

One of the first streams of Romanesque architecture in Europe in the end of 10th century and the beginning of 11th century is called First Romanesque or Lombard Romanesque. It took place in the Lombardy (Northern Italy), in the regions of Girona, Lleida and Huesca (the Spanish Mark), and in the south of France. Its principal decoration for the exterior, bands of ornamental blind arches are called lombard bands. It was characterized by thick walls and lack of sculpture in facades, and with interiors profusely painted with frescoes.

Catalan architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch suggested that what was formerly considered the late form of Pre-Romanesque architecture of Catalonia and Aragón bore features of Romanesque and thus classified it as First Romanesque (primer romànic).

Claude