Medieval Art and Culture: Byzantine, Islamic, Romanesque and Gothic
Medieval Art and Culture covers Byzantine, Islamic, Romanesque and Gothic. The paper asks you to identify a building's structural system and explain how structure produces a particular kind of image and light, and, in Spain, to handle the overlap of Christian, Islamic and Mudéjar traditions without collapsing them into one label.
Byzantine
Dome on pendentives over a square bay (Hagia Sophia, 537), centralized or Greek-cross plan, gold-ground mosaic, the Theotokos and Pantocrator types; iconoclasm (726-843) and the later theological defence of the icon.
Islamic
Hypostyle prayer hall with qibla wall, mihrab and minbar; minaret; horseshoe arch, muqarnas, sebka latticework and arabesque, aniconic ornament. The Aljafería in Zaragoza (second half of the 11th century, Taifa court) is the key Aragonese residential palace, with arcaded courtyards and carved stucco.
Romanesque
Thick masonry walls, small windows, barrel vault, groin vault and transverse arches; pilgrimage plan with ambulatory and radiating chapels; portal tympanum with Pantocrator and Tetramorph; historiated capitals. Jaca cathedral (from c. 1076) spreads the crismón and the ajedrezado jaqués, a checkerboard framing motif, along the Camino de Santiago.
Gothic
Pointed arch, rib vault and flying buttress take the thrust outward, allowing thin walls, large windows, stained glass and rose windows; three-portal façades; naturalism and the S-curve in sculpture. La Seo of Zaragoza and Toledo cathedral are the standard Spanish cases.
Mudéjar
Christian architecture built by Muslim craftsmen using Islamic techniques: brick, sebka, glazed ceramic, wooden ceilings. UNESCO listed the Mudéjar of Teruel in 1986 and of Zaragoza in 2001 (La Seo's Parroquieta wall, San Pablo, the Teruel towers).
Worked example
Compare the Aljafería with the tower of San Martín in Teruel. Both use horseshoe arches, brick and geometric ornament, so a weak answer calls both Islamic. The correct reading: the Aljafería is an Islamic palace for a Muslim Taifa ruler, its forms serving court ceremony and leisure; San Martín is a Christian bell tower whose Islamic grammar serves a parish and a municipal skyline. Same visual language, different religion and function.
Traps
- Calling Mudéjar Islamic art.
- Attributing rib vaults or pointed arches to Romanesque.
- Mixing the Pantocrator with the Crucifixion as a tympanum theme.
- Forgetting that Byzantine iconoclasm shaped later icon programmes.