Iberia - Iconosphere of Religious Otherness: The “Sodomitic Moor” in 16th-Century Spanish Painting

Abstract

This text proposes a genealogy of the trope of the “Sodomitic Moor” in medieval Iberian culture and its consolidation from the Modern Age onwards, coinciding with the imperialist/colonialist expansion towards America. The object of the study are the literary sources that describe the martyrdom of Saint Pelagius in the 10th century (Raguel and Rosvita of Gandersheim) and the visual representations of the same subject in the 16th-century Spanish painting, specifically the images that make up the altarpiece of Saint Pelagius painted by Master of Becerril, which is now in Malaga’s Cathedral. The analysis of the sources will be carried out considering the contributions of queer theory to the study of medieval Iberian cultures through authors such as Mark Jordan or Gregory Hutchenson. As for the visual analysis, the text reviews the historiography of Spanish art history on the images that make up this altarpiece, as well as other contributions such as Francisco de Holanda’s theory of painting, the persecutions for sodomy that were consolidated at the end of the 15th century with the approval of the Pragmatic against Sodomy by the Catholic monarchs, or the principle of ‘interconnected Otherness’ defined by Victor Stoichita, which allows us to understand how the Muslim religious Other is interconnected with the racialized Indian Other from the end of the 15th century onwards.