Images of Discord: Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Felipe Pereda, and: Crime and Illusion: The Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age by Felipe Pereda

Abstract

Reviewed by: Images of Discord: Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Felipe Pereda, and: Crime and Illusion: The Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age by Felipe Pereda Adam Jasienski Felipe Pereda. Images of Discord: Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in Fifteenth-Century Spain. Translated by Consuelo López-Morillas. HARVEY MILER, 2018. 312 PP. Crime and Illusion: The Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age. Translated by Consuelo López-Morillas. HARVEY MILLER, 2018. 336 PP. LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN SPAIN was rife with religious tensions as it transformed from a multiconfessional society into Europe’s “most Catholic” monarchy. Felipe Pereda’s two books argue that the reverberations of that process affected the appearance and ontology of the idiosyncratic image types produced across the Iberian Peninsula. Images of Discord was published in Spanish in 2007, ten years before the Spanish original of Crime and Illusion, published in 2017 (both with Marcial Pons). Images, divided into three parts, deals primarily with the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; Crime with the sixteenth and seventeenth, across eight [End Page 169] chapters and an afterword. Each stands on its own, but many of the major themes explored in the first recur in, or inform, the second. In Images, Pereda describes how the rulers and institutions of late medieval Spain came to grips with the complexities of managing a society composed of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and recent converts to Christianity from the latter two groups. Because Islam and Judaism were, in general, aniconic (either explicitly forbidding or discouraging figural representation in religious contexts), Pereda’s focus on images—which mediated relationships between different faith communities, the establishment, and God—brings those complexities into particular relief. However, Western Christianity had not yet articulated the kind of definitive doctrine regarding religious imagery developed in Byzantium following the earlier iconoclastic upheavals there. Ambiguities, misconceptions, and conflicting interpretations were therefore rampant. Against this backdrop, Pereda dedicates part 1 of Images (“Justifying Images”) to typologies of religious imagery: devotional, didactic, and cultic, the latter often miraculous. Pereda notes that, in practice, any attempt to organize images along such clear-cut lines is impossible, revealing his sensitivity to discordances between official ecclesiastical proscriptions and how images functioned in practice. Furthermore, the Spanish Church did not, in actuality, present a unified front on these issues: certain theologians believed that images should exclusively serve didactic functions, while others saw in them a potent “sacramental” power (51). This approach posited that sacred images possessed something of the divine, akin to the Eucharist, which, through transubstantiation, actually became the body of Christ. Pereda convincingly argues that these discrepancies were exacerbated by the ethno-religious conflict that plagued the region, granting prominence, both here and in Crime, to the historical prejudices that catalyzed much of the transformation underway in the period. In part 2 of Images (“The Byzantinization of Images”), Pereda examines the Sevillian cult of the Virgin of La Antigua, using it to introduce the notion of the “Byzantinization” of religious imagery (74). He shows that Eastern icons—the scale of which was well suited to private worship and which claimed to be authoritative images of the holy figures they depicted— impacted the Iberian Peninsula’s religious and visual culture to a greater degree than previously understood. This part explores the purposeful stylistic anachronism of numerous religious images and the appearance in Spain of iconographies such as the Hodegetria (a type of representation of the Virgin and Child), as well as of worship typically associated with the Eastern Church. In doing so, it challenges a teleological progression from premodern image to modern, self-conscious art object and the untenable narrative of early modern secularization it relies on (exemplified by Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, U of Chicago P, 1997). In part 3, “The Image Industry,” Pereda focuses on the recently capitulated city of Granada in the final decade of the fifteenth century, whose Muslim population initially received wide-reaching concessions, including religious freedoms. Within just a few years, however, many of these rights were impinged upon, resulting in forced baptisms and the...