In 1982 Bernard Reilly's revisionist study of the reign of Queen Urraca (d.1126) transformed the reputation of that neglected and maligned monarch.[1] Until then she had been known mainly for her failed marriage to Alfonso I of Aragón and for the civil war that followed, but Reilly demonstrated that she was a competent ruler who did any much as any ruler could have done at that time to further the fortunes of León and Castile and to lay foundations for the extremely successful reign of Urraca's son, Alfonso VII. Therese Martin's book builds on that groundwork in order to rehabilitate Urraca as a patron of the arts and, in particular, assigns to her the re-building of the church of San Isidoro in the city of León and the wall paintings in its Pantheon. She maintains that "the significance of San Isidoro within its historical context becomes clear only when we recognize Queen Urraca as its major patron" and that she "rebuilt San Isidoro to fortify her unique position as a queen who ruled in her own right." (2)
The patronage of these elements of San Isidoro has traditionally been attributed to older or younger members of Urraca's family, and thus this re-attribution entails some re-dating. Martin concurs with the majority of scholars in accepting that Queen Urraca's grandparents, Fernando I and his queen Sancha, founded the first palatine-monastic complex dedicated to San Isidoro in 1063. Likewise she allows that Queen Urraca's aunt, known as the Infanta Urraca (d.1101), was responsible for building the structure known today as the Pantheon, the vaulted palace rooms above and the first campaign of the new church. However, she disagrees both with those, including myself,[2] who believe that the wall paintings were also commissioned by the Infanta Urraca (c.1100) and with those who assign them to the much later period of 1164-88. Therese Martin uses the iconography of the paintings to date them very precisely to 1109 and to link them with Queen Urraca instead of her aunt.
Martin's main hypothesis, however, relates to the rebuilding of the church of San Isidoro that has traditionally been attributed either to Queen Urraca's daughter Sancha, born before 1095, or to her son King Alfonso VII (b.1105 ), or to both in concert. Martin uses archaeological and architectural evidence to propose new, earlier, dates for the church construction, which would place it firmly within Queen Urraca's reign. She also argues strongly that ascribing this initiative to Queen Urraca makes historical sense. As a female ruler her authority was always potentially in question and even more so after the failure of her marriage. The legitimacy of Urraca's position as Queen in her own right relied on her pedigree, which was expressed concretely in the burials at San Isidoro.
The book is structured in seven chapters. The first explores attitudes towards Queen Urraca held by medieval chroniclers and more recent historians prior to her rehabilitation and emphasises the need to clear away these accretions. The second summarises the evidence for the foundation of San Isidoro and its early history. It highlights Queen Sancha as the first of four generations of women patrons at San Isidoro, followed by the Infanta Urraca, Queen Urraca and the Infanta Sancha. Therese Martin maintains that each "revealed how she wanted the ruler to be seen whether husband, brother or herself" in the building and decoration of San Isidoro. In furtherance of this theory, she uses the Historia Silense, possibly written at San Isidoro in the reign of Queen Urraca, and other texts to build a case for Queen Sancha having almost sole responsibility for the foundation. She asserts that Sancha, although she was married to her brother's conqueror, was in such a strong position that she "took an active stance to prevent her line from being extinguished by redirecting its continuity through her self and her husband" (30). and put forward the idea of a new royal chapel that placed Fernando I clearly as the legitimate heir of the old Leonese line. This principle of female power exerted through patronage pervades Martin's text, but, in this instance at least, Queen Sancha's exact role is unclear. The Historia Silense certainly credits her with persuading Fernando I to build the church for his burial, but it does not say that she had a role in the execution. Like the royal women who followed her at San Isidoro, Sancha held the infantazgo and with it oversight of the monastery, but it is uncertain whether the infantazgo was a genuine source of power for the women who possessed it or a merely a mechanism for holding property, in the gift of the King, that carried with it a responsibility for the deceased members of the dynasty.
The third chapter continues the theme by considering Queen Urraca's aunt, the Infanta Urraca, and her devotion to the foundation of San Isidoro and to her brother King Alfonso VI. One of Martin's major contentions, developed in this chapter and in chapter five, is that the "Pantheon" is not structurally a narthex and that it was not designed as a liturgical or burial space. The configuration of tombs that is recorded in the sixteen century is doubtless, as Rocio S?nchez has said,[3] the result of a set of reburials c.1223, which reflected a fashion for such translations as a manifestation of lineage. However, it is difficult to accept Martin's assertion that the "Pantheon" was a secular space: an atrium built for petitioners waiting for an audience with the monarch, who was, after all, only infrequently in residence. She makes a comparison with the layout of the twelfth-century palace at Senlis,[4] drawing particular attention to the area in front of its palatine chapel and below the royal tribune, but Senlis was a royal palace and not a palatine-monastic complex like San Isidoro. Martin's case seems to me to be weakest when she turns to consider the frescoes in the Pantheon. She contends that they were directed at Queen Urraca's courtiers "as reminders of her legitimacy." She dates the paintings to 1109 because of the inclusion of St George, who was thought to have appeared at the battle of Alcozar in Aragón in 1096. Martin argues that 1109 was the only year in which Queen Urraca and Alfonso I were sufficiently harmoniously married for an Aragonese reference to be included. However, St George was growing in popularity in many different areas around that time and it was not surprising that San Isidoro tried to claim him as well. Otherwise Martin's argument concentrates on one extremely damaged painting located on the south wall of the Pantheon, above the doorway that leads to the palace rooms above, below a depiction of the Flight into Egypt and beside one of the Adoration of the Magi. It is usually considered to have been a representation of the Presentation in the Temple, but Martin proposes that the seated male figure that can still be discerned depicts Alfonso VI and that the female figure leaning towards him is Queen Urraca. There is, however, no evidence to support this interpretation. Despite these efforts to find secular references in the paintings, they remain a remarkable cycle of the life of Christ from his infancy to his Crucifixion and beyond to his Apocalyptic role. Even if readers prefer not to accept my own liturgical reading, which is not fully addressed in Martin's account, it is difficult to deny that this decoration denotes a sacred and not a secular space. If the secular argument does not stand, it is doubtful whether the inclusion of St George is sufficient to re-date the cycle and to reassign the patronage of the paintings to Queen Urraca.
In addition to accepting the Infanta Urraca's role in building the Pantheon, Martin also supports the view that, in the late 1090s, the Infanta began to replace the palatine chapel with a much expanded new church. She agrees with Serafin Moralejo's analysis that the masons who worked on the new church were not those who had built and carved the capitals in the Pantheon, and she notes that there are no mason's marks in the Pantheon but that they are found in both campaigns of the church. Whereas the sculptors of the Pantheon may have been French, the first sculptors of the church, whose carving included the Lamb Portal, were an indigenous workshop that had worked on Frómista, San Zoilo de Carrión and Jaca cathedral. The work completed in this first campaign included the east end as far as the crossing, and, if it had proceeded as planned, Martin suggests that the church would have had no transepts and a wooden roof, looking rather like San Pedro de las Due?as. She identifies a clear masonry break in the angle of the north wall, at the beginning of the third bay west of the crossing, and it is there that she sees the change from the work completed at the east end under the Infanta Urraca to that sponsored by Queen Urraca.
The heart of the argument for Queen Urraca's patronage of the church is contained in chapter four. Here Martin proposes that Queen Urraca was responsible for completing the final four bays of the nave, for the transepts and for replacing the side apses at the east end. Martin dates this second phase of the construction to 1110-1124 using stylistic analysis and written sources. She links the later sculpture at San Isidoro with the finest sculpture at Santiago de Compostela that Serafin Moralejo believed was produced by sculptors who left Santiago around 1112. She then uses an analysis of mason's marks and other archaeological evidence to confirm the two campaigns and to propose a date of 1124 for completion of the new church. The year of 1124 has usually been taken as the date of completion of the first phase, but Martin points out that the stone on which the date is carved has a volute-shaped mason's mark that otherwise appears only at the later west end of the building. She argues that the stone was moved from the west end of church to its present position, that originally it marked the completion of the second and final campaign, and that, therefore, the re-building was completed within Queen Urraca's reign. Martin's meticulous analysis of the structure of the church and the work of its masons is impressive, and she may be correct in re-assigning the patronage of this important church. However, it remains possible that the continuation of the re-building of the church took place primarily at the behest of her daughter the Infanta Sancha, who would have been at least thirty by the time of the putative completion date. There is no documentary or chronicle evidence to support Queen Urraca's close involvement with the building project, and it may be significant that Queen Urraca's only recorded donation to San Isidoro was made jointly with her daughter the Infanta Sancha in 1117.[5] This would not mean that San Isidoro and its dynastic associations were not important to Queen Urraca, merely that she delegated this concern to others, above all to her daughter, the Infanta Sancha, who was about fifteen years of age at the beginning of her mother's reign. Under this model Queen Urraca would have used the institutions of San Isidoro at arms' length, whilst she was busy with governance and military campaigns, and, in other words, acted like a male ruler. The sixth chapter of the book deals with the later history of San Isidoro and the work undertaken by the Infanta Sancha and Alfonso VII, but I think that it consistently undervalues her daughter's contribution to the church by seeing her main achievement as the handing over of the monastery to the Augustinians in 1148.
The last chapter returns to a historical evaluation of Queen Urraca and undertakes a brief comparison of her position with that of two other queens who ruled in their own right: Matilda of England (d.1167) and Melisende of Jerusalem (d.1161). These comparative cases are interesting, but they do not add a great deal to the argument as their situations were in many ways quite different. These separate chapters all contribute to the central contention and present important evidence but I cannot help feeling that the book is not entirely coherent. Despite Therese Martin's manifest careful and rigorous architectural analysis, her argument for Queen Urraca as a patron is engaging but not absolutely compelling. The apparatus of the book is thorough, and very useful appendices record the sculpture of the capitals in the church and the masons" marks. The illustrations are black and white except for nineteen colour plates of the wall paintings. The quality of the plates could have been higher, but the number of plates, one hundred and five in all, is extremely generous.
NOTES [1] Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) [2] Rose Walker "The wall-paintings of the Panteón de los Reyes: a cycle of intercession", Art Bulletin, 82/2 (2000), 200-225. [3] Rocio S?nchez Almeijeiras, "The Eventful Life of the Royal Tombs of San Isidoro de León, Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams, eds. Therese Martin and Julie A. Harris (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005) 479-520. [4] Jean Mesqui, Ch?teaux et enceintes de la France m?dievale: de la d?fense ? la residence, vol 2, (Paris: Picard, 1993) 22-24. [5] Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 125.