“The history of Spanish Romanesque sculpture might be graphically represented by taking a pen, full of ink, and tracing with it upon wet blotting paper, the road of St. James.” [1] With these words, in 1923, Arthur Kingsley Porter launched an enduring paradigm for the development of Romanesque sculpture in Christian-ruled Iberia. His ten-volume Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads so firmly established the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela as the primary conduit for artistic exchange in the region that, despite substantial critical reflection, it continues to underpin much scholarship and teaching on twelfth-century art in the northern Iberian kingdoms. [2]
Rose Walker’s book adds fuel to critique of the Pilgrimage Roads paradigm by demonstrating its failure to cope with the eclecticism and experimentality of medieval art produced in the Iberian Christian-ruled kingdoms during the long middle decades of the twelfth century. The corpus (if such it may be called) of sculptures, wall paintings, manuscripts, and luxury objects produced between the book’s specified endpoints of ca. 1110 and ca. 1170 does indeed resist traditional classification: these works are neither stylistically nor iconographically cohesive; they toggle between archaism and the invention of new forms; their incorporation of Roman and Andalusi spolia follows few discernible patterns; and many are obscured by later reworkings. The Pilgrimage Roads paradigm, forged in an era inclined toward generalized models rather than contextual specifics, clearly cannot explain them. Walker seeks to replace it with a plurality of alternative explanations that connect both the generation of artistic ideas and the movement of artists to complex, multidirectional networks of alliance that could be either religious or secular as well as corporate or individual. While some chapters of the book make this case more fully than others, all speak to the need to dislodge entrenched patterns of thought and rethink the framing of this complex material.
The book’s jumping-off point is the Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century assortment of texts related to Santiago and his shrine that, in Walker’s view, “exhibit a shared outlook, a love of collecting and assembling, and a delight in artifice” (3) with the works under consideration. The comparison is unexpected and appealing, although its impact is limited by the manuscript’s cursory introduction, which leaves the import of subsequent mentions dependent on the reader’s specialized knowledge. This is one of several instances in the book where a more generous introduction of key monuments and concepts might have boosted its accessibility for students, non-specialists, and specialists in other fields.
The book’s initial three chapters cohere in presenting monastic, ecclesiastical, and social networks as key to connecting patrons, artists, and works of art. The first addresses the engagement of the Burgundian Benedictine mother house of Cluny in the kingdom(s) of Castile and León, a topic well known to Iberianists but perhaps worth introducing more fully to other readers. A detailed historical examination of the ongoing exchange of donations, goods, and art objects between the mother house and its Iberian allies and dependencies suggests that these provided a conduit for artistic exchange well into the twelfth century.
The second chapter expands the project by exploring how royal gift exchange, the formation of confraternities, and the expansion of canons regular reinforced artistic connections among the Crown of Aragón, Navarre, Gascony, and Bordeaux. It too launches with a detailed discussion of regional social, political, and religious ties, here characterized a bit cryptically as “friendship circles.” The historical case for these connections seems strong, but their links to specific works of art remains under-supported by abbreviated and sometimes speculative re-readings of enigmatic ensembles such as the altar mosaics of Lescar Cathedral and the partly dispersed wall paintings of San Miguel de Gormaz, Santa Cruz de Maderuelo, and San Baudelio de Berlanga. The frequent inclusion of qualifiers such as “probably,” “it is possible that,” and “may have been,” reinforces how difficult it is to analyze these monuments in brief: most are fragmentary and dispersed partially or entirely in museum collections, and their longstanding iconographic challenges resist resolution in the space of a few pages.
The third chapter extends the scrutiny of “friendship circles” to canons regular, local nobility, and papal legates whose relationships reinforced the Aragón-Gascony axis. A nicely specific analysis of liturgical manuscripts in Huesca cathedral brings the role of the canons to light, although the number and diversity of the Aragonese and Navarrese sculptures that follow, which include facades at Leyre and Huesca, cloister capitals from Pamplona, the pier reliefs of Santo Domingo de Silos (arguably relevant despite the monastery’s location in Burgos), and an array of carved sarcophagi, limit what each can contribute to this argument.
The book’s second section comprises thematic chapters tied more loosely to the book’s main claim. A chapter on royal women and the infantado adds to important recent work on the topic by examining how two eccentric, heavily decorated cartularies, Tumbo A and the Liber Testamentorum, call attention to the agency of royal women whose property ownership and legal autonomy made them major players as patrons and consumers of art. Perhaps in part because here again the topic merits more than the few pages allotted it, the arguments regarding female agency in the Panteón de los Reyes of San Isidoro in León and other works associated with the Leonese dynasty, previously examined in depth by Therese Martin and others, remain under-developed. [3]
The next two chapters examine sculpted church facades, the first considering the addition of idiosyncratic new facades to existing churches in connection with changing institutional identities and the second analyzing the disordered sculptures of two famous facades at Santiago de Compostela and San Isidoro in León. Sweeping from Rodés and Ripoll in Catalunya to San Quirce in Burgos, Walker presents such unexpected choices as the incorporation of epigraphic elements evocative of scribal culture, the relocation of sculptures from other parts of the church, and the use of spoliated and classicizing forms in otherwise new facades as reinforcing a reinvented present through selective allusion to the past, an intriguing interpretation that leaves one hungry for a deeper look. The following chapter wisely eschews a full-scale attempt to resolve questions about the original design of Santiago’s Puerta de las Platerías, which may never be recovered, but it is surely correct to connect its assemblage of fragments of different dates, iconographies, and styles, like the far less dramatic resetting of the Puerta del Cordero of San Isidoro in León, to changing local agendas and preferences rather than mere participation in a “pilgrimage style.”
The perceived continuities of the Pilgrimage Roads model depend heavily on the concept of itinerant artists, traditionally envisioned as independent agents who traveled the routes in search of work. The book’s final chapter disputes this notion, arguing that the freedom to travel was rare given the ties of serfdom, indenture, or even enslavement under which many artisans pursued their craft in the twelfth century. The chapter’s historical overview of these various forms of unfreedom in medieval Iberia will surprise few readers these days, but the absence of artists from such documentation well might. Walker proposes to fill this gap with visual evidence, in the form of highly speculative interpretations of the many bound, chained, or otherwise encumbered figures represented in Iberian twelfth-century sculpture. One might agree that this imagery suggests an absorption with unfreedom as an artistic theme, but the rather postmodern assertion that they express the artists’ awareness of their own constraints seems a stretch.
The most welcome contribution of Art and Artifice is its encouragement to consider new frameworks for understanding the original, eclectic artmaking of Iberia’s northern kingdoms in the first two-thirds of the twelfth century. Its emphasis on the impact of social networks invites further unpacking, and it might respond well to new methodologies, such as Actor-Network Theory, that have been used by medievalists for similar projects. [4] The book’s chief limitation may be its scope. The effort to include and account for so many complex, diverse, and extensively published works in one volume often curtails what can be done with them: promising ideas may remain underdeveloped, visual analysis may slide into speculation, and historiography, despite the author’s long engagement in the literature of her field, necessarily becomes selective. Readers who do not already know all these monuments and their literature—and many who might want to read this book will not—may find this especially frustrating.
A further frustration must be laid at the feet of Boydell Press, and firmly. This is the poor quality and layout of the illustrations. Low contrast, limited value ranges, and visible pixelation render many images difficult to read, and the frequent placement of horizontal illustrations sideways on a blank page makes for awkward navigation. No author deserves this kind of under-investment, much less a seasoned scholar whose introduction explicitly states that “close visual analysis should be a constant” (8). Both author and readers deserve better.
In challenging the dominance of the Pilgrimage Roads paradigm, Art and Artifice should provoke those who study and teach the art of medieval Iberia to reflect on the assumptions that sometimes implicitly shape our field. If it does not resolve the many questions once obscured behind Porter’s juggernaut, it will surely invigorate the discourse by bringing them into the light.
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Notes:
1. A. Kingsley Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, vol. I (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1923), 181.
2. On Porter’s model, see Janice A. Mann, Romanesque Architecture and Its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000-1120 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2009), 7-45; for a recent critique, see Lucía Rodríguez Navarro, “A Century of Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. Rivers of Europe entering the land of the sons of Cain,” Critical Inquiries in Medieval Culture (published online Dec. 28, 2023):1-16; https://doi.org/10.5817/CIMC2023-3.
3. Therese Martin, Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2006); eadem, “Fuentes de potestad para reinas e infantas: el infantazgo en los siglos centrales de la Edad Media,” Anuarios de estudios medievales 46, no. 1 (2016): 97-136.
4. E.g., Amanda R. Luyster, “Reassembling Textile Networks: Treasuries and Re-collecting Practices in Thirteenth-Century England,” Speculum 96, no. 4 (October 2021): 1039-1078.