Hello, everyone. Welcome to the sixth and final lecture being given by the slain professor of finance at the 2021.
Some of you will know these lectures are an important tradition at the University of Oxford.
John Ruskin was the first to give a series of public lectures on art in 1870 after being appointed as Initial Slade professor of Fine Art.
Every year, a distinguished scholar is asked to follow in his footsteps.
My name is Geoffrey Bachem, nine, professor of the history of art at the University of Oxford.
It is my great pleasure to introduce this year's Slate Professor Dr. Geralyn Detox.
Jerry Dodds is Harlequin, the Dead Diamond Professor, Faculty of Art History at Sarah Lawrence College in the United States.
Professor Dodd's scholarly work is centred on mediaeval, Spanish art and architecture,
and especially on issues of trans culture, Asian and identity formation.
Amongst her many publications are arts of intimacy, Christians, Jews and Muslims in the making of Castilian culture.
The renowned co-authored textbook. In addition to her other books, catalogues and essays,
Jerry has also curated a number of important exhibitions and made interesting films to accompany them.
In 2018, in recognition of her exceptional contributions to the dissemination of knowledge in Spanish history and culture, Prof.
Dodds was the recipient of the Cross of the Order of Civil Merit from the Government of Spain.
We are honoured that Professor Dodds accepted an invitation to deliver this year's slate professor of fine art lectures,
and I now hand over the microphone to her for the last time. Thank you.
Thank you so much again. Griffith and I have more to say at the end.
But thank you for your very generous words. So the Alhambra in Granada, the great palace of the nascent monarchy,
has been gloriously ornamented over times with scores of our own projected meanings.
WASHINGTON Irving, my countrymen, who wrote from a set of apartments he had procured within the Very Alhambra in the spring of 1829,
called it an oriental pile the royal abode of the Moorish kings,
where surrounded with the splendours and refinements of Asiatic luxury, they made their last stand for empire in Spain.
Looking back,
I believe that despite our ardent intellectual fealty to Edward said we were not so long ago moved to say similar things if more guarded language.
And why not Asiatic and oriental aside?
Of course, this was a building constructed to quicken the hearts of those who beheld it from within and without.
Our mistake is to see this in Irving's terms of only splendours and refinement because the Alhambra was a far deeper game than that.
The first Nazaret Muhammad, the first having defeated Ibn of Murcia in the 13th century,
cobbled together an Islamic polity styling himself as the king of Iberian Muslims under the shelter of a feudal pact with Ferdinand.
The third the now Nazareth's dynasty was born, then as a vassal of Castiel, though not a consistently compliant one.
After first settling on the hill of the ale by scene,
he said to have climbed to the more formidable Sabeco Hill and laid out a stronghold which would become a fortress and a Palatine city.
The palace's relations to its dramatic setting differ.
Child, Ruggles reminds us, would become not only a context, but a metaphor for territory and sovereignty for few future Nasrin monarchs
and Muhammad was already keenly aware of his position governing a condensed,
vestigial territory pushed hard against the Mediterranean.
Here, he clearly declared his intention to imagine this rule as that of Alan Deluce writ large in the most perilous moment of its existence.
It would be continuously expanded and transformed under successive nascent rulers, as Antonio Fernandez purpose has shown us over the years.
The monarch, who is our focus Mohammed the fifth made perhaps the most memorable changes to the Alhambra.
We're going to join him in 13 62, just returned from an exile of three years to a throne that had been lost to his half-brother.
A throne regained with the help of his great ally and feudal lord Peter.
The first also called Peter the cruel king of Castile.
Muhammad would continue to rule for almost 30 years more,
in part because of his friendship with Peter and also his strategic management of that volatile and tortured Castilian King.
Upon his return, Mohammed first renovated the Max War, where Palace business was conducted,
the seller de la Barca and the North Gallery of the Castrol Sultan called today Kumaris Palace, the centre of court life and around 13 70.
He then set out to add an entirely new complex to the palace,
which we often call today to the Palace of the Lions, known in the time of Mohammed the fifth, as Arianna said.
A garden of delights. A court divided into four parts by water channels that flowed to a central fountain circled by lions.
On the East-West axis are pavilions resting on frail columns and to the north south spectacular Cuba's centrally planned rooms crowned with Cardenas.
Interlocking complexes of sections of cones creating intricately complex sculptural surfaces,
complicating but disconnected from the structure of an arch or dome.
These dorms have a kinetic effect established through their changing appearance as light rotated through a crown of pierced windows,
revealing an intricate, continuously rotating vault of heaven as the sun marks its passage through the skies, surfaces of decay,
continuous floral and vine scrolls are complex conceived and often interwoven with a pig.
Repeat over 3000 inscriptions, including the Nazarene motto Prayers,
Maxon's and some 30 poems are poetic fragments written expressly for the palace by Ibn Al hijab.
Even some rock at Ibn al-Khatib poets and elite Nasserist courtiers at the moment of the
palace's construction and study today in profoundly important work by Hossein Megaport,
commuters who calls the Alhambra a literary textual building.
In fact,
once entitlement within its walls was intertwined with one's ability to read the building and interact appropriately with its compact cursive,
a Griffey floating on top of fields of Matariki.
The effect is one of two independent but intertwining abstract discourses in which the epigraph one is certainly dominant.
Work on the home front during the past decades has revealed much about its complex ornamental discourses,
in particular as regards the language with which the building itself admonishes the viewer in
the first person to slow their pace and engage a poem from the colour hurrah of Mohammed.
The seventh declares You who enter stop for God's sake, contemplate.
This occurs for Olga Bush in a framing of aesthetic experience as the arrested movement
of ceremonial ritual or artistic preparation for the veneration of the Sultan.
The building is thus interpretive, fully dense and multivalent. Juan Carlos Ruiz reads a vision dedicated to creativity to creation and eternity,
and he urges us to draw on Yasir Chartwells theory of the McCance dome as an expression of an atomic rather than Aristotelian view of the universe.
One made of intricate fragments that only God can know or govern.
Although Bush has shown a meticulously conceived programme in which Ornament interacts in concert with textiles and furnishings,
which in turn share a dialogic structure with poetry so that those same fine textiles and luxurious objects that Washington Irving
imagined emerge as part of a learnt intellectualised court culture that the charming 19th century enthusiast could not begin to imagine.
Indeed, for Cynthia Robinson, the language of Forms is a dense,
allegorical web profoundly informed by Sufism that consciously plays with the concepts of misuse and representation,
both abstract and literal through ornament poetry and pink Rafi.
So how are we to understand these monumental figural paintings in the Garden of Delights?
A group of gentlemen against the gold ground and images of courtly romances, hunting and valour of arms painted in opaque, saturated temperate.
The Court of the Lions on Rihanna said, has been seen literally for centuries as duplicating the functions of the Palace of Kumaris.
Or perhaps as a summer pleasure palace or as a banquet hall, as some still see it today, it is on one hand a pair of desert goal setting.
But I'd like to talk about it today in terms offered to us by Juan Carlos Rizzo,
who recognised that the court and its dependencies were reflective of a series of madrassas sites of learning constructed
under the patronage of 14th century Maryland Sultans that Mohammed might well have seen during his exile in North Africa.
As scholars, we'd all been for so long,
so focussed on the palatial theory like Irving as good Orientalist that we have not seen this clear form that we knew so well.
The Court of the Lions is interpreted today by some as a Bible Hikma,
a term that arose first in relationship to the Library or House of Wisdom of Baghdad in the late, 8th and 9th centuries.
But later, examples were conceived as libraries as sites for scholarly exchange and the education of princes.
And you see we see here just such a library, you can see little books in the back with a group of a group of wise people or
organising their own discussion in a mock manuscript from around thirteen hundred.
Susanna Codebook opinion has shown how this kind of courtly institution, a library that becomes a place of learning and discussion,
was already part of the dynastic strategies for legitimacy in Ireland to lose in the period of
the caliphate when it appeared in the pillared hall of the umpired palace of Medina al-Sadr.
Here, Roman sarcophagi of the philosopher type became both emblems of the intellectual activity that occurred
there and allegories for the wise eight ancients whose classical texts were translated and studied there.
They embody the process of translation as an arm of instruction,
part of the incorporation of a body of knowledge into my legacy as part of their legitimisation and self-definition.
Abidal Hickman at the Alhambra might be seen then,
not only as a place for the consideration of jurisprudence, but also the cultivation of ancient texts,
philosophy, the sciences and a job that is secular literature,
collective wisdom and virtues and codes of comportment that all princes ought to follow.
The texts supporting this intellectual work at the Alhambra would have been contained in alcoves at the eastern extreme of the Palace of the Lions,
farthest from the entrance. But opening on to a gallery in court as as Medina Asahara.
So the paintings are up here. These are the alcove sets.
One supposes the light the books would have been kept and the paintings are tucked behind them here.
One there, one there and one at the end. So then,
how did these paintings function within the palace and library within the embrace of this highly
intellectualised and esoteric language of ornament that characterises our Riada side as a whole?
These paintings are first provided with an epic graphic context.
The actual poetry composed to celebrate Muhammad, the fifth is concentrated on the North-South axis of the palace,
defined by the two Cubas and likely a throne content complex.
The inscriptions from the other parts of the Palace of the Lion tend to repeat phrases and prayers found throughout the building the Nazareth model.
There is no victor to God and others blessing good fortune and one lasting health glory.
Be to our lord. The Sultan's short models that might have served as Edmund memoir for longer formula within the official protocol,
as Jeremy Jones has suggested for Sicily. But in the east west axis, culminating just in front of the hall, where the paintings are located,
the language of the inscription militates certain formulae are concentrated in front of the paintings.
Muhammad is not just our lord, but just warrior, which does not appear on any of the other faces of the court facade.
Epigraph, he promises not just prosperity, but eternal sovereignty and dominion and clear victory texts that are formulaic, to be sure,
but which congregate here in a more elaborate formula is repeated twice in the monumental cursive inscriptions leading to the central painting.
To wit? Divide a dominion and clear victory belong to our Lord Abdullah, prince of the Muslims.
On the other axis, in the court, this only appears immediately in front of the throne room.
The juxtaposition of expressive languages, one that hinges on intricate,
abstract and epic graphic semantic structures and the monumental figuration of the other is jarring.
The more so because the paintings are took tie into these constricted spaces so they cannot be seen until ones directly below them.
The figural and narrative paintings on leather executed probably between 13 A.D. and 390, seem in comparison, almost primitively literal,
a contrast that Robinson interestingly sees as part of a play basis and representation throughout the palace.
The centre moves most of these paintings likely represents, Echevarria has suggested an assembly of knights surrounding the sultan,
even the compared them to the Ansar companions of the Prophet,
one of a series of metaphors exploited exploited by the Nazareth's in the construction of a fictive identity of pure Arab genealogy,
ancient lineage and unquestioned religious orthodoxy in the pursuit of jihad as a struggle against the enemies of Islam.
Years ago, I compared them to an illustration from a Syrian copy of the book Tal of 5:47, in which seven sages amongst them Homer Aristotle,
Alexander the Great and Solon hold animated discussions from their temporarily divergent worlds.
My concern at the time was to construct a precedence for the representation of an interaction across time.
But the book's early come the choicest maxims and aphorisms make sense now in a
different way if we understand the ceiling as the covering of a library alcove.
The illustration is, after all,
made for a book that's a collection of albeit dubious biographies and aphorisms of great sages whose discourse with one another.
Only such a book makes possible. The illumination is, in one sense, a visualisation of the translation of its compiler, even fatigue,
who brought these stages together from different times and places so that their wisdom could be discussed in compared by readers.
The Majlis, the gathering of elite masters and in the paintings, pardon me,
might evoke a similar conversation based on the books in the library below.
Translation included commentary, interpretation and new information.
It favoured contemporary contingencies over fidelity to a historical novel.
Model, pardon me. The learnt elites in the central dome seem in the time of the nascent Sultan Muhammad,
the fifth or perhaps a few years after his death, to be echoing yet another act of translation through deliberation.
But the discourse of the lateral was to the north and south of this one is quite a different story.
They depict in a shallow space a landscape or garden in which birds populate the trees and skies,
hovering oddly over both compositions with ominous ubiquity, a setting that must represent a said the garden of Delights in which it is found.
Chandler Post, pointing out Gallus isms in costumes called the style Franko Gothic.
By the way, he also reported that Bernard Berenson and assign them to a Florentine master something post actually asked him to confirm in writing.
I probably would, too. Indeed, in terms of galaxies,
CISM shares certain conventions of representation with the artery wall paintings of the chateau of South Florida in November.
But we're most likely looking at an Iberian tradition of secular painting.
The same typologies can be found in the contiguous.
And in 14th century miniatures of Alfonso, the 11, the 11 Cronica Triana Carmen radiographers made this comparison of young knights.
She believes the technique tempera painting of art on a ground prepared with gesso to be common with 14th century Christian altar pieces.
But familiarity with a secular romance tradition of the kind encouraged under Alfonso the 11th Peter,
the first father, seems a more likely place for this type to have been developed,
especially in light of the lively artistic exchanges documented between the Castilian and Nazareth courts in the 14th century.
But I can see graphically things get more complicated in my very first publication now over 40 years ago.
I suggested that the paintings in the Hall of the Kings of the Alhambra used artillery and iconography
as part of a fashionable admiration in the nascent court for Gothic style and the language of chivalry,
one in which that yearning was marked by the defiant, monumental, polarising image of a Muslim killing a Christian knight in mounted combat.
I saw the story of Tristan and Isolde images of Lancelot in the wild, wild men as connected to gothic prototypes,
perhaps from French Gothic ivory caskets known as composite test caskets that combine some of the same
disconnected scene from just disparate stories and legends as a of courtly love and moralised transgression,
it seemed an OK bit of iconography for the time. But the terms in which I spoke feels scurrilous as I read them today.
To wit, the idea of fashionable admiration linked with guileless misunderstanding a patently Orientalist assumption which was
seised upon 30 years later by Cynthia Robinson in a ground changing volume she edited together with Simon Pinney,
one that has very much transformed the way we think about these images.
Robinson had shown that courtly tales could be found in this far more transcultural mix that we had not considered before.
Tristan DiLeo niece a version of Tristan and Isolde and fluorescent block floor both Castilian transcultural narratives,
very likely known by their nascent allies, are also present in the imagery of the paintings.
So these images were not misunderstandings.
They were, as Rodriguez Porto suggested, translations, appropriations inventions and refashioning to serve an already transcultural repertory.
A slightly more complacent lady with Wildmon can be found, for instance, as an isolated image in the castle of Alcanna Teeth and its myriad meanings.
I, a graphical and I chronological and psychological, are all available, Peni tells us in the Dorel Hikma.
The idea of translation becomes particularly interesting if we reconsider a key image from my original study,
Tristan and his love meet in both French and Castilian sections of the story in a set piece called
The Tryst Beneath the Tree here in an iconic graphical type widely disseminated in courtly arts.
But within the fountain are a series of nude figures, and I don't know if you can see them, they're here.
And this is a closer photograph made of them. You can see these nude figures who are within the fountain.
Now the new figures correspond. To a type for nude figures bathing in the fountain of youth, a scene probably from the Alexander cycle,
which also appears separately together with the twist on the composite caskets only usually they get their own fountain.
Actually, always they get their own fountain. I'd originally called this a misunderstanding of the gothic type,
measuring its validity by conformity to an authoritative original and protecting onto the Nazareth's.
And I use here the words of Barry Flood in speaking of Hindu-Muslim encounters projecting onto the Nazareth's,
a backward oriented and ideologically charged source monitoring.
I had to give that quote because I loved the source mongering part.
It's clear here that the kind of graphical type was available to the artists of the Alhambra paintings, but not thematically compelling.
So these pesky nude figures were redeployed.
Robinson saw them as part of a fountain, and I wonder if perhaps the reconceived as a piece of classical spoleto within a fountain,
an image of a kind that was consistently part of the translate of culture of Islamic Iberia for all seven centuries of its existence?
Recall that a Roman sculpture of Venus graced the southern gateway to mid-teen Asakura,
which was translated into an allegory for the planet Venus or the constellation Virgo stores that protected Allan de Luce,
or the classical sarcophagi found in the bites of Hikma of Medina on soccer,
transformed into the common concept of the wise ancients whose work was studied there.
In this Dorel Hikma, the images from Tristan or Flora and Blanca Flor are from romances cycles of courtly love that are often juxtaposed.
Chuck, let's try that again. They're often juxtaposed in a French gothic context as tomboy of courtly love and moralised transgression.
But here they're translated to serve a divergent moral code,
something accomplished as these romances are semantically guarded by a series of dynamic
scenes in a more monumental scale as a guiding moral discourse in the painting cycle.
The most salient image of the cycle is a single joust in which a Muslim kills a Christian knight,
and Robinson has also connected this to one of the romances.
It governs the interpretation of the other vignettes placing ascendancy with Muslim knights in the context of this transcultural cultural narratives.
Beyond the particular romance narrative, it is structurally central to the discourse of the painting.
It really is emblematic not of Nazaret or Castilian or Gothic chivalry, as we often try to nuance things here,
I think it's really an image of a Christian and a Muslim in an uncomplicated bipolar opposition.
The transcultural space of the Garden of Delights is confessional, contested territory.
Such images of hunting and violence beyond the narratives to which they might be attached
constitute a separate discourse of easily readable analogies within the paintings.
The Christian Knight is to the wild man whom he kills as the Muslim knight is to the Christian he defeats at the Alhambra.
These more monumental images corral the romance vignettes, asking acting sort of as moral centuries to their transcultural stories that
claim romance literature in the library below as part of a common culture.
In this way, they proclaim that the textual incorporation of this literature does not extend to confessional ambivalence or to Nazaret identity.
Recent studies by Muhammad Balon have revealed in the work of the Nasser dynasties extraordinary polymath and courtier, even al-Khateeb,
a genealogical obsession with a myth of pure Arab descent and unsullied Muslim confession and lineage that masked
genealogical anxieties about pure identity that stemmed from the very heterogeneous descent of the nascent themselves,
both because of the demographics of their plural polity and because of their own limited lineage and on the simplest level level,
very much like much of his line of Muhammad, the fifth mother, both Sonya was a Christian,
and this also acts in a way to obscure their political interdependence on the Kingdom of Castile for the Nazareth,
Kingdom of Granada still danced a tenuous diplomacy as both the last connexion and connexion
of the marinade states of North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula and his vassals of Castiel,
for whom they acted as a bulk work against the same polity.
Granada and Castiel were interwoven not only through tribute and military obligations, but also through agriculture,
the Nazareth's powerful international trade networks and the lively artistic interaction that saw not only a market in objects and materials,
but the movement of artistic styles from Granada to Seville and then back to Granada again.
After Peter, the first received Muhammad, the fifth during his exile and returned him to his throne.
So there was tension within this transcultural garden of chivalry.
The remaining images of this second more agonistic discourse in the paintings are all hunters,
but they exist in a garden already full of hunting figures, wind hunting horns.
Attendants have spears, dogs, course beneath horses,
hooves and attack the hunters prey in a way everyone hunts so that the very skies are filled with hunters.
Falcons snatch doves in flight, extending their talons and beaks in mid-air.
In the southern seething ceiling, we see established in an unusually clear and graphic compositional juxtaposition.
The metaphoric relationship between hunting and warfare hunting not only as preparation training for the skills of warfare,
by the way hunting, said Castilian King. Up until the 11th, Peter's father is good preparation for war and also quite a bit less expensive.
Not only preparation for war,
but hunting as an aristocratic activity that has the capacity of mirroring the hierarchies inherent in feudal warfare and society amongst Muslims.
Spearing a boar and a Christian who spears a bare faced one another on either side of Tristan and Isolde faced fateful tryst.
Their costumes that relate them to figures in the romance narrative scenes have prompted suggestions of Castilian master.
It's engaging in calm and chivalrous activities, and indeed they point us to a particular culturally determined kind of hunting in Castiel.
Hunting King Alfonso, the 10th once intoned Always belongs to kings.
That was in his liberal de la Santé Molinsky cousin, in turn, a translation of an Arabic text today called Mummy.
This idea, reflecting the contentions on both sides of the confessional divide,
was refined by text of Alfonso's nephew, one Manuel, in his libretto de la Casa,
which favours falconry as the most subtle kind of hunting in which a raptor is trained to pursue game that are not its natural quarry.
Falconio had been a part of the earliest admired traditions in Syria, and in all,
Deluce became emblematic of Mihdhar sovereignty for the first 300 years of its history.
Michael, you noted syncretism between the Falcon and my power in both poetry and art during the entire
caliphate and falconry imagery continued in the Typekit Palace of the Moon in Toledo.
As a more general signifier of terrestrial hegemony, even Hudale, who's not mastered treatise on chivalry,
were dedicated to Muhammad, the fifth and Muhammad the sixth seventh privilege falcon welcoming amongst all those forms of hunt.
It was practised by all the great Nasser rulers and lords, he recounts, who kept teams of falconers falconers with the most prised gift.
Falcons not felt well. Maybe falconers were, too.
Falcons were the most prised gifts exchanged between rulers, and he characterises falconry as the quintessential Arab practise.
One honoured throughout Islam, marking it for particular importance in the formation of nascent identity.
But remarkably, though, there are raptors in the air.
The only person to hunt a bird of prey in the Alhambra is a lady on whose wrist a very diminutive Merlin perches, suggesting predatory credentials.
Her champion seems to lack. So the monumental hunters in the Alhambra paintings do not engage in the kind of hunting that one would imagine
they might in their careful construction of the Nazareth's adherence to a blemish lists Arab and Muslim genealogy.
I think the reason is this what is represented in the paintings was instead the
kind of hunting that was explicitly connected to off until the 11th and his son,
Pedro, the first, the Castilian with whom these nests were culturally and politically entangled.
Jonathan Bergen has shown that a major large hunting, hunting, large game on horseback with dogs the hunt, as it is shown in the Alhambra paintings,
articulated an ideological position for Alfonso the 11th in his lb. de la Montrealer,
the book of mounted hunting, a position opposed to falconry falconry in a ritual opposition to his enemy.
One man well who promoted falconry in the Liberal Democrats.
The. Even some rock, so many of whose poems are composed, the Alhambra is epic graphic discourse,
wrote a hunting poem describing Muhammad the this particular passion for the hunt.
These images were then not completely emblematic for the falconry was the most esteemed of practises.
The Nazareth's also practised cut them where the animals hunted in the Alhambra.
Paintings are not only the large games reserved for nobility and royalty and Castilian practise,
they are also the actual quarry of the mountains surrounding Granada bears, wild boar and deer.
So here in the Alhambra,
the nurseries are laying aside their concern with their iconic Arab past and are choosing in stead to take on the Castilian in their own ideological.
And as it turns out, topographical terrain for Alfonso, the 11th libro de la Montrealer conveys Senate positive,
a clearly defined ideology of the authority of the monarch and nobility in the thirteen, thirties and forties.
In part, he says, because it includes a charting of all the hunting lands in the kingdom of Castile,
1500 areas can, encompassing 9000 locations for customizer mounted hunting.
It is, in fact, the first comprehensive top anaemic survey survey produced in Castile because hunting large game on horseback with
dogs was a privilege of the king when performed his possession of the land a privilege he could bestow or withhold.
The survey of hunting lands became one means of defining the topography of his sovereignty.
And so one level of the tension hovering, like so many hawks over the garden of our Ariadna said,
is to be explained by the simple fact that the hunting lands of the King of Castile included not only Burgos,
Soria, Toledo and Murcia, but also the hills of the Nazareth Kingdom of Granada.
So we might see the hunters like the jousting parents as sentinels, perhaps vigilantes meant to patrol the semantic frontiers of the ceiling.
This is expressed without the subtle nuance of the graphic programme, as the same hunters prepare a prepared to present their quarry to ladies.
And I'm going to show you the drawings, which are a little clearer.
Well, Muslim presents his quarry in an erect posture, while the Castilian offers his in a kneeling position,
marking him as a supplicant in the tradition of courtly love.
And while the Muslims lady leans forward and points to the glory quarry in approbation, the Christian lady recoils slightly in ambivalence.
The Christian is a rather overt foil to the erect Muslim,
comparatively impotent and lacking in dignity as the conventions of Courtney Love or turned against
him in an image meant to ridicule an aspect of courtly culture that mimics feudal practise,
the aristocratic lady in the rule of the feudal master of her effective vassal.
This position is echoed in an image of a page who kneels before kicking off on to
the 11th in an illustrated copy of his own hunting book The Liberal della Materia,
completed by his son. Here, the page offers the King Quarry from the hunt for his meal in a less metaphorical image of Vacillate.
This type then? Is used to invert the political dilemma of the narrow streets in the Alhambra painting.
And it was a type these surely new images of the feudal subjugation of Muslims were not unusual in Castilian courts.
They're repeatedly depicted in the pages of the country gusty Santa Maria, which might well have been in that library below.
So the paintings of the Palace of the Lions, on one hand, must constitute a response by the Nazareth's to their own political and psychic vassal.
The contingency of their possession of their own lands, their own reluctance to play the subaltern.
I'm wondering if the whole complex, multilayered composition is not only an image of a shared romance and activities,
but also a figural translation of the militant models that are now announced.
The paintings just warrior. Eternal sovereignty, dominion victory and Divide.
Divine Aid, Dominion and Clear Victory belong to our lord in a composition that presented
both a dominant and a background discourse just as the after graphic panels do.
Even Holden, who came to Grenada on an embassy to Pedro, the first of Castiel, had remarked disapprovingly that the Nasrat made figural art,
although it's unlikely that he saw the paintings that we're talking about today.
He might have been thinking of wall paintings like these earlier ones from the park tall when
he said the now streets even draw pictures on the walls and have them in buildings and houses.
The intelligent observer will draw from this the conclusion that it is a sign of being dominated by others.
Perhaps we might see these paintings as a defiant response in the midst of a building
that otherwise musters all the possibilities of erudite and iconic expression.
To the kind of attitude voiced by even the not so much whose disapproval of their
figure lurks as to his contention that cultural reception is a mark of weakness.
The paintings might be, in fact,
the Nazareth's declaration of their capacity to master and manipulate figurative styles to translate ideas like dominion
victory and jihad from Arabic and purify into the Castilian own figural language of expression to possess that language,
as well to serve a different concept of of chivalry than that present presented in Castilian texts.
Alphonso, the 11th had established his new secular chivalrous order, the order of the band,
which supplanted monastic military orders, in particular that of the Templars, much to the anguish of the Pope.
The objectives of the New Order were limited to promoting chivalry and loyalty to the king with few religious obligations.
There was a very lamented Peter Linehan remarked more of the round table than the Last Supper in Alfonso's new order.
Rodriguez Porto sees Alfonso the 11th as promoting courtly literature with a special interest in the secular side of these narratives.
Both French and Iberian, in her words,
elevating chivalry to a regulating code of courtly life and making the court a place of pleasure and refinement that escaped the church's control.
And this image that you see here on the right is actually in the paintings of the the paintings that we're looking at.
But the contention now is that it was that it was painted there much later.
And certainly there were Muslims in Nazareth Times who lived to this, who lived the idea of the order of the band.
And that's been pointed out,
that's been pointed out before hundreds of Muslim knights who fought for Pedro of Castile in Teruel were awarded the order of the band,
as it has been suggested that it was present in the Alhambra as well.
However, the El Hombre paintings are governed by a different series of ideas about what chivalry is.
The works works by Ibn Hudale.
How does their subjects a Nasseri view of chivalry combining not only horsemanship but military skills and hunting with a pronounced ideological bent?
His work ornament of the souls and arms of the inhabitants of Alanda Loose, written under Mohammed,
the fifth was seen by Alejandro Garcia San Juan as a genre of jihad literature to reinvigorate jihad,
the author declares God has given the sultan for teaching the war against the infidel and significantly assisted by God.
He will liberate this country from the bonds that keep it in.
Inferiority will bring abundance after sterility.
Three. These lands from the feast of consumption.
Jihad Abigail Bubble has shown was a uniquely lab vital tool for simultaneously legitimating authority and undermining enemies of any religion.
Indeed, the fissure between ideal and execution was wide.
Hussein fancy has shown Christian and Muslim rulers regularly deploying multi confessional armies
and mercenaries to achieve political goals in the name of holy war of both crusade and jihad.
For Ibn Hudale, scars to a fragile nascent identity might well have been inflicted by the contingencies
of a Mohammed the 5th subtle Castilian diplomacy until the death of Peter the first.
His text hovers like the hawks in fountains over the dignified hunters and submitted questions of the Hall of Justice ceilings.
His raw exhaustion to liberate his country from the bonds that keep it in
inferiority is a call to erase an apparent shame voiced coldly by even hold doom.
Quote the Spaniards, assimilate themselves to the Christian nation in their dress, their emblems and most of their customs and traditions,
an indication, he says, that the vanquished can always be observed to assimilate themselves to the victor.
Garcia said one sees an oblique reference in ornament to the Nazareth's one great 14th century victory against
the Christians Muhammad the 5thS victory at Algeciras conquered only months after the death of Peter,
the first with its consequent dissolution of those feudal obligations.
And this confluence of ideas is, of course, central to the Alhambra,
which only grew bar so long ago as a victory monument to that single battle celebrated a poem by Ibn SAMRC in the solid de la Barca.
How many infidels did you reach in the morning, only to become the arbiter of their lives in the evening?
You put on them the yoke of captives so that they appear at your doorstep to build palaces in servitude.
You conquered Algeciras by the sword and opened the gate, which had until then been denied to our victory.
Or on the fountain of the of the lions on a direct access with the paintings, its lions are identified as Austal Jihad, the lions of war.
These paintings. Our dedicated as one of their meanings to the sultan's renewal of jihad in an age of ambivalent alliances,
defying a perception that Iberian Muslims were too entangled and complacent.
One of the titles conferred on Muhammad, the fifth was a Mujahid, the holy warrior.
Perhaps these paintings fashion nascent chivalry as an expression of the exaltation of jihad in the face of tangled cultures and alliances.
Writing at a time before the paintings,
even holding presented the Nazareth's penchant for figuration as a state of weakness, as a tradition to be conquered.
But at the Alhambra, resistance was useless. So it must need to be conquered from within.
The excision of the Christian from within, in Simon Pinners words far from misunderstanding their models,
the nasty words met the Castilian on their own formal grounds in the paintings of the Darle Hikma,
showing mastery of both artistic languages, both concepts of chivalry and both languages of the hunt.
Marking out the territory of the garden at the library and the realm with a dream of jihad of a separateness they could not achieve.
It is a sacred language of expression at the intersection of profound treads,
acculturation and the deep desire to individuate the paintings decode in some mere Merritt's words regarding translation,
a referential world in which more than one language is involved,
one in which images are suspended in the complexities of multilayered cultural content.
But then was he been was was he been [INAUDIBLE] do. Correct?
Is Trent's cultivation the domain of the vanquished by now, there ought to be received, I hope, as a rhetorical question.
Consider these two images of hunters. Both depict courtly aristocrats.
Both are hunting bears,
one painted in saturated tempera over a level revolt against a backdrop of woods and the other static and emblematic inserted into a web of a pig,
Raffi Canos and a Tony King.
They present us with the identical subject seriously conceived in divergent artistic languages, almost contemporary to one another.
The painted hunter against the verdant ground, well, you know it well enough by now.
And as you probably guessed, the stucco cartouche is from the Palace of Peter the first.
In Seville, the Alcazar inserted into the precincts of a of an appropriated Alamo residence by his father, Alfonso, the 11th and himself.
These hunting images from a Castilian palace in Seville are announced with an Arabic inscription
that describes Pedro of Castile as sultan and in the same kind of cosmic terms that evoke Muhammad,
the fifth in the Cubas of the Palace of the Lions of the Alhambra.
They are embraced by as an Arabic and pseudo Arabic Griffey in a tangle of exchanges and sharing this language of expression,
as Juan Carlos Ruiz Sosa has told us, had become something like an official Castilian style absorbing forms.
But only those that marked, but only those meanings that marked his own interests and needs the nascent pedigree of
cosmic kingship as a stepping stone towards the formation of a centralised Castilian state.
The unquestioned kingship performed by Nasrallah rulers in the planning and
epigraphs of the Alhambra was a very useful image for a monarch like Peter,
whose power was dangerously contingent with shared contentiously and in the end fatally with the lords of his realm.
But trance cultivation is always multidirectional.
The difference here is that unlike the paintings of the Alhambra, the imagery is not coded for defiance or religious difference.
This is because in this translation,
the ultimate model the Nazareth stucco styles of the Alhambra is already deemed to be a part of the crown of Castile.
By the end of the 15th century, the vestiges of the natural kingdom presented to the Knesset Castilian and Eric Goodness Alliance,
an arena where a battle could be joined for the purpose of uniting a still divided Christian idea Iberia into a Catholic kingdom of Spain.
If we see Alan Deluce as a cultural content conduit of translated texts and of the arts and science to Spain.
Or too effective, lest we miss the point entirely. The struggle was not about how to exchange or appropriate.
It was at this point how to disentangle. About the time I wrote my first article regarding the Alhambra paintings.
George Steiner wrote of translation in his after Babel in this way.
To experience difference, to feel the characteristic resistance and materiality of that,
which differs, is to re-experience identity one's own spaces mapped by what lies outside.
It derives coherent texto tactile configuration from the presence of the external.
But now many of the struggles I've tried to highlight here have been about something else,
they've been about what happens when you can no longer clearly map the external is being outside
no longer feels sufficiently the characteristic resistance and materiality of that which differs.
That question so much at the heart of the dilemma of the Nassau, it's also, for me, fuels the thrilling practise of the study of mediaeval Iberia.
Look. I'm not going gonna. Thank you so much for these weeks together.
My thanks once again to the Slate Committee for the enormous honour conferred upon me in entrusting me with these lectures.
I wish in particular to offer my thanks to Professor Jeffrey Batson for his patience,
care and humour throughout the constantly changing terrain of this lecture series.
To thank Professor Chavez are also for his sage guidance and abiding support and Holy Knights.
Liz Green and the entire torch team for their incredible professionalism and endless patience.
It has been such a gift that I have, though I have not been able to come to Oxford.
Oxford has met me in a sort of virtual daal hikma some place over the Atlantic, together with all of the generous,
brilliant international community of his finest mediaevalist and Islamists who have been my correspondence and in so many ways,
my teachers during the past year, my deepest thanks to you all.