Mozarabic

also: Mozarabic art · Arte mozárabe

style tradition c. 900-1100 Spain Portugal

Mozarabic art is the art of the Mozarabs - Christians living under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, and the communities that carried the style north as they resettled in the Christian kingdoms. Flowering roughly from the late 9th to the 11th century, it fuses an Islamic decorative vocabulary with Christian subject matter. Its masterpieces are the Beatus manuscripts - copies of Beatus of Liébana's Commentary on the Apocalypse - whose pages burn with flat, brilliant colour, hard outlines, stylized beasts and apocalyptic drama. The architecture matches: monastic churches such as San Miguel de Escalada (913) with horseshoe arches and dense ornament, and painted hermitages like San Baudelio de Berlanga. Distinctive, hybrid and short-lived, the style was absorbed by Romanesque forms after the 11th century.

Example work related to "Mozarabic".
Example work related to "Mozarabic".Public domain · source

Defining characteristics

  • Blazing, flat areas of pure colour bounded by hard outlines
  • Horseshoe arches, interlace and stylized vegetal and animal ornament borrowed from Islamic art
  • Hieratic, frontal figures in stacked registers, with expressive distortion
  • Apocalyptic imagery - monsters, angels and demons - rendered with graphic intensity
  • Densely decorated manuscript pages that frame and interlock with the text

Key figures

  • Beatus of Liébana (c. 730-c. 800) — Monk whose Commentary on the Apocalypse furnished the school's subject matter
  • Magius (active c. 950) — Archipictor who illuminated the Morgan Beatus, the school's masterpiece
  • Emeterius (active c. 970) — Priest-painter who completed the Morgan Beatus after Magius's death

Example works

Sources

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