latristereina:The Catholic Monarchs and their family were familiar with Islamic art and culture sinc

latristereina:The Catholic Monarchs and their family were familiar with Islamic art and culture since other former Moorish cities and towns, such as Córdoba and Seville, had already fallen into Christian hands. But the Alhambra was, and still is, different. Many of its rooms were small and intimate, their decoration spectacularly beautiful; its gardens were enticingly cool in the scorching summer sun; its setting was unique; its romance as the venue for the Moors’ last stand was beguiling. Isabella and Ferdinand both fell under its spell. They commissioned artists and craftsmen to restore it, albeit with alterations; they frequently held court there, and Isabella chose Granada as her burial place. But it was more than a work of art: it was the symbol of Christian success, the city that above all others represented the triumph of their faith over that of the Moors. Katherine shared her mother’s joy when the royal mosque was consecrated as a Christian church and a Franciscan monastery founded in what had been a leading Moor’s private house. Reverently, the Moors had carved Arabic inscriptions on the palace walls to glorify and praise Allah. “There is no conqueror but God” could be read everywhere, as it still can today. Neither Ferdinand nor Isabella would have had any quarrel with that sentiment, provided it was their God who was the conqueror. Capturing Granada and assuring the supremacy of Catholicism had been the queen’s personal crusade; Katherine and Juana, who would one day have their own crusades to wage, could appreciate that.While the Alhambra brought them into close contact with Islamic art, learning, and wisdom, Juana and Katherine also grew up within the context of the European Renaissance. Keen to ensure that Spain was not a cultural backwater, Ferdinand and Isabella welcomed foreign scholars, endowed chairs in Hebrew and Greek in the University of Salamanca, and patronized artists from abroad as well as from within their own realm. Katherine and Juana may well have lived amid the bustle of a court that was forever on the move, but it was not a court bereft of ornament or exquisite artifacts.Isabella’s art collection contained a number of stunning works. With an eye to posterity, she commissioned portraits of herself and her children, a few by one of her favorite court painters, Michael Sittow. While today many of her pictures, most on religious topics, are scattered through the galleries of Europe, many remain in Spain, some housed in the museum close to her tomb, a few paces away from the glass cases containing the standards and pennants that once dominated Granada’s towers. Thus it is still possible to gaze on pictures that Isabella loved, several of which Katherine and Juana too would have seen.There is The Garden of Gethsemane by Botticelli, showing Christ kneeling beneath a comforting angel as He prays for the cup to be taken from Him; the disciples, separated from Christ by a wooden fence, sleep peacefully close by, blissfully unaware of what is to come. There are versions of the Nativity by masters such as Hans Memling, Rogier van der Weyden, and Dieric Bouts, all of breathtaking beauty. There are depictions of the Crucifixion that do not shield the viewer from the full agonies of Christ upon the cross or from the harrowing grief suffered by the Virgin at the death of her son. Such images are not for the squeamish. What is interesting, though, is that the type of painting that appealed to the queen, and to which she exposed her children, tended to be conservative and contemplative, with suffering a key theme: the queen bought Botticelli’s Garden of Gethsemane, not his Birth of Venus.A similar emphasis can be seen in the tapestries that Ferdinand and Isabella accumulated over the years. They inherited some, received others as presents, but purchased most themselves, so that Isabella possessed about 370 tapestries by the time she died. Again they were religious or moral in tone, several being used by the queen and her family in their chapels or in their private places of prayer, and again the pain of the Crucifixion is overt.- Julia Fox, Sister Queens -- source link
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