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Alfonso X El Sabio1221-1284

Las Cantigas de Santa MaríaVol. II

Códice Rico, Ms. T-I-1Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial

Madrid 2011

COLECCIÓN SCRIPTORIUM

DIRECCIÓN CIENTÍFICA Y COORDINACIÓN DEL PROYECTOLAURA FERNÁNDEZ FERNÁNDEZ

JUAN CARLOS RUIZ SOUZA

PRÓLOGOINÉS FERNÁNDEZ ORDÓÑEZ

ESTUDIOS

CARLOS DE AYALAUNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE MADRID

LAURA FERNÁNDEZ FERNÁNDEZUNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

STEPHEN PARKINSONUNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

ELISA RUIZ GARCÍAUNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

MANUEL PEDRO FERREIRACESEM/FCSH, UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA

JUAN CARLOS ASENSIO PALACIOSESCUELA SUPERIOR DE MÚSICA DE CATALUÑA

ÁLVARO SOLER DEL CAMPOPATRIMONIO NACIONAL

JOSÉ LUIS CASADO SOTOMUSEO MARÍTIMO DEL CANTÁBRICO

Mª LUISA MARTÍN ANSÓNUNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE MADRID

LAURA RODRÍGUEZ PEINADOUNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

FERNANDO GUTIÉRREZ BAÑOSUNIVERSIDAD DE VALLADOLID

Mª VICTORIA CHICO PICAZAUNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

ROCÍO SÁNCHEZ AMEIJEIRASUNIVERSIDAD DE SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA

FRANCISCO PRADO-VILARUNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

ALEJANDRO GARCÍA AVILÉSUNIVERSIDAD DE MURCIA

JUAN CARLOS RUIZ SOUZAUNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

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THE PARCHMENT OF THE SKY: POIESIS OF A GOTHIC UNIVERSE

FRANCISCO PRADO-VILARUNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

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RESUMEN EN CASTELLANO

EL PERGAMINO DEL CIELO:POIESIS DE UN UNIVERSO GÓTICO

ESTE artículo constituye un versión ligeramente revisada de un capítulo de mi tesis doctoral titulada “In the Shadow of the Gothic Idol: The Cantigas de Santa María and the Imagery of Love and Conversion”, presentada en la

Universidad de Harvard en 2002 bajo la dirección de j. Shearman, H. L. Kessler, D. Roxburgh y j. Hamburger. Utilizando una estructura metodo-

lógica sofi sticada y selectiva, en la que se combinan modos de análisis de diversos campos como la teoría y crítica literarias, la antropología cultural, los estudios de teatro y de cultura visual, etc., se presenta un estudio integral del sistema artístico del manuscrito. En él se delinean los modos en los que las imágenes de las Cantigas fl uctúan constantemente a diferentes niveles de signifi cación redefi niendo su campo operativo más allá de los límites establecidos por la voz autorial, la estruc-tura narrativa y la realidad física del códice. De la misma forma que una partitura musical alcanza su potencial artístico a través de su interpretación (performance), saliendo de la página al ámbito del escenario público, así el triple sistema artístico de las Cantigas consigue extenderse más allá del pergamino activando una “poética visual” dinámica en la que el papel del espectador se ve constan-temente redefi nido a través de la combinación interactiva de texto, imagen y música. A cada uno de estos tres niveles corresponde una sección del artículo, donde se analizan en profundidad ejemplos específi cos, trazando sus fuentes textuales e iconográfi cas y mostrando los modos de construcción de una retórica visual que se situaba en la vanguardia del arte de su tiempo. Algunas de las líneas de análisis que se tratan son: la riqueza multicultural del universo literario de Alfonso X, que abarca desde las Confesiones de San Agustín, pasando por leyendas bizantinas de acheiropoieta, hasta las Maqamat de al-Hariri (se muestran paralelismos estructurales e iconográfi cos hasta ahora inéditos con algunos manuscritos de las Maqamat); la combinación de iconografía cristiana tradicional con imágenes pictóricas y textuales árabes, dando lugar a una dramática expansión de lo “visible” sin parangón en ninguna otra producción manuscrita del siglo XIII; el potencial semántico del perga-mino en su realidad material; el discurso de emanación divina que subyace la teoría de la imagen de las Cantigas; la sofi sticada relación ekphrástica entre texto e imagen, defi nida mediante análisis comparativos con pasajes de la Divina Comedia de Dante, así como las diferentes concepciones de las implicaciones teológicas de la música.

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Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already work-ing. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubt-ful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.

R. Caillois, The Writing of Stones1

FOLIO 50r of the Códice de Florencia is a world without humans (fi g. 1). The sudden interruption of the project has left us a pictorial universe in the process of becoming, but never fully realized.2 Human form surfaces timidly in the fi rst frame

only to fade away without being able to imprint narrative and emotion on the, otherwise, uneventful canvas of existence. Originally conceived as the

periphery of visual story-telling, nature and architecture now take center stage to reveal a fullness that becomes more evident by contrast to the bleakness of the human form. Buildings, animals and vegetation appear complete in their fi nest details forming a coherent and self-contained world

* This article constitutes a slightly revised version of a chapter of my PhD dissertation “In the Shadow of the Gothic Idol: The Cantigas de Santa María and the Imagery of Love and Conversion” (Harvard University, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, 2002). Since then, I have published several articles on different aspects of the Can-tigas, expanding on issues which are touched upon obliquely in this essay. Here, however, they are presented in the context of a comprehensive analysis of the artistic system of the manuscript, where I delineate the ways in which the imagery of the Cantigas fluctuates constantly at different levels of signification as it reframes itself in and out of the limits established by the authorial voice, the narrative structure, and the physical reality of the codex. In order to delve into the constituents of what I call Mediterranean Gothic visual poetics, of which the Cantigas is a prime example, I trace the sources of Alfonso’s hybrid textual culture, ranging from Augustine’s Confessions to al-Hariri’s Maqamat, and analyze how the absorption and transformation of literary imagery resonates at a visual level in a pictorial system that incorporates, through various processes of detachment and reframing, the accomplishments of diverse artistic traditions. In publishing this study practically unrevised from when it was written back in 2001, I want to capture a moment in time in my intellectual development, as a way to extend my gratitude to the readers of my dissertation, john Shearman, Herbert Kessler, David Roxburgh, and jeffrey Hamburger for the extraordinary privilege of having them as my interlocutors.

1. CAILLOIS 1985, pp. 105-6.

2. The Códice de Florencia (Ms. B.R. 20, BNCF) is the second volume of a single fully illustrated luxury edition of the Cantigas, featuring musical mensural notation to guide the performance of each individual song. Due to Alfonso´s death, this manuscript was hastily assembled and some of its miniatures left unfinished. For a study of the division of labor in Alfonso’s scriptorium, as it can be inferred from the different stages of unfinish of Ms. B.R. 20, MENÉNDEZ PIDAL 1962, pp. 25-51. For questions of provenance and chronology of the manuscripts, see FERNÁNDEZ FERN-ÁNDEZ 2005 (1) and 2008-2009, as well as her article in the present volume.

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endowed with a substantial pictorial independence. This reified frame has almost no bearing on the human drama that was intended to unfold within, other than offering, in its stark stillness and solid pigmentation, a point of contrast that emphasizes the latent potential of the exposed surface of the parchment as a pictorial milieu.3 In effect, this page prompts us to refine our focus and examine the process by which the artists gave both material and emotional density to the visual field.

Parchment is the cipher and the catalyst of this universe. Nothing characterizes more essentially the art of the Cantigas than its relentless engagement with the surface of the parchment as a fluid dramatic and symbolic space, activated and unified by the web of relations established among its inhabitants. In its emptiness, the vellum provides the necessary absence –a suspension of signify-ing structures that facilitates the transfiguration of the page into a mutable visual environment. In many instances, the page dematerializes, subverting its natural horizontality, as a child plunges into the air to be rescued by the Virgin before “crushing like a lump of salt”, as youths toss balls in an open field, and as two men struggle to keep hold of the prow of a sinking vessel. On other occasions, it becomes a screen to articulate an elegant theater of silhouettes, and the conductor of invisible lines of sight that produce emotionally charged moments of visual recognition (fig. 2)4. In these scenes, the vellum is neither a surface nor a background but an expansive and polyvalent milieu that helps configure the dramatic environment of representation.

3. For the etymological, philosophical, and literary aspects of the term “milieu,” see SPITZER 1968, pp. 179-316.

4. For a detailed analysis of this miniature and the theological and political implications of the emphasis on the repre-sentation of quotidian life and love in the Cantigas, see PRADO-VILAR 2005, pp. 84-94.

Fig. 1.CSM, Ms. B.R. 20, BNCF, f. 50r.

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Fig. 2. CSM, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 195r.

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But even if the parchment is transformed and modulated through the folds of this complex system of representation, its organic materiality is never completely left behind. In this respect, another unfi nished miniature from the Códice de Florencia may be taken as a true theoretical object that encapsulates the complex relation between the pre-symbolic materiality of the parchment and the representational system that it supports. Alfonso X appears looking ecstatically at an invisible pres-ence (fi g. 3). He raises his hands as if to grasp an elusive patch of vellum framed by fading traces, which were originally intended as outlines for the painting of a statue of the Virgin. Paradoxically the fi gure of the Virgin –the central element that the representational system of the Cantigas strives to communicate– appears only as a discontinuity in the fabric of representation itself. The deline-ated vellum containing the sacred image is both external to representation and its generative center. It is the point where the wholly material and the wholly immaterial collapse, where the organic sig-num fi nds identity with the sacred res.

To be sure, the Cantigas gives continuous testimony to the real presence of the Virgin in the phe-nomenal world, as we witness her image permeating through all elements of creation: stones (fi g. 4), human hearts (fi g. 16), and walls (fi g.18). As the aforementioned miniature evocatively illustrates (fi g. 3), it seems that, for Alfonso, the sacred may be apprehended by simply exercising a primordial act of distinction over the continuity of matter. This conviction informs the Cantigas, where the king sets out to record incessantly the miraculous apparitions of the Virgin and her active participation in human affairs. Indeed, the codices of the Cantigas are testaments to the king’s efforts to com-municate Mary’s real, ubiquitous, and detextualized presence to his subjects. In them, script, score, and illumination unite to create a spectacle that transcends the physical limits of the manuscripts.

The artistic fusion and public character of the Cantigas present a challenge for the art historian who approaches the work with a preestablished set of expectations as to what a Gothic manuscript can offer –especially if those expectations are based on Northern European models. To draw an analogy that I will substantiate in the course of my argument, the Cantigas relates to canonical examples of Gothic manuscript illumination, such as the Bible moralisée, in a way similar to

Fig. 3. CSM, Ms. B.R. 20, BNCF, f. 100r-6.

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that of Dante’s Commedia to Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. While in one set of works Christian doctrine is conveyed through poetic re-creation, in the other, it is transmitted through discursive exposition. At the core of the distinction between the poetic and the discursive lies a particular approach to the relation between word and image. Medieval art history has been traditionally inter-ested in word-image relations in terms of dichotomy, mapping their multiple levels of interaction, which range from direct parallelism to critical confrontation. However, it has been less sensitive to such works as the Cantigas, in which the fundamental integration between the verbal and the visual renders artifi cial any attempt to confi ne meaning to either artistic register. Consequently, rather than dissecting schematically the connections between text and illuminations, the Cantigas requires a different hermeneutic approach and also a different analytical language to grasp fully its artistic and intellectual signifi cance.

By visual poetics, I refer not only to an artistic system that transcends the word-image opposition but also to a mode of analysis that aims at capturing the meanings generated when that system is activated in a specifi c context of reception.5 The purpose of my study, paraphrasing Paul Zumthor, is not only a question of demonstrating but of revealing, “that is to say, of making present to the

5. The term visual poetics has been used in the art historical literature of the 80’s and 90’s to designate interdisciplinary methodologies between literature and visual art, especially in the work of N. Bryson (e.g. BRYSON 1981) and M. Bal (e.g. BAL 1991). Although I have been influenced by those studies, I do not subscribe to “visual poetics” as a subfield (or metafield) of art history. As I use the term in this article, it has both historial and historiographical connotations within medieval studies, especially in reference to ZUMTHOR 1992).

Fig. 4.CSM, cantiga XXIX, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 44r-3.

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senses, of causing us on a cognitive plane to hear and feel. What I am seeking to evoke in this way would be a “poetic” discourse, homogeneous with its subject matter, as opposed to an approved master language that is external and reductionist: a language that is both ever-changing and yet producing its own adherence to truth: a gesture.” 6

Fundamental to my approach is an understanding that any art historical analysis of the Cantigas would be necessarily reductive if it does not attempt to retrieve part of the intense humanity of the work. Indeed, Alfonso’s creative enterprise originates from his conviction in the capacity of art to move, to “cause us on a cognitive plane to hear and feel.” Such conviction informs another prod-uct of that Gothic Mediterranean to which the Cantigas belongs, Dante’s Commedia. In the course of my argument, I will draw comparisons between the two to chart the constituents of a “dif-fuse cultural system” that has been traditionally constrained by extraneous hermeneutic models. Although there exists direct historical connections between Alfonso and Dante –Dante’s teacher, Brunetto Latini, spent time at the court of Alfonso in Seville c. 1260 and dedicated his Tesoretto to the Castilian king – my argument does not aim at charting direct influences but at characterizing a cultural sensibility and its art historical implications.7

The three sections that integrate this article largely respond to the threefold artistic system of the Cantigas –the voice, the image, and the music– and, as in Alfonso’s work, my analysis will focus on their convergence and integration into a unique artistic configuration, whose generative kernel is parchment.

ALFONSO’S CONFESSION: THE WORD MADE FLESH

Holy Mary has so many virtues that we do not have enough time and life to sing them all.How can any human language praise enough the One who made God wish to take on Her holy flesh and become man? The One who made possible for His divinity to be visible in flesh, which can be seen and heard?Holy Mary has so many virtues….For Holy Mary has so many virtues that there is no tongue that could tell them all. Even if it were made of iron and never stopped talking, day and night, it would ultimately fail before completing the task.Holy Mary has so many virtues…If the starry sky were parchment and the whole sea were ink, and there were a scribe who lived forever, the largest part of Her praises would still be left unsung.Holy Mary has so many virtues…8

6. ZUMTHOR 1984.

7. For the historical context and an assessment of the intellectual exchange between Alfonso X and Brunetto Latini, see HOLLOWAY 1990.

8. My translation. Subsequent quotations of the Cantigas are taken, with minor adjustments, from the prose English translation by KULP-HILL 2000.

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In cantiga CX Alfonso reflects on the limits of language. Human life, speech, and writing are bound to a temporality that renders them inadequate to fathom the extent of Mary’s virtues. Her body, the holy flesh through which the divinity became visible, remains the only site of signifi-cation that fully contains her. For Alfonso, Mary’s corporeal image is not just a historical truth revealed to the present in textual form but also a real presence to be experienced “in flesh which can be seen and heard”. Like Mary’s body, the books Alfonso dedicated to her are “flesh which can be seen and heard.” In the same way that musical notes fulfill their artistic potential through performance, by coming out of the page onto the public stage, so the threefold artistic system of the Cantigas engages the world outside by activating a dynamic visual poetics in which the role of the spectator is constantly redefined and reframed through the interactive combination of text, sound, and image.

The internal structure of the miniatures illustrating this cantiga epitomizes the general semi-otic layering of the manuscript. The six-panel grid is vertically divided in two sections that, although connected physically on the surface of the parchment, belong to two different realms of representation (fig. 5). The three panels on the left embody the first person of the poetic voice –Alfonso as preacher and storyteller. The panels on the right visualize that which Alfonso’s speech confesses unable to render in words. With the depiction of a courtly audience that attentively listens to the king, the illuminations highlight the fact that Alfonso’s poetry was primarily composed for oral recitation. This aspect determined that the visual apparatus of the manuscript was conceived independently from the musical and textual registers, which function exclusively as scripts for performance rather than prerequisites to understanding the visual narrative. Language and images, disconnected in the body of the codex, meet only at the moment of performance, when the text enters the temporality of speech and gets spatially expanded through communal audition. The use of images in the Cantigas might have been influenced in part by popular forms of entertainment, such as traveling storytellers or minstrels who delighted audiences with their colorful spectacles combining poetry, music, and imagery.9 This was an important aspect of the troubadour sub-culture to which Alfonso belonged and which he strove to transform into a vehicle for the promotion of Marian piety.10 In fact, Alfonso composed his Cantigas hoping that they would be disseminated through public performances as he explicitly states in the concluding verses of cantiga CLXXII, “from this story we com-posed a song for the minstrels to sing.” Similar forms of popular entertainment of medieval origin continued well into modern times.11 A photograph showing a street performer as she recites a story with the aid of an illustrated banner documents the survival of such practices in twentieth-century Spain (fig. 6).12

9. The seminal study on oral poetry is LORD 2000 [1960]); also see, ZUMTHOR 1990; for the medieval period, see ZUMTHOR 1985; for the oral character of troubadour poetry and its relation to writing and compilation, see HUOT 1987.

10. For the sociology and anthropology of the troubadours in the Castilian court, see MENÉNDEZ PIDAL 1945; and RIQUER 1975.

11. See EICHLER 1975; and MAIR 1988.

12. EICHLER 1975, p. 48; rprt. in MAIR 1988, p. 148.

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Fig. 5. CSM, cantiga CX, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 157v.

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A French engraving from 1778 entitled “Le chanteur de cantiques” (fi g. 7) helps clarify the bipolar dimension of the miniatures illustrating cantiga CX13. It features a preacher instructing an urban audience on the events of the Passion. The primary role of the visual apparatus of the Cantigas, as accompaniment of an oral performance with a clear didactic intention, would correspond to the illustrated banner being used in the engraving. Seen in this light, the illuminations on fol. 157v constitute a split representation: the section on the left refers to the world outside the manuscript; the section on the right refers to the visions generated in Alfonso’s mind. In between the two levels is Alfonso’s voice –the poet’s musical recitation– that bridges the gap between them at the moment of performance. The neutral surface of the vellum that unfolds between the speaker and his audi-ence becomes the image of a voice –a soundscape that defi nes a unifi ed space of communication bringing together the king and his subjects.

By introducing a depiction that stands outside the frame and internally thematizes the use of the illuminations, fol. 157v constitutes a meta-image which emphasizes the public dimension of the art of the Cantigas and the expansion of its imagery beyond the limits of the codex.14 As I will argue in the course of this article, the imagery of the Cantigas fl uctuates constantly at different levels of signifi cation as it reframes itself inside and outside the limits established by the authorial voice, the narrative structure, and the physical reality of the codex.

Let us now enter the meta-image of fol. 157v in order to analyze the images that furnish Alfonso’s poetic universe. The upper register illustrates the refrain of the poem, which comments on the temporal limitations of human life in relation to the limitless number of Mary’s virtues. Alfonso’s surrogate lies on a bed in a borderline state between temporal dream and postmortem bliss. Stanzas

13. EICHLER 1975, p. 89; rprt. in MAIR 1988, p. 175.

14. For a study of meta-images in the context of Baroque painting, see STOICHITA 1997.

Fig. 6.Spanish picture reciters presenting a mystery play, 1965.

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one and two are visualized in the left and right panels of the middle register. In the left panel Alfonso points to his tongue –that human tongue not made of iron to which the song refers. On the right, there is an image of Mary and jesus, who playfully kisses his mother as he reaches out to touch her breast. This iconography, which emphasizes the carnal bond between Mary and Christ through the act of breast feeding, was widely used to represent the Incarnation, the human physi-cality of Christ mentioned in the stanza.15 Finally, the imagery of the fi nal stanza brings to mind Augustine.16 In a beautiful passage from the Confessions, he introduces a metaphor likening sky and parchment in relation to the timeless nature of God’s word. It envelops different issues impli-cated in the spirit and the letter of cantiga CX:

“O who but You, our God, made a fi rmament of authority over us in Your divine Scripture? For the heavens shall be folded together as a book which now are stretched out like a pavilion over us. The authority of Your divine Scripture is all the more sublime because the mortals by whom You gave Scripture to us have died the death. And You know, Lord, You know how you clothed men with skins when by sin they had become mortal. Thus it was as a skin that you stretched out the fi rmament of Your Book, the fi rmament of Your words ever in harmony which, by the minis-try of mortal men, You placed over us. By their death the fi rmament of the authority that was in the words You uttered through them was stretched more sublimely over all that lies below; while they were living that force and authority were not spread so high. You had not yet stretched out the heaven like a pavilion, You had not yet spread all through the world the fame of their death.

15. See, for example, BYNUM 1992, pp. 181-238.

16. For evidence of Alfonso’s acquaintance with Augustine, see MÁRQUEZ VILLANUEVA 1994, p. 62.

Fig. 7.Le chanteur de cantiques by Charles-Nicholas Cochin le fi ls, 1778.

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Let us, O Lord, behold Thy heavens, the works of Thy fingers: clear away from before our eyes the cloud with which You have covered them. In them is Thy testimony giving wisdom to little ones…There are, as I believe, other waters above this firmament [of Scripture] waters immortal and kept clear of earthly corruption. Let the super-celestial hosts of Your angels praise Your name, let them praise You for they have no need to look upon this firmament nor to read it in order to know Your word. For they ever see Your Face, and in Your face they read without syllables spoken in time what is willed by Your eternal will. They read it and they choose it and they love it; they read it without ceasing, and what they read never passes away. For by choice and love they read the very immutability of Your counsels. Their scroll is not closed, their book is not folded together, for their book is Yourself and You eternally are: because You have established them above that firmament which You have established above the infir-mity of the peoples below: and there they may look up and know Your mercy, that mercy which ever announces You in time, who made time”.17

Here, Augustine discusses the nature of divine revelation, whose final form is the vision of God’s face in an eternal present. The blessed, liberated after death from the skin of sin, will be able to contemplate the Verbum as a totality, as if “reading without syllables spoken in time.” Before reaching the domain of vision, however, mortals may access divine truth by reading on the firma-ment of God’s book.18 The underlying concept of cantiga CX –the impossibility of rendering in words, through the temporality of speech, the vision of the divinity– reproduces Augustine’s semi-otic hierarchy. The images in the upper and lower right panels are complementary in rendering Augustine’s analogy: death (the liberation from time and matter) grants the direct contemplation of Mary (upper panel), while recording her praises through the temporality of language falls short of reaching the final vision, even if it is carried out by an infallible scribe writing on the expansive parchment of the sky (fig. 8).

Alfonso’s dialogue with Augustine, however, is more poetic than theological. The Cantigas, like the Confessions, is a public account of a personal process of conversion in which the author moves away from the delights of the flesh in order to pursue a spiritual relationship with the divinity. Alfonso approaches Augustine’s text as an author, seeking literary imagery, which, once incor-porated into his mental landscape, resurfaces, transformed, within his own poetic discourse. The illuminations of cantiga CX are truly remarkable for their poetic density. They not only succeed in visualizing a text whose metaphorical originality and confessional mood renders traditional icono-graphic formulae stiff and insufficient, but, in so doing, they add unexpected layers of meaning at a purely visual level.

Let us for a moment disconnect the images of the lower register from their textual referent in the Cantigas and look at them again through Alfonso’s eyes, as a reader of the Confessions and as a lover of nature. The depiction of the old and venerable scribe who, seated on a golden throne, writes incessantly on the firmament of the book, brings to mind Augustine’s reference to God

17. Confessions 1993, XIII.15, pp. 269-270.

18. For the recurrent metaphor of the universe as a book written by the hand of God, see CURTIUS 1953, pp. 302-347.

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writing the book of nature. The rather naturalistic representation of three herons in the landscape surrounding the scribe would reinforce this interpretation. In effect, in the section De animali-bus of Gil de Zamora’s Historia Naturalis, we encounter a passage regarding the heron (ardea ave in Latin, garza real in Spanish)19. Following the allegorical tradition of medieval bestiaries, Alfonso’s counselor gives a moral interpretation to the characteristics of the heron:

“The ‘ardea’ is so called, according to Isidore in book XIII of his Etymologies, because its flight is ‘arduo,’ that is, high; because it fears rain, it flies above the clouds, and, in so doing, it escapes storms. When the heron flies high, it means a storm is coming. Isidore says that many people call this bird tantalum.In a sense, the heron resembles the contemplative soul; because, in the same way as the heron flies high to avoid the rain, so the contemplative soul always aims at things high. Because contemplation is nothing but the elevation of the soul above itself to be suspended next to God, enjoying the pleasure of eternal bliss”.20

19. Gil de Zamora (in Latin Iohannes Aegidius Zamorensis) was a Franciscan friar who studied in Paris, perhaps with Bonaventure, and became Alfonso X’s secretary and close advisor. To Alfonso he dedicated the Liber Mariae, which contains 78 Marian miracles. He also wrote treatises on music, history, theology, and rhetoric. For a biography of Gil de Zamora, see CASTRO Y CASTRO 1955; for the Liber Mariae and its connections to some miracles in the Canti-gas, see FITA 1885 (1), pp. 379-409.20. For the Latin text, see Historia Naturalis 1994, vol. 2, pp. 1016-1018. The fact that Gil de Zamora quotes several passages from Augustine’s Confessions in his Historia Naturalis provides further evidence of Alfonso’s possible fa-miliarity with the text.

Fig. 8.CSM, cantiga CX,

Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 157v-6.

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The presence of the herons in the miniature, wandering, unafraid of the rain, in a calm fi eld, helps identify this landscape as the blissful realm generated by the proximity of God, where the con-templative soul enjoys a direct vision of His eternal message written on the parchment of the sky. Therefore, interpreted through Augustine and with some clues from Gil de Zamora, the scene unfolds as an allusion to God, whose eternal will is made visible in a sky full of stars.

The closest visual parallel for the iconographic solution of the unfolding of the sky as parchment in the Cantigas is found in a manuscript belonging to Alfonso’s own library, the Toledo Bible moralisée, underscoring the fact that, behind the poetic metaphor of the scribe, is the Biblical imagery, later taken up by Augustine, of the fi rmament as scroll written by God.21 A medallion on f. 118 illustrates one of the Biblical passages (Isaiah 34.4) that use the image of the sky folding like scroll, showing a curtain of stars falling down in similar fashion to the starry scroll in the Cantigas illumination (fi g. 9)22:

“All the stars of the heavens will be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll; all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled fi gs from the fi g tree” (Isaiah 34.4).

However, this pictorial parallelism serves only to highlight the radically different meaning that a scroll of stars has in each manuscript. Indeed, in the adjacent panel of the Cantigas, Alfonso directs the audi-ence with his fi nger to the starry fi rmament –a gesture that, in the larger context of his cultural projects where the study of the stars played a central role, acquires a special relevance that must be explored.

21. The first documentary mention of the Cantigas occurs in Alfonso’s last testament, issued in january 1284. Together with the Cantigas manuscripts, Alfonso catalogues, among his most precious possessions, a three-volume illuminated Bible that had been presented to him by his cousin, the King of France, Louis IX. With all certainty, this corresponds to the Bible moralisée produced in Paris between 1226 and 1234 and now preserved in the Cathedral of Toledo (MSS. 1-3). See GONZÁLEZ JIMÉNEZ 2004. For an edition of Alfonso’s testament, see GONZÁLEZ JIMÉNEZ 1991, p. 560. For the Toledo Bible moralisée, see LOWDEN 2000, pp. 95-137. The facsimile edition is GONZÁLVEZ RUIZ 2004.

22. Other biblical passages, use this image, especially in the context of apocalyptic visions. Among them, Revelation 6:14, is the one that has generated a more consistent iconographic tradition, depicting the sky as a scroll in representa-tions of the Last judgment (“The sky receded like a scroll, rolling up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place”). The illustration of this passage in the Toledo Bible moralisée, however, does not feature the image of the sky as a folding scroll.

Fig. 9.The Bible of Saint Louis, T. II, Toledo, Cathedral of Toledo, f. 118r.

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Astronomy was the Learned King’s lifelong passion. He sponsored teams of scientist that, during ten years, from 1262 to 1272, undertook astronomical observations in Toledo in order to chart the position of the planets and stars. He also commissioned numerous Castilian translations of Arabic astronomical and astrological treatises, which were collected in three major compilations: Libro de las formas et de las imágenes (Ms. h-I-16, RBME), Libro de Astromagia (partially preserved in Ms. 1283a, BAV) y Libro del saber de astrología (Ms. 156, BHMV, U.C.M).23 In the prologue to his Book of Astrological Wisdom, Alfonso states his wish “that the great virtues and wonders that God attributed to the things he had made should be known by intelligent men who would be helped thereby, and that God might be praised, loved, and accepted.”24 Alfonso justifies astrology, an activity contested strongly by the Church, by presenting it as a vehicle to interpret God’s book of nature. According to the king, the knowledge of the stars and other elements of Creation helps to deepen the love and acceptance for God and contributes to his exaltation. This argument seems to reflect the natural conclusion that an astrology aficionado like Alfonso could have drawn from the aforementioned passage of the Confessions, “Let us, O Lord, behold Thy heavens, the works of Thy fingers: clear away from before our eyes the cloud with which You have covered them. In them is Thy testimony giving wisdom to little ones. O, my God, out of the mouth of infants and of sucklings perfect They praise.” In this light, the miniature under discussion visually articulates and justifies Alfonso’s views of creation, nature, and astrology through the use of poetic imagery of Augustinian origin. Alfonso shows his subjects the stars (as he literally did through his translations into the vernacular) because those are, rephrasing Augustine, the words directly written by God upon the firmament of his book –a moment reenacted by the illumination.

If Alfonso’s views of nature and his astrological knowledge emerged from a combination of Arabic lore and Christian sources, his poetic imagery also reflects a hybrid character. The scribe seated on the lavish golden throne is clothed with an elaborate garment that, by comparison to other represen-tations of scribes in the Cantigas, shows a clear Eastern flavor. His headgear is an ornate variation of the type worn by characters on f. 194r of Ms. T-I-1, whom the text of cantiga CXXXVIII defines as ‘heathens’25. Due to the association of astrology with Arabic culture in Alfonso’s court, the char-acterization of the scribe seems to reinforce the implied reference to that science in the miniature. It also points remarkably to the cultural origin of another aspect of Alfonso’s metaphor. sura 18 of the Qur’an contains the following verse:

Say: ‘If the sea were inkfor the Words of my Lord,the sea would be spent before the Words of my Lord are spent,though We brought replenishment the like of it.’26

23. PROCTER 1945. The scientific projects carried out by Alfonso’s scriptorium up to his death are generally studied disconnected from the Cantigas, and yet they all respond to a unified vision, according to which Alfonso sought to compile a universal corpus of knowledge useful to his nation. This corpus described the forces that emanate from God, how they operate in the world, and the ways in which they could be controlled and deployed for the larger good of the community, though stones, images, mechanical instruments, and faith, see PRADO-VILAR 2009 (1). For a complete study of the corpus of scientific works produced in Alfonso’ scriptorium, see FERNÁNDEZ FERNÁNDEZ 2010 (1).

24. Cited in O’ CALLAGHAN 1993, p. 142.

25. See the picture in Fernández Fernández in the present volume.

26. ARBERRY 1996, p. 328.

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This metaphor has also a widespread presence in other literary traditions of the Middle Ages, and in particularly, in the Iberian peninsula27. However, there is an incontrovertible piece of evidence, not noticed until now, that Alfonso is consciously borrowing Muhammad’s words to express the inadequacy of language to fathom the extent of Mary’s virtues. In fact, it is not a coincidence that immediately after this verse in the Qur’an, there starts sura 19, which is dedicated to Mary. We know that this sura, which reaffirms the virginity of Mary, was familiar to Alfonso and his team of poets and illuminators because they highlight it, both in texts and images, in several cantigas as a vehicle to promote Marian devotion among Muslims.28 In sum, we have a rich and polyvalent poetic image created by merging diverse literary and pictorial sources resulting in a multidimen-sional representation that evokes simultaneously allusions to Augustine, Muslim astronomers, the Christian God and to Allah through the same body, the sacred scribe who eternally writes the book of nature. This body, in turn, mirrors Alfonso’s own in his role as the writer who strives to record incessantly the praises of the Virgin.29

Another widely disseminated topos was the vision of the beloved during sleep. This is a recurring motif in Arabic literature as part of the so-called nasib or introductory passage of the qasida. For instance, there is a verse from the Mufaddaliyyat that reads “There comes to him from time to time the nightly vision of Sulayma.”30 This literary image could have informed the “ambiguous” visu-alization of the first stanza of cantiga CX, where Alfonso’s surrogate receives the nightly vision of his beloved, the Virgin Mary.31

So far, I have explored the hybrid character of Alfonso’s poetic imagery –the images generated by his oral recitation, which are depicted on the right panels of f. 157v. Now I would like to step back onto Alfonso’s performative stage in order to examine the sources informing his role as author and storyteller. On the left, Alfonso addresses an audience of courtiers gathered in cross-legged fashion. Basically, this arrangement speaks of the influence of Islamic customs in the daily life of Christian Spain. It has, however, another significance at both iconographic and literary levels. Similar compositions thematizing acts of listening are in fact characteristic of the illuminated cycles illustrating thirteenth-century manuscripts of al-Hariri’s Maqamat (fig. 10). In particular, several miniatures in the Cantigas are strikingly similar to the illustrations contained in a manuscript

27. See, for instance, LINN 1938.

28. See PRADO-VILAR 2005, pp. 77-78, and PRADO-VILAR 2011. For a Cantigas illustration of a Muslim sultan holding a manuscript of the Qur’an as he points to sura 19 (Ms. T-I-1, fol. 222r), see PRADO-VILAR 2005, fig. 5.

29. Arabic literature develops numerous allegories dedicated to writing. For instance, the eleventh-century Cordoban author, Ibn Burn, in a famous essay entitled the sword and the pen, mentions, among other metaphors, the analogy of the sea as ink. Such topoi abound in the literatures of Spain, especially Arabic and Hebrew poetry, crystallizing in the creation of a whole sub-genre: “the dispute between the pen and the sword.” See GRANjA 1976.

30. See SCHIPPERS 1994.

31. The difference of this image with traditional Christian iconography related to dreams can be explored by compar-ing it with other examples in PARAVICINI y STABILE 1989.

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produced around 1237 by the painter and scribe Yahya ben Mahmud al-Wasiti and known as the Schefer Maqamat (Ms. arabe 5847, BnF).32

My concern here is the influence of the Maqamat at a literary level. Al-Hariri’s Maqamat is a collection of fifty anecdotes in Arabic rhymed prose in which a narrator, al-Harith, relates his encounters with the protagonist, an eloquent and elusive rogue called Abu Zayd.33 The plot is relegated to a secondary position and becomes an excuse to develop convoluted linguistic puns. Despite the fact that it is a text that does not lend itself easily to illustration, numerous illuminated copies of the Maqamat were produced in the Arab world in the thirteenth century. Although none of the thirteen extant illustrated Maqamat can be assigned to Spain, the well-documented knowl-edge of the Maqamat literary genre in al-Andalus and the Spanish Christian kingdoms provides the cultural context for the presence of illustrated manuscripts in the Iberian Peninsula. In effect, al-Hariri’s Maqamat reached al-Andalus at an early date and it soon exerted a strong influence in the literary world.34 For instance, the Andalusian al-Sharishi (d. 1222) is credited with the most renowned commentary of the Maqamat.35 At about the same time, the genre is attested in the

32. For a description of this manuscript, see GRABAR 1984, pp. 10-11. The facsimile edition is Maquamat 2003. With remarkable intuition, Menéndez Pidal was the first scholar to signal the compositional similarities between two mini-atures of the Cantigas (both of them depicting military parades) and two illustrations from the Schefer Maqamat, see MENÉNDEZ PIDAL 1986, pp. 21-35. However, the relations between the Cantigas and the Maqamat are much more significant, both formally and conceptually, than previously thought. The compositional similarities between several other scenes of the Cantigas and miniatures of the Schefer Maqamat, in addition to clear connections in narrative tech-nique in the construction of various episodes, lead me to believe that the Cantigas artists had access to either the Schefer Maqamat itself or another “lost” illuminated copy of the Maqamat directly related to the Schefer manuscript. For a hy-pothesis about the possible arrival of such manuscript at the court of Alfonso X, see PRADO-VILAR 2009 (2).

33. Enciclopaedia of Islam 1913-1938, s.v. “Makama”.

34. See NEMAH 1974, pp. 83-92; GRANjA 1976; and EL-OUTMANI 1994, pp. 105-125.

35. Enciclopaedia of Islam 1913-1938, s.v. “al-Sharishi.”

Fig. 10.Maqamat, Ms. arabe 5847, BnF, f. 131v.

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Christian Kingdoms in the work of several jewish writers, such as al-Harizi who translated al-Hariri into Hebrew in 1205 and composed fifty maqamat in which he combined biblical quotations according to the structure and stylistic characteristics of the Arabic maqamat.36

In affect, the maqamat was a malleable genre that could contain different literary forms, such as poetry, dialogue, and description in order to effectively convey a variety of subjects –including religious matters. It was also a genre that developed across different stages of high and popular culture, from the streets to the courts. In its origin, the maqamat –term that translates as “assem-bly” or “session”– involved an eloquent storyteller who addressed an aristocratic audience. As Ch. Pellat has pointed out:

“Before an audience of common people, an analogous role was performed by the kass, who originally delivered edifying speeches but, as is well-known, in the course of time soon took on the dual function of storyteller and mountebank, whose activity was to a certain extent comparable to that of the mukaddi, the wandering beggar or vagrant who went from town to town and easily gathered around him an audience who rewarded him financially for the fascinating stories he told”.37

Essentially, the maqamat offered Alfonso a model of dialogic storytelling with which to reach a large audience across social and ethnic boundaries. It provided a flexible literary environment to perform multiple authorial roles and encompass a wide range of subjects. In many respects, the maqamat constitutes the literary equivalent of the process of embedding and reframing that char-acterizes the imagery of the Cantigas. In the maqamat, the voice of the storyteller provides the expansive frame that generates the multilevel narrative, reappearing on occasions as actor within his own discourse. In similar fashion, Alfonso’s presence –his position with respect to the images in the visual discourse– constitutes the pivotal element around and from which the different levels of representation originate. This process of framing is fundamental to understanding an essential characteristic of what I have termed as Gothic visual poetics. Before exploring in more detail the artistic, religious, social, and political implications of such a mode of visual representation, I shall illustrate further this issue through a comparative analysis of images from the Cantigas and other thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts that thematize processes of framing.

As we have seen, the illuminations of cantiga CX juxtapose a portrait of the author with his didac-tic imagery. The depiction of Alfonso directing the audience to the visual representations of his discourse can be loosely related to the new role that was allotted to john the Evangelist in a group of thirteenth-century English illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts. In those works, as Suzanne Lewis has pointed out:

“john is visibly present as both author and protagonist in the dramatic disclosure of his visions. He functions as a human intermediary between the reader and the divine revela-tion…. [He] frequently witnesses the apocalyptic events as a spectator physically isolated

36. For a recent study of the influence of the maqamat in the literatures of medieval Spain, see WACKS 2007.

37. Ibidem, s.v. “Makama.”

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from the vision. Standing outside the frame, he shares a place in the corporeal world of the reader, clearly distinguishable from the spiritual, timeless realm represented within. The frame is not longer perceived as impermeable boundary, a perimeter conceptually disavowed or repressed, but now plays an active role in the visual semiosis of the text-image”.38

Comparing an image from the Douce Apocalypse (fig. 11) with the central register of fol. 157v, we observe certain similarities. The authors, Alfonso and john, stand outside a frame that con-tains a visualization of the events related by their first-person narrative voice. The image of John physically witnessing his own vision through a small opening in the frame can be related to another scene from the Cantigas, where Alfonso commands his audience to gaze through a door into an architectural frame that contains a scene featuring the Virgin and child (fig. 12). Both scenes show a similar connection between the timeless realm of the iconic image and the contin-gent world of the author. And yet this similarity is only apparent because the architectural setting and figure placement brings us back to the visual world of the maqamat and their fluid theatrical relation between word and image (fig. 13).

In fact, the Apocalypse illuminations and the miniatures in the Cantigas are completely different both in terms of the relation between the author with the images and in terms of the connection between the images and the text. The miniatures of the Apocalypse illustrate a dogmatic text. They are bound to a stable textual matrix and, indirectly, to a pre-established iconographic tradition associated with that text. It is also a text that claims authenticity, that transmits the visionary expe-rience of the Evangelist “as it actually happened.” As Lewis remarks:

“The role of john as observer of his visions, transcends that of an oral witness to serve a more direct authenticating function in graphic presences that validate his visions in the written record by reenacting his seeing and hearing for the reader. john serves as a human intermediary between the reader and divine revelation, a preceptor whose optical and audi-tory experiences provide an authenticating conduit through which the reader finds access to his visions.”39

In effect, the frame in the Apocalypse illustration separates the image of the Evangelist, which is essentially a visual gloss –an iconic signature– from a vision that preexists him as an author, that is, an image which is not created by his poetic imagination but to which he relates just as a passive witness. Conversely, the images that Alfonso shows to his audience are not illustrations of actual visions that he claims to have had, but visualizations of his poetic speech as it unfolds in front of an audience. While john relives, through the opening in the frame, the visions he experienced in a historical past, Alfonso simply uses images to accompany, synchronically, his poetic recitation (in a fashion similar to the street performers pointing to the banner in the engraving). Unlike the images of the Apocalypse, which claim an immutable truth, the images in the Cantigas constitute a theatrical reenactment of a poetic, subjective, and fluid score. This theatrical approach to visual representation undermines the textual economy of traditional Christian iconography and expands

38. LEWIS 1995, pp. 19-20.

39. LEWIS 1995, p. 20.

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Fig. 11.Douce Apocalypse, Ms. Douce 180, BLO, f. 20r.

Fig. 12.CSM, cantiga CLX, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 216r-2.

Fig. 13.Maqamat, Ms. arabe 5847, BnF, f. 148r.

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the artistic frame to incorporate extra-textual, purely gestural, elements. Unlike in the Apocalypse miniatures, the Cantigas illuminations do not draw attention to their discursive content –to their textual matrix– but to the world outside. The basic content of the text is amplified and extended by aural and visual imagery at the moment of performance. In this fashion, unlike the introspective imagery of standard medieval manuscript illumination, the Cantigas’ visual poetics engages life, reality, and history as it unfolds. As R. Poirier has pointed out, “Performance is above all historical –that is, inevitably caught up in the social and political exigencies of the moment.” 40

In its self-aware theatricality and liberation from a binding textual matrix, the visual narrative of the Cantigas develops a sophisticated system of gestural communication that incorporates elements of the usage of images in performance situations. The dialogic principle that gener-ates the artistic system of the Cantigas (between Alfonso and his audience) is echoed within the narrative and lyrical songs. Alfonso often addresses the Virgin in the first person and makes his case to induce her benevolence and win her advocacy at the Last judgement. His dialogue with the Virgin is similarly visualized by juxtaposing his gestural address with illustrations of his speech. For instance, cantiga C, one of the most beautiful musical compositions of the collec-tion (frequently recorded in the discography of the Cantigas) exemplifies this principle. These are the lyrics:

Holy Mary, Star of Day, show us the way to God and be our guideYou make the wayward, who were lost because of sin, see and understand that they are very guilty. But they are pardoned by you for the temerity which caused them recklessly to do what they should not.You must show us the way in all our deeds to win the true and matchless light which only you can give us, for God would grant it to you, and most willingly bestow it for your sake.Your wisdom can guide us far better than any other thing to Paradise, where God has always delight and joy for whoever would believe in Him. I should rejoice if it please you to let my soul be in such a company.

The illustration of this song on the Códice Rico is outstanding (fig. 14). The six-panel grid is interconnected through a network of gestures that links visually both the characters involved in the dialogue and the theological ideas expressed in each stanza. The first panel includes both the refrain –Mary is referred to as “Star of Day,” so a star is depicted above her–, and the first stanza –Alfonso points to a group of people, among whom there is one “who [was] lost because of sin” and turns away from the Virgin. The second, third, and fourth panels illustrate the second stanza. The second panel visualizes Alfonso’s utterance “You” and the third panel shows the content of that utterance–that the Virgin “show us the way in all our deeds to win the true and matchless light;” consequently, the Virgin appears directing a devout audience towards the true light of God. In the fourth panel, Alfonso addresses the Virgin again reassuring her of her power to mediate for the faithful in front of God –his gesture contains the verse “because God would grant it to you.” The final two panels refer to the last stanza in which Alfonso asks the Virgin for her intervention to reach Paradise, so the king points directly to an image of Paradise. The gestural language of the

40. SAYRE 1990, p. 98.

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Fig. 14. CSM, cantiga C, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 145r.

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Cantigas is so subtle that even the implication made in the song that the Virgin has the power to open Paradise is remarkably conveyed by the direct eye contact between the enthroned Virgin and the angel who is guarding access to Eden with his sword.

At a purely pictorial level, the miniature representing Paradise is another embedded hybrid image. Its closest compositional model can be found in manuscripts of the Maqamat.41 Earlier we have encountered a miniature, the scribe writing on the sky, which was created through a process of merging different literary and pictorial sources, resulting in a rich poetic image that projects simul-taneously allusions to Arab astronomers and to God onto the same body. In a similar fashion, Christian Paradise is “imagined” through Islamic models.

The external dialogic system of the Cantigas (between Alfonso with the Virgin and his audience) is reflected at a more essential level in the active cultural dialogue that informs many aspects of the work.42 Alfonso’s hybrid textual and visual cultures, open and permeable to multiple forms of dis-course, allowed for the expansion of representational structures to apprehend and construct reality. The absorption and transformation of literary imagery, evident in the authorial voice, resonates at a visual level in a pictorial system that incorporates, through various processes of detachment and reframing, the accomplishments of diverse artistic traditions, expanding, consequently, the realm of the visible in medieval art.

ALFONSO’S PURGATORY: THE MATTER OF REVELATION

“We were climbing through a cleft in the rock, which kept bending one way and the other, like a wave that goes and comes. ‘Here must we use a little skill,’ my leader began, ‘in keep-ing close, now here, now there, to the side that recedes.’ And this made our steps so scant that the waning orb of the moon had regained its bed to sink to rest before we came forth from that needle’s eye. But when we were free and out in the open above, where the mountain draws back, I weary and each of us uncertain of our way, we stopped on a level place more solitary than roads through deserts. From its edge, bordering the void, to the foot of the high bank which rises sheer, a body would measure in three lengths; and as far as my eye could make its flight, now on the left and now on the right, such this terrace seemed to me. Now yet had we moved our feet on it when I perceived that the encircling bank (which, being vertical, lacked means of ascent) was of pure white marble, and was adorned with such carvings that not only Polycletus but Nature herself would there be put to shame”. 43

Dante, Purgatorio X, 7-33.

41. MS. 1200, BL, f. 68r. For a description of this manuscript, dated 1256, see GRABAR 1984, pp. 12-13. Illustration in PRADO-VILAR 2005, fig. 10.

42. For the concept of dialogism and multilevel discourse in literature, see BAKHTIN 1981; for “Bakhtinian” read-ings of medieval literature, see FARRELL 1995.

43. Quotations from Dante’s Commedia are taken from the English translation by SINGLETON 1970-1989.

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On f. 44r of the Códice Rico, covering the marbled whiteness of the parchment that still surfaces as background within the figurative structure, a rectangular grid frames a series of six scenes (fig. 15). The upper left panel features Alfonso pointing to his audience the visualization of the miracle he is about to recite. In the direction marked by his gesture, speech unfolds into images as the viewer discloses sequentially, from left to right, the content of the story. These illumina-tions correspond to cantiga XXIX, which, unlike other miracles in the collection, relegates plot to a secondary position and adopts a reflective character. As a result, the illuminations favor a con-templative mode of viewing that both supplements and subverts the natural directionality of the narrative flow. Examining the panels on the right from top to bottom, one sees the visual layout of a Christian theory of representation. In the top right panel, astonished people gather to observe the formation of acheiropoieta, images not made by human hands, which reproduce likenesses of the Virgin and Child.44 The right panel of the middle register portrays God as the artist causing his mother’s appearance to be visible and available for veneration. Immediately below, there is an Annunciation, specifically featuring the moment in which God sets in motion the mystery of the Incarnation, and therefore, providing the historical and theological background that justifies pos-terior instances of divine representation.

To the left, below Alfonso’s authorial portrait, there are two panels that open the miniatures to the viewers’ theatrical participation. In the panel of the middle register, the stage designed for the dramatization of the preceding scene is reproduced vacant, compelling the observer to take on the role of amazed audience member as s/he examines the pillars on which Mary’s features surface. Immediately below, one witnesses how the diffuse presence of Mary in the pillars substantiates into a majestic corporeality as she occupies her place at the head of Creation and is worshipped by all creatures. The transition between Mary’s monochromatic likeness and her colorful embodi-ment expresses, in purely pictorial terms, the fundamental theological tenet of the acheiropoieta: the continuum between divine emanation and religious representation.

In the delicate simplicity of its white on white, the marble image of the Virgin seems to emerge from the creamy surface of the vellum, underscoring the essential identity between matter and form implicit in the concept of the acheiropoieta. Also implicit in that concept is the absence of human agency in the making of the images, which is illustrated through the stark contrast between the self-effacing drawing on the marble and the rich pigmentation that fills the other figures. The tension between monochromatic drawing –signaling an image untouched by human hands–, and multicolor pigment –an index of human intervention–, is finally resolved through the scene of the Incarnation when Mary’s human body becomes a site of divine revelation. As a result, in the final panel, emanation and representation become one as the iconic frontal image of the Virgin, fully colored by human hands according to God’s revealed model, is venerated by all creatures.

The sophisticated interplay between vellum, drawing, and pigment that takes place in the visu-alization of this miracle transforms f. 44r into a masterful embodiment of a Christian view on the relationship between matter and revelation. Unlike contemporary illuminations such as those

44. On acheiropoieta, see VON DOBSCHUTZ 1899; KITZINGER 1954, pp. 83-150, esp. pp. 112 ff.; jANSON 1961, pp. 254-266; BELTING 1994, pp. 47-57; TRILLING 1998, pp. 109-127.

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Fig. 15. CSM, cantiga XXIX, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 44r.

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from Bible moralisée, whose symbolic density derives from a textual gloss external to the page, this cantiga encodes theology into the pictorial performance of the text. The essential continuity between pictorial performance and text makes these images transcend their status as illustrations and become ‘embodiments’ The surface of the parchment becomes itself the material support for the formation of acheiropoieta.

This intelligent deployment by the illuminators of the pre-symbolic materiality of the manuscript within the system of representation parallels what they did in the miniature of the scribe writing on the sky (fig. 8). The blue pigment that represents heaven fades away as it the scroll of the sky unfolds to become the white parchment on which the sacred scribe is writing (fig. 8). Therefore, that unpainted patch of vellum from the codex, which exists outside the system of representation, becomes literally the parchment of the sky within that system. The scribe is writing on the actual codex that contains his representation. The nature of these images as ‘embodiment’ of the central concept of the story rather than illustrations of it can be further explored through the analysis of their relation to the accompanying text.

Cantiga XXIX, titled “This is how holy Mary made likenesses of Herself appear on the stones,” reads:

We should always keep in our minds the features of the Virgin for the hard stones received their impressions.As I have heard from men who went there, in holy Gethsemane likenesses of the Mother of God were found which were not paintings.Neither were they carved, as God is my witness, but there appeared there the semblances of the Gracious Lady with Her Son accurately done to their exact proportions.Furthermore, She made them shine and glow, by which sign we must believe that She is Mistress of all things in nature and has the power over all things to bring light out of darkness.God chose to depict Her features on stone to demonstrate to us that all creatures should honor His Mother, for He descended from Heaven to take on human flesh in Her.

As I have mentioned above, this song does not frame the presentation of Marian images within a detailed plot –there is no specific physical location, no human protagonist involved, no wrong situation made right by the images, no narrative beginning and no end45. Instead, acheiropoieta are made the focus of a series of reflections upon Mary’s place as the head of Creation. The capacity of the Virgin to make her image visible through different materials, even those less suitable for representation such as dark and hard stones, is discussed as proof of her privileged position in the hierarchy of nature. The main idea of the cantiga, conveyed insistently by the refrain, uses achei-ropoieta to promote a piety of interior vision. With a veiled allusion to the Aristotelian mnemonic metaphor of the mind as a sealing wax on which a signet-ring leaves its imprint, Alfonso compares the mind’s capacity to receive images of Mary to that of stones, which despite being of a harder substance, are not invulnerable to Mary’s imprint.46 Alfonso advocates for the interiorization of

45. For the textual sources of this cantiga, see KINKADE y KELLER 1999.

46. On mnemonic metaphors, see YATES 1966 and CARRUTHERS 1990.

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the figure of Mary by keeping her likeness always present in one’s mind, as if the human body was the material support for an acheiropoieton. In a sense, cantiga XXIX stresses the internalization of imagery which is at the core of the constitution of acheiropoieta –a process of projecting an interior image on a material support and realigning the latter’s physical appearance according to a pre-established set of expectations.

The concept of divine emanation that permeates cantiga XXIX conforms to the ideas espoused by Alfonso in one of his scientific treatises, the Lapidario. This work, commissioned in 1250 when Alfonso was still a prince, is a translation into Castilian of an Arabic treatise on the properties of stones.47 In the prologue, Alfonso explains that all things in the world are related to each other and the lower ones receive their virtues from the most noble. His Neoplatonic concept of divine emanation is conflated with a mystical approach to astrology of Hellenistic origin. To each stone corresponds a constellation from which it derives its power. This downward reflection of God through astral bodies onto the lower elements of creation informs the account of acheiropoieta in the Cantigas, opening the possibility for this fluid interplay of resemblances and religious mean-ing. For instance, cantiga CLXXXVIII recounts the tale of a girl who loved the Virgin so much that she caused her divine image to be imprinted in her heart (fig. 16).48

Years after its translation, the Lapidary received a full cycle of illuminations consisting of scenes of “finding” and “examination,” which serve as preface to the description of each stone and its properties (Ms. h-I-15, RBME).49 Historiated initials, such as the ones on fol. 22v (fig. 17), feature a standard composition of two people (sometimes more), a connoisseur/physician and his assist-ant, extracting and analyzing the stone in the specific topographical setting where it is found.

The way in which cantiga XXIX reports the existence of stones imprinted with images of the Virgin resembles the textual sequence in which each stone is disussed in the Lapidary: exterior location –finding– description of the qualities of the stones –celestial sources informing their properties. Surprisingly, despite the thematic and structural connections between the text of cantiga XXIX and the treatise on stones, the iconographic formulae developed for the Lapidary were completely disregarded when approaching the illustration of this cantiga. Instead, the illuminations follow a route different from the one marked by the text. In contrast to the presumably exterior location of Gethsemane and the generic mention of stones in the text, the miniatures show an interior space in which images of the Virgin appear on two piers lined by marble slabs. These elements seem to connect the miniatures to a textual tradition of acheiropoieta stories located primarily in the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Hagia Sophia was celebrated for its interior marble decora-tion as is attested in the ekphrasis composed by Paul the Silentiary for the rededication of the

47. The standard edition of the Lapidary is WINGET y DIMAN 1980.

48. For references to similar stories of religious imagery found in the heart of devout women, see BYNUM 1992, esp. p. 187, n. 28. For an extended study of the theory of divine emanation as an unifying principle informing the epistemology and praxis of the power of images reflected in the ambitious editorial projects carried out by the royal scriptorium in the last decade of Alfonso’s life, ranging from the Cantigas de Santa María, to the illuminated lapidar-ies, astromagical, and astrological manuscripts, see PRADO-VILAR 2009 (1).

49. The facsimile edition is Lapidario 1982.

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Fig. 16: CSM, cantiga CLXXXVIII, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 248r.

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church in 562.50 Paul repeatedly emphasizes the glittering character of the marble –a quality that cantiga XXIX also mentions attributing it to the light irradiating from Mary’s presence. As James Trilling discusses in a recent study, the fi gural potential of veined and colored marble, together with the psychological and cultural predisposition of the Byzantine population to visualize reli-gious imagery on natural objects, could have generated acheiropoieta legends.51 By the end of the fourteenth century, visitors to Hagia Sophia were probably introduced to similar legends by local tour guides as is attested by the Spanish ambassador Ruy González de Clavijo.52 In his description of Hagia Sophia, Clavijo mentions the existence of:

“…a very large white slab of stone which is built into the wall, the centre of many others that surround it. On this slab there appears, formed naturally and not wrought by human art either of sculpture or painting, the perfect fi gure of the most Blessed Virgin Mary, who holds our Lord Jesus Christ in her arms… These fi gures…are not drawn or painted with any pigment, nor graven in the stone artifi cially, but are entirely natural and of its substance; for the stone evidently was formed thus by nature with this veining and markings in it which so clearly depict those Persons whose fi gures now appear upon its surface.”53

As cantiga 342 testifi es, a similar story was in fact known to Alfonso. This cantiga tells how “Holy Mary caused Her image to appear among some blocks of marble they were cutting in Constantinople;” the text reads:

50. Mentioned in TRILLING 1998, pp. 119-120.

51. Ibidem, passim.

52. Ibidem, pp. 126-127.

53. GONZÁLEZ DE CLAVIJO 1928, p. 75.

Fig. 17.Lapidario, MS. h-I-15, RBME, f. 22v.

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Rightfully can God reveal the likeness of Himself or of His Mother in His creations, for He formed them.For in creating things in the form they have today or in many other forms, God made not, nor makes any effort, nor gives any thought to shaping them, for He has great power to begin them as well as to finish them.Therefore, if He causes images to appear on stones, no one should be amazed at this, nor likewise on plants, for He causes them to grow and gives them many colors to appear beautiful to us.Therefore it happened in Constantinople, as I learned, that the good Emperor don Manuel ordered a very noble church to be built there. And, as I heard, he had blocks of marble brought there from far away and sawed in the middle to make great tablets to place around the altar of the Holy Virgin, Mother of our Lord. While they were sawing one of them, they saw Her image inside, painted in colors, just as God had painted it,[stanza missing]holding Her Son, who took on flesh from Her, in Her arms. When the emperor heard of this, he mounted his horse at once, and when he saw the image, he worshipped it and had it placed in the main entrance.And there it sits today, and all hold it in great reverence. The Holy Virgin did this to show that She can transform the heart of the sinner by Her grace, since She transformed the hard stone into Her image.

It becomes clear that the artists in charge of the visualization of cantiga XXIX imagined the stones with the figures of the Virgin mentioned in the text through the description of her image on marble slabs as it appears in cantiga 342. The illuminations on f. 44r splendidly combine the theological reflections of cantiga XXIX with the narrative specificity of cantiga 342 creating a synopsis of the basic tenets of Christian religion regarding divine representation.

Acheiropoieta stories of Byzantine origin were widely disseminated in the Christian West by the thirteenth century. The Cantigas takes some of them from Latin Marian collections such as juan Gil de Zamora’s Liber Mariae and the mariology included in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale. This is the case of cantiga XXVII, which relates the story of the Virgin of Lydda (Diospolis). According to this cantiga –vividly illustrated (fig. 18)– the apostles bought a syna-gogue from the Jews to turn it into a church dedicated to the Virgin. Dissatisfied with the deal, the Jews appealed to the emperor to get it back. The emperor gave each party forty days to find legal proof of ownership. Immediately, the apostles went to Mary for help. She told them not to worry and, when they reopened the church, they found a portrait of the Virgin painted miraculously on the altar wall. The cantiga adds how, at a later time, the emperor julian the Apostate ordered jews to bring him the image but, when they tried to remove it from the church, she “gazed at them so threateningly that they dare not touch it for anything” (panel 6). The core of this story appears as early as the ninth century in the Pseudo-Damascene’s Letter to Emperor Theophilos on the Holy and Venerated Icons.54 This text, composed as a fervent defense of icons, exemplifies the connec-tion between acheiropoieta and iconoclasm.

54. See The Letter of the three Patriarchs 1997, pp. 150-151.

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In effect, acheiropoieta stories played an important role in discussions regarding the veneration of religious images, especially when such practices came under attack. That was the case of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversies during which iconodules articulated two aspects related to acheiropoieta in their defense of images. On the one hand, they emphasized their nature as direct emanations from God to differentiate them from pagan cult objects. On the other hand, they equated God’s agency in the formation of acheiropoieta with his role in the Incarnation, in order to enunciate a theory of Christian representation. As we have seen, in their interpretation of the text of cantiga XXIX, the Alfonsine artists provided one of the clearest visualizations of the parallel between the mystery of the Incarnation and the nature of acheiropoieta. The scene in the middle register featuring God producing a devotional image of the Virgin with his fingers is vertically juxtaposed to a representation of the Annunciation. In order to stress the connec-tion between the two events, the artists modified the standard composition that they used for the Annunciation in the rest of the manuscript and introduced an image of God in heaven at the intersection of the two registers. From the Creator, a ray descends on the Virgin (the purest flesh) initiating the process of divine embodiment that parallels God image-making gesture on the mar-ble (the purest stone).

The presence of these miracles in the Cantigas conforms to the general premise of the collection, which is the promotion of the cult of the Virgin and her miraculous images. Furthermore, that apology, as in the Byzantium of iconoclasm, was triggered by specific religious and socio-polit-ical circumstances for it was directed to an audience of new or potential converts –the extensive Muslim and jewish population of Alfonso’s newly expanded kingdom– whose religious back-ground forcefully rejected divine representation.

In fact, as it might be expected in such a context, the Cantigas’ promotion of images is combined with a strong anti-iconoclastic discourse. Many miracles illustrate the punishment allotted to those who perform iconoclastic actions, both members of religious minorities and Christians. The illu-minations of one of these stories, cantiga 294, on f. 20r of Códice de Florencia, rank among the most lively visual documents of the role of religious images in medieval life (fig. 19). We are sud-denly transported to a public urban space in Apulia where a woman is playing dice with a group of gamblers. Behind them, there is a church, “well built and beautiful,” which features on its façade:

“A beautiful statue of the Holy Virgin Mary, finely carved in stone…There were two angels in front of it, and both of them had one hand on their breasts and in the other held a book of very profound significance, because doubtless they know all knowledge. They had their other hands resting on their breasts to signify that they fervently held all their will upon God.Whereupon this crazed woman saw a stone and picked it up and looked at the statue of the Virgin and insulted it and threw that stone to strike it, but she missed it because the angels who were in front of it were there to guard Our Lady. One of them raised its hand and received the blow, but its arm was unharmed. All who saw this immediately seized the woman and threw her into a flaming fire.The angel ever after held its hand outstretched, which it had thrust in front of the statue to protect it. For this reason that statue was thereafter held in much greater esteem by all those people than it ever was before”.

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Fig. 18. CSM, cantiga XXVII, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 41v.

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In their characteristic mimetic theatricality, the miniatures of the Cantigas bring the text to life with amusing detail and offer a snapshot of the role of art in daily existence during the Gothic period.

Alfonso’s promotion of images stemmed from his conviction concerning the integral role they played in personal piety. His iconophilia is explicitly documented in cantiga 295 where he describes in the third person his own relationship with Mary through her images:

“[There was] a king who constantly had stately and beautiful statues made of Her and had them dressed in rich clothes of gold, sumptuously embroidered. To further beautify them and enhance their appearance, he put crowns with many precious stones on their heads which gave splendor to each statue and made it shine.Furthermore, on Her feast days he had the clothes changed to even richer ones to give the feast greater honor and had the statues placed upon the altar. In addition, he wrote songs for Her, as I was informed.Those songs were about Her many and marvelous miracles which God performs through Her…”

Fig. 19.CSM, Ms. B.R. 20, BNCF, f. 20r.

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This miracle relates how Alfonso commissioned a lavish statue of Mary to be donated to a monas-tery so the nuns could pray to her on the king’s behalf. The Virgin was so grateful that she appeared to the nuns in a vision and told them to ask the king to go see her statue. The story goes:

“As soon as he arrived there, the statue knelt to the earth in front of him and began to ask for his hands so that She might kiss them.However the king threw himself to the earth before Her, arms outstretched, weeping and saying: “My Lady, who is the Light, I shall kiss your feet and arms, for your virtue always brings me health and protects me from those who would harm me.”“No,” She said, “rather I shall kiss your hands for the great honor you always pay me and my Son, Who is God and man. Therefore, I shall place you in His kingdom after you die, this I promise in all truth.”

Iconophilia and self-adulation go hand in hand in the radical turn of this story where Alfonso has a statue of the Virgin dramatically kneel in front of him. Such bold gestures probably elicited strong counteraction and, to be sure, Alfonso cautiously elaborates a defense against those who might regard his iconophilia as idolatry. Cantiga 297 tells the story of a king who owned a beautiful miracle-working statue of the Virgin. A friar attacked the king for his fervent devotion, saying, “I think that this king believes in idols,” and further argued:

“I firmly believe that it is a man without good sense who believes that there is power in carved wood that neither speaks nor moves. This is obviously madness, and I hold that any-one who does not see this is blind.”

To refute the friar, Alfonso develops an explanation based on the concept of divine emanation, as it appears implied in the acheiropoieta story and in his Lapidary:

“We must believe that God is complete power and that the saints receive it from Him, so that they may bestow salvation. Hence, so help me God, he who does not see this is blind to understanding. And likewise, His great power is such that it can act through that thing which He deems wor-thy to be thus empowered. This is the true reason why the one who sincerely believes finds power in a statue.For just as breath gives strength to a living thing, likewise the image receives it instantly from the saint it represents, although man does not see him.”

This statement advocates for the potential capacity of images, regardless of their material making or mechanical reproduction, to share the divine powers of their prototype. This explanation is pertinent because, in many respects, the role assigned to religious images in other miracles of the collection could have seemed to undermine the core argument that made acheiropoieta legends such a powerful vehicle to combat iconoclasm –the negation of human agency. As we have seen, rather than erasing the material making of images through legends, the Cantigas elaborates at length on their origin as human manufactures. In leafing through the manuscripts, one sees how icons are purchased as com-modities in street stores, how they are stolen, how images are painted, and restored.

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In effect, in the Cantigas, the divine character of Marian images is dependent neither on their etiology nor on their connection to discursive theological glosses but, rather, on their agency, both in the space of experiential reality (the whole collection is made up of testimonies of such instances) and within the phenomenological environment activated by the artistic system of Alfonso’s multidimensional work.

The Cantigas should be better understood as a work that articulates a phenomenology of images rather than a discursive image theory.55 Phenomenology helps bring interpretation a step beyond iconography or symbolism by searching for meanings encoded at the level of the experiential comprehension of an artistic object –the process of absorbing meaning by “living within” a cer-tain artistic configuration. This aspect is fundamental to understanding Gothic visual culture and to giving voice to artistic productions that have been traditionally reduced to epistemological structures unfitted to their aesthetic/semantic makeup. In order to analyze the subtle relations between word and image in Gothic visual culture, I will turn to another vernacular author who, like Alfonso, transformed Christian doctrine into a poetic universe both intensely personal and deliberately popular.

In the quotation opening this section, we have seen Dante the pilgrim and Virgil climbing to the first terrace of Mount Purgatory and approaching a series of marble reliefs carved on the sides of a cliff. The reliefs feature three scenes intended as allegorical representations of humility: the Annunciation, David dancing in front of the ark of the Covenant, and the story of Trajan and the widow. 56 The poet explains how “He who never beheld any new thing wrought this visible speech, new to us because here it is not found” (Purgatorio X, 94-96). Dante qualifies the reliefs as acheiropoieta –as unmediated emanations of God and the materialization of his universal lan-guage. The first scene carved on the Purgatorio cliff, the Annunciation, besides playing its role within the monumental program as an example of humility, internally thematizes the underly-ing concept of this ekphrasis, the nature of God’s language of salvation. As in the Cantigas, the Annunciation refers to the mystery of the Incarnation as paradigm of God’s perfect language –the identity between res and signum– where there is no gap between presentation and representation.

In this respect, Dante’s ekphrasis embodies a Gothic poetics and hermeneutics of representation that activates and reframes the ideas elaborated in the Christian textual corpus regarding the ques-tion of divine revelation. As we have seen reflected in the passage from Augustine’s Confessions, medieval exegesis explained how God’s original language was written into the book of creation where the divine truth was reflected without mediation. Before the Fall, man was conversant with God’s language but, after the original sin, Adam and Eve lost their ability to read the images of creation. Meaning became obscure as the eternal images created by God in Paradise lost their per-manent fixed referentiality and got inserted into the mutability of time. Within time, visible signs entered the domain of language and, therefore, God needed to provide a fixed linguistic model of

55. I am referring in particular to Merleau-Ponty’s reformulation of phenomenology as the study of the experiential comprehension of the world by an embodied subject, MERLEAU-PONTY 1962; for a brilliant phenomenological approach to art criticism, see KRAUSS 1986.

56. On this ekphrasis, see HEFFERNAN 1993, pp. 37-45; SHAPIRO 1990, pp. 97-115; VICKERS 1983, pp. 67-85; and CHIAMPI 1982, pp. 97-112.

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interpretation as a new path to salvation, the Bible.57 In the Bible, the supreme act of writing is the episode of the tablets of the Covenant where God’s legisla-tive speech is monumentalized and fi xed on stone by his own fi nger. The images that God carved on the cliff of Purgatory stand at the intersection between the unchangeable visual signs of the prelapsarian world (God conveying meaning through images) and God’s immutable speech as recorded on the tablets of the Covenant, which, like the Purgatorio images, were laws “written with the fi nger of God.” Dante, therefore, creates his ekphrasis by confl ating two biblical events that describe the materialization of the Logos: on the one hand, the creation of the world and, on the other hand, the inscription on the tablets of the Covenant. In so doing, he constructs an image that both points to God’s original language before the Fall and, at the same time, anticipates the semiotic system that the pilgrim will encounter in Paradise where, as Dante states, “everything is seen depicted.”

Dante’s poetic speech fl eshes out Christian cosmology so that it gets expanded visually around the reader/viewer to the point of eliding the traces of its own discursivity. Within that system, a theory of representation can only be drawn by accounting for the semantic dimensions of aesthetic experi-ence. Ekphrasis, therefore, for its power to render simultaneously both images and the observer’s experience of them lies at the basis of Dante’s poetics. We experience the work as being within the work. It is the word made fl esh, made experience.

One of the elements that transforms the Commedia into a phenomenological experience rather than a discursive exposition of Christian doctrine is Dante’s process of casting himself as specta-tor within his own visual universe. Alfonso’s image-making lyric voice, as we saw represented in cantiga CX, plays a similar role within the visual poetics of the Cantigas. The way Alfonso, as a character in the miniatures, relates to the visualization of his speech parallels the way Dante inscribes himself as spectator of the images with which he furnishes his poetic universe. For instance, we can compare the portrait of Alfonso pointing to the acheiropoieta he describes in cantiga XXIX, with the similar composition that illustrates Dante’s purgatorial ekphrasis in a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript (fi g. 20).58 The poet-visionary-preacher “sees” and makes present for his readers the experience of his poetic speech turned into images.

Seeing the illuminations of cantiga XXIX in this light, they acquire a completely different dimension from the one that can be drawn from their reduction to a mere iconographic decoding. The Cantigas’ difference lies in Alfonso’s presentation of images through his own experience of them. Alfonso’s role as spectator of those images introduces a level of consciousness to the narrative that brings his authorial voice a step closer to the outside world (to the world of the reader), trespassing the threshold of representation as it is delimited in other manuscripts.

57. See, for instance, CURTIUS 1953; SPITZER 1963; LEWIS 1964.

58. For a description of this manuscript, see BRIEGER, MEISS y SINGLETON 1969, vol. 1, pp. 252-257.

Fig. 20. Ms. Holkham misc. 48, BLO, f. 75.

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It is at that moment, when textual sources are activated within a performative structure, that an image theory develops into a visual poetics. From this perspective, the illuminations of cantiga XXIX do indeed contain the essence of Alfonso’s views on the relationship between matter and revelation. It is expressed in the diagonal axis that connects the panel where Alfonso points with his finger towards the marble images of the Virgin and the one where God inscribes with his fingers her likeness on stone. God’s gesture, like Alfonso’s, is the index of a voice –the divine breath that engenders all creatures. By pairing Alfonso’s image-making gesture with that of God, the illumi-nations portray him as creator of the world.

ALFONSO’S PARADISE: THE COLOR OF MUSIC

Thenceforward my vision was greater than speech can show, which fails at such a sight, and at such excess memory fails. As is he who dreaming sees, and after the dream the pas-sion remains imprinted and the rest returns not to the mind; such am I, for my vision almost wholly fades away, yet does the sweetness that was born of it still drop within my heart. Thus is the snow unsealed by the sun; thus in the wind, on the light leaves, the Sibyl’s oracle was lost. O Light Supreme that art so far uplifted above mortal conceiving, relend to my mind a little of what Thou didst appear, and give my tongue such power that it may leave only a sin-gle spark of Thy glory for the folk to come; for, by returning somewhat to my memory and by sounding a little in these lines, more of Thy victory shall be conceived.

Dante, Paradiso XXXIII, 55-75

The joy that surfaces in Dante’s Paradiso, when the pilgrim is “drawing near to the end of all desires” (Paradiso XXXIII, 46-47), is constantly undermined by a poignant meditation on the fail-ure of language to render the final vision. Purgatorio was the last stage where referential systems of representation could reach. It was the dwelling place of the masters of language, such as Homer, Virgil, Statius, Cavalcanti, and the masters of images, such as the illuminators Oderisi of Gubbio and Franco of Bologna –the point where words and images collided, exhausting themselves in an impressive instant of triumph (ekphrasis) before their dissolution. Thereafter, as the pilgrim approaches the “Eternal Light,” Dante chronicles the collapse of his poetic skills in moving verses.

Paradiso’s last canto, like Alfonso’s confessional cantiga CX, opens with a prayer to the Virgin, “who didst so ennoble human nature that its Maker did not disdain to become its creature” (Paradiso XXXIII, 4-6), and culminates against the backdrop of a starry firmament, where “my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradiso XXXIII, 143-45). Within the canto, along the path that leads from “Vergine Madre” to “l’altre stelle,” Dante confesses, in terms similar to Alfonso, his inca-pacity to translate into words a glorious vision that was “greater than speech can show” (Paradiso XXXIII, 55-56), and pleads God to “give my tongue such power that may leave only a single spark of Thy glory for the folk to come” (Paradiso XXXIII, 70-72).

The inadequacy of memory itself, the ultimate site of representation, to record traces of the divine light –as if it were “snow unsealed by the sun”– is at the core of Dante’s struggle to give testimony

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of his vision. However, not everything was lost of the pilgrim’s experience, and that which he retained is, I have argued, the essence of Dante’s poetics. “As is he who dreaming sees,” Dante explains, “and after the dream the passion remains imprinted and the rest returns not to the mind; such am I, for my vision almost wholly fades away, yet does the sweetness that was born of it still drop within my heart.” The remains of his vision need to be retrieved from the heart and can only be communicated, to others and to himself, in terms of feeling –sentient immersion in the events–, in other words, phenomenological experience rather than discourse. While doctrine, theology, and history are available in the Commedia at the level of discourse, across ink on parchment, the ultimate goal, Paradise itself, may only be attained through an empathic surrender to its poetic dimension. The reader must feel the toils and triumphs of the journey by becoming a pilgrim him-self in Dante’s virtual cosmology. As I have outlined in the preceding section, the poetic strength of the Commedia lies in Dante’s process of writing himself into his own literary universe. His authorial voice, a supreme combination of intense humanity and otherworldly terribilità, intro-duces a focalizer for the reader’s phenomenological apprehension of the poem and creates an unresolved tension between reality and fiction –the tension that foregrounds human recognition of divine presence.

In a work such as the Commedia, where religious knowledge is so fundamentally reintegrated in the realm of poetry, searching for God by unraveling the threads that link it to the Scriptures and to the Christian corpus alone is missing the poem’s image of God itself. That image resides in the sphere where discourse ends and poetic experience begins. Dante’s, and Alfonso’s world, is not Aquinas’ –their voices aim at fashioning the world by inducing knowledge of the divine (and making palpable divine order) through poetic immediacy, not through discursive systematiza-tion. Univocal referentiality and schematic ordering give way to a system of signification directed towards the actualization of aesthetic experience. In effect, the way from Inferno to Paradiso is punctuated by a progressive implementation of an imagery of sentience over the language of rea-son. If we follow the unfolding of the poetic narrative, we can determine two ramifications of this process: a dematerialization of images and a detextualization of vision.

Upon entering Paradise, Dante tries to discern the faded forms of its inhabitants,

“As through smooth and transparent glass, or through clear and tranquil waters, yet not so deep that the bottom be lost, the outlines of our faces return so faint that a pearl on a white brow comes not less boldly to our eyes, so did I behold many a countenance eager to speak” (Paradiso III, 10-16).

In expressing his difficulty to apprehend the incorporeal presence of heavenly beings, Dante lays out an analogy of color –a pearl which so blends into the skin that cannot be discerned clearly at first glance. White on white, as in Alfonso’s acheiropoieta, best expresses the beauty and inscru-tability of heavenly imagery. The elusiveness of monochromatic figuration will be deployed again by Dante to describe the awesome beatific vision at the end of his journey:

“O Light Eternal, who alone abidest in Thyself, alone knowest Thyself, and, known to Thyself and knowing, lovest and smilest on Thyself!

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That circling which, thus begotten, appeared in Thee as reflected light, when my eyes had dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me depicted with our image within itself and in its own color, wherefore my sight was entirely set upon it.As is the geometer who wholly applies himself to measure the circle, and finds not, in ponder-ing, the principle of which he is in need, such was I at that new sight. I wished to see how the image conformed to the circle and how it has its place therein” (Paradiso XXXIII, 124-38).

The visualization of God in the illuminations for cantiga C, whose theme, as we have seen in the first section of this article, is the Virgin as a vehicle to reach Paradise, could not be closer to Dante’s vision (fig. 14). Alfonso and the Virgin point to what the song calls the “Matchless Light,” which is there represented as a circle of shimmering gold (where light is generated by reflection) featuring, to use Dante’s phrase, “our image within itself and in its own color.” Both in Paradiso XXXIII and cantiga C, the inscribed image is the figure of the Son –the incarnate Christ, an image of ourselves– within and indistinguishable from God the Father, the Eternal Light.

The gradual dematerialization of signs in Paradise underscores a progress from the diversity of creation towards the unity of God. The process of blurring the boundaries between visual signs leads from corporeal figures, by way of overlapping monochromatic images, into their final fusion, Light. Correspondingly, the progressive convergence of sonorous signs leads from referential lan-guage to abstract Music.

In his essay on the relationship between music and language, Theodor Adorno uncannily repro-duces Dante’s paradisiacal disquisition down to the use of the light metaphor. The following statement could have well been penned by the Florentine poet.

“Signifying language would say the absolute in a mediated way, yet the absolute escapes it in each of its intentions, which, in the end, are left behind, as finite. Music reaches the absolute immediately, but in the same instant it darkens, as when a strong light blinds the eye, which can no longer see things that are quite visible”.59

Those two integral elements of heaven –light and music– are conjured up in the closing verses of the Commedia. In the last verse of the poem, immediately after the passage quoted before, which illustrated the dissolution of imagery into light, Dante identifies the source that had moved his desire and his will: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.” Implied in this statement is the medi-eval Neoplatonic concept of musica mundana– the perfect harmony produced by the movement of heavenly bodies. This type of music, inaudible to humans, was the highest category in the hier-archical scheme elaborated in Antiquity by Pythagoras and Plato and later taken up by Christian writers such as Isidore of Seville and Boethius.60 In his Etymologies Isidore explains, “Nothing exists without music; for the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves under the tones of harmony.”61 Boethius outlines in his De

59. ADORNO 1993, p. 404.

60. On conceptions of music in medieval thought, see MEYER-BAER 1970 and SCHUELLER 1988.

61. See full text in STRUNK 1950, p. 94.

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institutione musica the characteristics of the other two kinds of music that complete the cosmologi-cal scheme: musica humana, which rules the relation between the physical and the spiritual as they apply to human body and soul, and musica instrumentalis, which is music as acoustic phenomenon. Boethius’ treatise reflects the dominant medieval conception of music as a speculative discipline, dissociated from the art of sound, and dealing primarily with the mathematical proportions and perfect harmony of the universe. If music is, in Dante’s Paradiso, an abstract environment, it con-stitutes, in Alfonso’s work, a material presence. I have followed Dante to the end of his journey to explore the constituents of a poetic sensibility grounded on that Gothic Mediterranean culture to which Alfonso so fundamentally contributed. I will now step back from the point in which Light and Music coalesce in a single element and untravel the road back to Alfonso’s Paradise. That road is exemplified by the vertical axis that connects the image of God as Eternal Light with the repre-sentation of Paradise in the miniatures illustrating the aforementioned cantiga C (fig. 15). The text describes Paradise as the place “where God is always joyful and smiling,” and joy in the Cantigas means music. Accordingly, the miniature shows Eden as a land of palm trees where music is being played in honor of God –an indirect allusion to Andalusia, and specifically to Seville, where the Cantigas was produced.

The vertical diptych of cantiga C illustrates the progressive approximation between the differ-ent conceptions of music that took place in medieval thought. In effect, the split between musica mundana, the music of the spheres, and musica instrumentalis, sensory music, was progressively bridged in the later Middle Ages on two principal grounds: theological –sensory music started to be considered a vehicle to elevate the soul to the perception of heavenly harmonies–, and repre-sentational –angel musicians were imagined to perform the heavenly music of which the sounds produced by humans were an imperfect reflection.62 In effect, Alfonso’s Paradise is inhabited by angel musicians singing the praises of God and rejoicing in His eternal company. Far from the theoretical conception of heavenly music as unfathomable mathematical harmony, the instrumen-tal music of Alfonso’s Paradise constitutes an image of sensual pleasure and joy. In cantiga 422, Alfonso pleads the Virgin to grant him Paradise “where we will always have joy and laughter.” joy and laughter were also the intended effect produced by Alfonso’s musical poetry. In effect, in the Cantigas, music, poetry, and illuminations seek to arouse the audience’s sensibility and contribute to the promotion of Marian piety, anticipating for the audience the sweet songs of hope and bliss that they will eternally enjoy in Paradise. The first scene illustrating cantiga CXX –where the king summons “those who believe him” to praise the Virgin– shows Alfonso kneeling before Mary and directing a group of musicians and dancers, by pointing to himself and to Mary, to join him and perform in her honor (fig. 21). The courtly musical ensemble stresses the charac-ter of musical performance as an embodied activity and mimics the angelic minstrels of Paradise. In the same way as angels praise and rejoice in the presence of God in heaven, so humans praise and benefit from the presence of the Virgin on earth. Mary brings about happiness in the world by protecting humanity and granting joy in everyday life. Alfonso’s Cantigas evokes an image of Paradise on earth –a world of hope where laughter and joy triumph over tears and suffering thanks to the miraculous interventions of the Virgin in favor of those who sing her praises. In Alfonso’s utopian nation, that earthly Paradise of human happiness, music is a fundamental element. It not

62. See STEVENS 1958, pp. 81-95; and RASTALL 1996, vol. 1, pp. 176-193.

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only advances the joy and laughter of Heaven for the audience but it also becomes an asset for composers and performers to achieve redemption. Alfonso himself repeatedly prays to the Virgin to be his advocate in the Last judgment reminding her that he composed songs retelling her mira-cles. In turn, the Virgin demands the composition of songs dedicated to her in order to win her favors. For instance, cantiga 307 –beautifully illuminated on f. 101r of MS. B.R. 20– relates a miracle located in Sicily during the eruption of the volcano Etna. The Virgin appears to a man in his sleep and tells him he should compose a song in her honor and sing it if he wants the fiery rain to stop. As Alfonso recounts:

“The good man, who saw this in a vision, was greatly pleased by it. Immediately he began to compose his song, rhymed as best as he knew how.In keeping with the words, he set it to music and then sang it with great devotion. The storm quieted at once, and the people lost their fear of it”.

The Cantigas celebrates sensuous music –the musica instrumentalis that had been denigrated by Christian thinkers and the Church for most of the Middle Ages. As we have seen, the luxury edi-tion of the Cantigas, contained in Ms. T-I-1 and Ms. B.R. 20, not only includes mensural notation for the performance of each song but it also recreates visually numerous instances of musical composition, performance, and audition. Alfonso’s love for instrumental music becomes even more evident in another edition of the Cantigas sponsored by him. Known as Codex Princeps for being the most complete edition, a total of 417 songs, this manuscript (Ms. b-I-2, RBME) has been used as the main reference by both the modern editors of the text and students of the music. Higinio Anglès, the foremost Spanish musicologist and transcriber of the music of the Cantigas, said of MS. b-I-2, “for its perfect mensural notation and its content, this codex should be regarded as the most important text of courtly monody in medieval Europe”.63 The illuminations of MS. b-I-2 are devoted exclusively to musical performance. Every tenth cantiga is prefaced by a square miniature of the length of a text column featuring one or two musicians as they interact with their instruments and with one another. The forty miniatures of the codex reproduce in detail a great variety of instruments –fiddles, zithers, shawms, bagpipes, etc.– which are being handled by min-strels that are depicted with a high degree of individuality.64

The boldness of Alfonso’s project, giving music such a preeminent role in his vast pious artistic undertaking, reflects a culture in which instrumental music and poetry were much more than entertainment, and where entertainment itself was considered a fundamental and beneficial part of life. While this sensibility accords with Alfonso’s participation and support of the cul-ture of the Galician-Portuguese troubadours, however, in its religious dimension, it cannot be disconnected from the hybrid character of the society where it flourished. This aspect is clearly illustrated in the miniatures from the Códice de los Músicos. In one scene, we see a Christian musician playing alongside a Moor; in others, we see jewish minstrels, women, etc. Nine years after Alfonso’s death, the multicultural character of the Castilian musical court appears docu-mented in the financial records of his son, Sancho IV, which list 13 Christian musicians, 13

63. ANGLÈS 1943, p. 11.

64. See ÁLVAREZ 1987, pp. 67-95.

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Fig. 21. CSM, cantiga CXX, Ms. T-I-1, RBME, f. 170v.

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Moors (among them two women), and one jew.65 The Arabic influence in the music of the Cantigas has been a controversial issue since the groundbreaking study of the Islamicist Julián Ribera, who argued for an extensive presence of Arabic melodic and poetic forms (e.g. zajal) in the Alfonsine works.66 Heated debates in favor and against that influence have recently devel-oped into more balanced assessments of the inescapable imbrications of each cultural tradition with the other.67

The popular religiosity of preconquest Seville, which impinges on the Cantigas at several lev-els, was influenced by Muslim mystics and preachers who started using popular poetic and musical forms such as the mawashshah and the zajal as vehicles for the expression of mystical thoughts. In their proselytizing efforts, they organized gatherings where those compositions were performed with musical accompaniment. Such was the case of a contemporary of Alfonso, the Sufi al-Shushtari, who developed an important poetic oeuvre in the neighboring kingdom of Granada, where he had emigrated after the Christian conquest of Seville.68 It seems more than probable that Alfonso realized the persuasive power of music to bridge the distance between the cultures of his kingdom and effectively bring people into his vision of a utopian nation under the protection of the Virgin.

The tunes of the Cantigas are embedded in the listeners’ musical culture –a culture that tran-scended linguistic and ethnic boundaries endowing Alfonso’s poetry with an overarching and primal appeal. His music incorporates melodies of diverse origin, fitting them to moralized words (contrafacta). This compositional technique accentuated the popular reach of the work beyond liturgical settings by offering audiences religious messages colored with melodies that they could identify in their own lives and find emotionally meaningful. The music sonically inscribes the mood of the lyrics and, at the same time, creates the frame of mind in terms of which the images are experienced.

The illuminations uniquely capture a sense of immediacy, of the pulsating rhythm of human exist-ence, which accords with the musical dimension of the accompanying text. For both performer and audience, music is, above all, a bodily experience, the tangible projection or articulation of bodily energy.69 It channels itself through the contingency of our physical presence here and now, and at the same time, makes us aware of our own transcendence. To borrow the heartfelt words Wynton Marsalis speaking of jazz, the Cantigas, as no other medieval monument, “celebrates life, human life, the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intel-ligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it, and it deals with it, with all of it.”70

65. See RIBERA 1929, pp. 142-159; and SADIE 1980, s.v. “Cantiga.”

66. RIBERA 1922.

67. See TOUMA 1987, pp. 137-150; and MONROE AND LIU 1989; FERREIRA 2004.

68. For an edition and Spanish translation of al-Shushtari’s poems, see CORRIENTE 1988; also see, Encyclopaedia of Islam 1913-1938, 1st ed., s.v. “Shushtari.”

69. See LEPPERT 1993.

70. In WARD 2000, p. xii.

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Using this quotation is not simply rhetorical. It has been said of jazz that:

It is America’s music, born out of a million American negotiations, between having and not having, between happy and sad, country and city, between black and white, and men and women, between the old Africa and the old Europe, that could only have happened in an entirely new world. It is an improvisational art, making itself up as it goes along, just like the country that gave it birth.71

The Cantigas, like jazz, is the artistic expression of a hybrid culture which was forced to deal with issues of race, social and sexual identities, religion and history, within the context of a new political order that was struggling to mature into a unified nation. The diverse social, ethnic, and religious groups that made up the Cantigas’ performers and audience were compelled literally and figuratively to listen to each other. As Lawrence Kramer writes: “Deeds of music seek receptive listeners. As part of its illocutionary force, the music addresses a determinate type of subject and in so doing beckons that subject, summons it up to listen…Listeners agree to personify a musical subject by responding empathetically to the music’s summons. Their pleasure in listening thereby becomes a vehicle of acculturation: musical pleasure, like all pleasure, invites legitimization both of its source and of the subject position its sources address.”72

Both the Cantigas and the Commedia stem from a similar cultural context –a Mediterranean world where the clash between East and West was being waged, not through reified theological argu-ments but in the aesthetic strength of their respective cultural productions. This aesthetic strength resides in the power to move, to draw audiences into a vision of the world made palpable through phenomenological experience. Alfonso was responding to the cultural and artistic achievements of his newly conquered territories, which, being still the religious other, had also become the bet-ter part of the self. Anxiety of influence –an influence that needs to be absorbed, transformed, disguised, and ultimately transcended– lies at the center of the cultural and artistic particulari-ties defining the Gothic Mediterranean. The testing ground, target and consumer of those cultural productions was an expanded urban audience, which, for the first time, was given a taste of high culture through the vernacular.

The cultural function of the Cantigas is inseparable from its aesthetic dimension. The multiple interconnections and the dynamic engagement between the world outside and the artistic dis-course contained in the codex turns them into an indissoluble unity in the minds of the spectators. As a projection of an artistic discourse into a public space, performance provides the participants with the possibility of taking on a coherent exterior image that helps overcome the hesitant self-image. Like the reader of the Commedia, the spectator of the Cantigas becomes involved in a journey of gradual discovery that progressively detaches him from the physical world in which he is embedded and absorbs him into a different realm. From that point on, perceptual processes are cognitively penetrated by those poetic experiences, affecting decisively the construction of reality.

71. Ibidem, p. xxi.

72. KRAMER 1995, pp. 21-22.

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Above all, both the Cantigas and the Commedia are autobiographies transmuted into cosmologies through the power of the creative imagination –an idea beautifully captured by Wallace Stevens in these verses:

She sang beyond the genius of the seaBut it was she and not the sea we heard.For she was the maker of the song she sang.She was the single artificer of the worldIn which she sang.73

73. Quoted by W. J. Ong in the foreword of ZUMTHOR 1990, p. X.