cover image The Art of Medieval Spain, A.D. 500-1200: A.D. 500-1200

The Art of Medieval Spain, A.D. 500-1200: A.D. 500-1200

Jerrilynn Denise Dodds. Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, $75 (358pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-6433-4

Medieval Spain's intermingling of Christian, Muslim and Jewish cultures can be traced in this stunningly illustrated catalogue of an exhibition that is to open in 1995 at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Visigoths, Germanic invaders who supplanted the Romans as overlords of Spain by the sixth century, fused Byzantine and Germanic influences in their churches. The cultural flowering of Islamic Spain, beginning with the conquest in 711 and lasting three centuries, was cross-fertilized by the participation of Jews and Mozarabs (Christians living under Spanish Muslim rule). The Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia nurtured the Romanesque style linking Spain to the orbit of Western Europe. These developments are traced here in hundreds of marvelous reproductions of illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, religious statuary, frescoes, jewelry, textiles and everyday objects. Dodds, a professor of art and architecture at Manhattan's City College, leads an international team of scholars in illuminating this feast. (Mar.)