Designing contested heritage within the sacred context. The AΧΕΙΡΟΠΟΙΗΤΟΣ monastery, Cyprus

The analysis of the Aχειροποίητος monastery shows the superimposition of different buildings: a domed church with a central plan, built in late Byzantine times over the ruins of an early Christian basilica, enlarged by the addition of three successive narthexes, and therefore transformed into a longitudinal basilica. The name Aχειροποίητος, literally “made without hands”, referred to a sacred icon hosted therein. A walled enclosure surrounds the church and contains the monastery, which developed in subsequent phases, with different additions, demolitions and restorations. We outlined the formation process of the complex, from the V cent. Basilica, to the transformation of the monastery into military barracks in the 1970s, as a premise for the restoration project. Recently the Department of Antiquities assigned the monastery to the Girne American University for its restoration and it is urgent to accomplish some statical interventions. The management of this site, hence the political situation of northern Cyprus, represents an interesting case study on the contested heritage issue. Nevertheless, the heritage management in Cyprus, for the complex political situation of the island, bears more difficulties than in other UE countries, but we should consider that every heritage site has someway a contested character. An architectural project was experimented, according to the typo-morphological approach of the Muratorian Italian School, based on the principle that new buildings should be the continuation of the old ones, without imitating them, but following their formation process, as the last step of an ongoing process. We did not conceive the new architecture as an object contrasting with the context, but following the full understanding of the processual transformations of the site, it was possible to design the new addition to the monastic building as a living organism, in conformity with the sacred context

‘Me juzgo por natural de Madrid’: Vincencio Carducho, theorist and painter of Spain's court capital

More than a guide for painters, Vicente de Carducho's Diálogos de la pintura has long been recognized to promote painting as a liberal art and to advocate for the creation of an academy of painting in seventeenth-century Madrid. But questions of patriotic belonging and prestige are also at stake in this erudite treatise. In his prologue, Carducho prioritizes his allegiance to his adopted city even while acknowledging his debts to his native Florence. The first part of this article argues that the treatise serves to showcase that allegiance as it participates in a project to make the young political capital a great cultural centre. The second part makes the case for Carducho as a practitioner who understood the debt he owed to the visual culture of his adopted homeland while remaining true to the aesthetic principles of his Florentine training. His late depictions of saints in adoration of the crucifix provide a focus for examining a religious sensibility subtly informed by Spanish devotional literature

The Image of Phoenicians and Carthaginians in Modern Spanish History and Culture

El artículo analiza la imagen de fenicios y cartagineses en España de los siglos 18 a 21 a través de libros de historia, manuales escolares, pintura y novela histórica, revistas y comics. Estas imágenes derivan de las tendencias istoriográficas y políticas dominantes en cada époc

Humanism and the Bible in the poetry of Benito Arias Montano (ca. 1525-1598)

Benito Arias Montano (ca. 1525–1598) is known for his polymathic scholarly interests. However, for him, humanist learning had to be put to the service of the study of the Bible. While the erudition of Arias Montano’s prose treatises has seen an increase in critical attention in recent years, his poetry is still understudied. This thesis shows that the fruits of his learning can also be seen in his original lyric poetry. However, I argue throughout this study that Arias Montano’s poetry betrays an anxiety about the limitations and proper use of humanist scholarship. The first two chapters place his oeuvre in context. In Chapter One, I aim to situate Arias Montano’s work in a broader trend of European biblical encyclopaedism. In Chapter Two, I discuss how his choice of poetic form and his use of biblical material compares to that of other religious poets writing in Europe during the same period. In the following chapters, I focus on the appearance of particular disciplines in his poetry: respectively, the study of Classical texts; Hebraist studies; the study of historiography and political theory; and biblical geography and architecture. More broadly, I aim to contribute to our understanding of sixteenth-century biblical humanism by demonstrating how Arias Montano balances his interest in emerging humanist disciplines with his conviction that the Bible was ultimately the only source of true knowledge. This thesis also aims to fill a surprising gap in scholarship by providing the first full-length study of Arias Montano’s Latin lyric poetry

The Image of Phoenicians and Carthaginians in Modern Spanish History and Culture

El artículo analiza la imagen de fenicios y cartagineses en España de los siglos 18 a 21 a través de libros de historia, manuales escolares, pintura y novela histórica, revistas y comics. Estas imágenes derivan de las tendencias istoriográficas y políticas dominantes en cada époc

History and Poetry in Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s Historia de Marco Antonio y Cleopatra (1639)

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s Historia de Marco Antonio y Cleopatra (1639) is the most sustained treatment of the figure of Cleopatra in the Spanish Golden Age and the volume also has the particularity of being a prose history interspersed with a significant number of poems by the author and by other writers. This article contextualises the work and examines the moral and political lessons which emerge from the presentation of Cleopatra and of the major Roman figures (Julius Caesar, Antony, Octavian) with whom her life became entwined. The essay identifies the exact sources of much of Castillo Solórzano’s prose history and demonstrates how these are woven together and to what ends. The character and effects of the interpolated poetry are then examined, with a special emphasis on the most prolific external contributor to the volume, the Aragonese Francisco Diego de Sayas. The final part of the study offers some conclusions about the interaction or otherwise of prose and poetry in the composition and meanings of Historia de Marco Antonio y Cleopatra.This study was undertaken under the auspices of the research project I+D+i La novela corta del siglo XVII (y II) (FFI2013-41264-P), funded by the Spanish government’s Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad and headed by Prof. Rafael Bonilla Cerezo of the Universidad de Córdoba

Consulting the past: a comparison of relations between Abrahamic religions in medieval Spain and its reflection in today’s Israel-Palestine relations

It has been said that the study of medieval Al-Andalus with the purpose to shed light on Middle Eastern relationships in today\u27s world would be a fruitless endeavor. The two worlds are not synonymous, even though Muslims, Jews and Christians continue to live together at present time in a small geographic area. Many are familiar with the Christian Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, but many more are unaware of the cohabitation that took place between Christians, Muslims and Jews for over 700 years in Spain, known as Convivencia. This thesis aims to add to the discussion of relations between Abrahamic Religions in today’s Israel-Palestine through literary analysis of first hand Medieval Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts and placing them on a spectrum of Convivencia, ranging from Convivencia discordia to Convivencia pacífica. Texts explored are excerpts from El Cantar de Mío Cid, the Tahkemoni by Judah Ibn-Harīzī, and zajal and muwashshaha style poetry by Ibn-Quzmān and Al A’ma al-Tutīlī. By comparing the rhizome and chronotope experienced in Medieval Spain with those being experienced in Israel-Palestine, this thesis will continue to add to the discussion of relations between Abrahamic religions