Kingdom of Asturias; the Christian Art of Early Medieval Spain
Asturian Pre-Romanesque, a unique Christian artform
In April, we explored a little of the history, and the art, of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of the Spanish peninsula, and talked about what happened when the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate invaded in 711. Today we will follow the Christian refugees north into the mountains, where a handful of survivors regrouped in the remote, forested mountains of Asturias.
There, under the leadership of a Hispano-Roman nobleman named Pelayo (Pelagius), they laid the foundations of a new Christian kingdom that was to start the long road back in the Reconquista. This small, embattled kingdom was deeply rooted in the Christian faith and held on to a cultural and spiritual continuity with Christian late antiquity that was manifested in art, architecture, music and liturgy.
A little background reading
We touched briefly on the art of the Visigothic Kingdom in our exploration of the art of the “Dark Ages”, and in “What Happened in Spain” - which you can read here:
In today’s post for paid subscribers, we turn our focus on the history, art and architecture of the Kingdom of Asturias, the small, defiant Christian realm that emerged in the aftermath of the Islamic conquest of Visigothic Spain. While the political and military story of Pelayo’s guerrilla resistance is often told, less attention is paid to the extraordinary cultural and religious continuity this mountain kingdom preserved. In its isolated churches, monasteries and sacred buildings, we find one of the most distinctive early medieval artistic styles in Europe: Asturian Pre-Romanesque. We’ll look at how it draws on Visigothic, Roman and Eastern Christian traditions.
This will include its defining architectural features, such as the tripartite sanctuaries, horseshoe arches, elevated tribunes and decorative stonework as well as fresco wall paintings and manuscripts.
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From the Shop
I’m happy to offer prints of this little figure, part of a painting - egg tempera and gold leaf - I did for a client in the contemporary Byzantine iconographic style. He is the speaker in Psalm 84, Quam Dilecta: “My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.”
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