Jewish Writings on art in Fiftteenth-Century Castile

Abstract

The activity of writing about art (prescriptions, commentaries, evaluations, etc.) is not prominent in discussions of medieval Jewish intellectual life. Departing from the realization that, like representation, figura is common to art and to writing the article attempts to reconstruct the fifteenth century Hispano-Jewish written attitudes to art and the painters and vice versa as in the case of Arragel (and also others such as Duran, Bonafed, Yocef ibn Saddiq).

These relate on occasions to iconoclasm but cannot be exclusively reduced to this one issue. Other questions impinge on the subject. One way out of the hermeneutical impasse would be to see them in a historic-cultural context: that of the history of relations between (Christian, noble) patrons and (learned, Jewish) clients in precise areas and periods.