Last weekend I fortunate to attend a ‘Scholars’ Day’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focused on their new exhibition “El Greco to Velazquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III.” The morning consisted of a guided tour of the exhibition led by William B. Jordan and Richard Kagan, and both the tour and the exhibition itself were tremendously enjoyable‚ÄîI highly recommend a visit when the exhibition opens to the public tomorrow.
Two paintings in particular stood out to me. The first was Juan Bautista Maino’s 1612 Adoration of the Magi. (Apologies for the terrible picture, but it’s all that I could find to link to. A better image is available in the slideshow on the MFA’s website.) To my untrained eye, the painting looks virtually identical to one of the belenes, or cr?™che scenes, still popular in Spain. The ivy on the stones, the appearance of the Magi… Maino’s scene is a dead-ringer for its modern three-dimensional counterparts. This makes perfect sense to me: “Belenismo,” the art of making lifelike belenes, was essentially imported from Naples in the early seventeenth century, at precisely the time that Maino was painting. (Fow what it’s worth, iIt is still considered a high art in Spain, and every December the city of Madrid assembles a walking tour of the city’s most impressive examples.)
The other painting that caught my eye was Luis Trist?°n de Escamilla’s 1613 Crucifixion. (No online photo, I’m afraid.) As one of my fellow participants pointed out, deep in the background of the painting, barely visible behind the crucified Christ’s feet, the city of Toledo stands in for Jerusalem. This may just be an example of a tendency which I tend to associate with northern art of the period: that is, to transpose biblical events to local landscapes, perhaps to make it easier for the beholder to feel that he/she is really witnessing the scene before him/her. But this may also be a reference to the legend, popularized in the early 1570s by the court historian Esteban de Garibay, that Toledo literally was the New Jerusalem. The legend rested on two bases: first, the alleged topographical identity of Jerusalem and Toledo; and second, the fact that Toledo is supposed to have been founded by a contingent of Israelites brought to Spain in the sixth century BC by Nebuchadnezzar, in the period commonly known as the “Babylonian Captivity.”
In any case, it is a terrific show, and I hope that it will receive many visitors!
Though it has been up for several months, only today did I notice David Plotz’s “Digging the Bible” series over at Slate.com. The series is essentially Plotz’s travel journal from an extended visit he made to Israel, in the course of which he toured a number of archaeological sites associated with the Bible. As he told readers during a recent chat session, his decision to visit the holy places in situ was inspired by the year he spent “Blogging the Bible” for Slate. (I highly recommend both series, for their humor as well as their educational value.)
I was interested to read about Plotz’s experience because it struck a chord with my recent research into biblical antiquarianism of the Renaissance. In many ways, my subjects‚Äîfigures like Benito Arias Montano and Joseph Scaliger‚Äîtraveled much the same intellectual arc as did Plotz. Determined in the first instance to understand the Biblical text, and to “translate” its arcana into useful knowledge for their contemporaries, Renaissance antiquarians and Plotz alike found themselves drawn ineluctably into the study of biblical geography and biblical antiquities. Read More »
… Continued from “Digging the Bible, I” …
This history of destruction and disregard was only reversed in the fourth century, well after all memory of the actual localizations o the Holy Places had been forgotten. What accounts for the resuscitation of interest in the Holy Land was the Christianization of the empire under Constantine (ca. 280–337). The surge of official interest in localizing the Holy Sites and relics of Palestine, some historians have conjectured, may have been orchestrated for the purposes of increasing imperial prestige. Throughout the 320s and 330s Constantine and his mother, S. Helena, carried out an aggressive campaign to recover and restore places of biblical and/or Christian significance throughout Palestine, and particularly those in the vicinity of Aelia Capitolina (which Constantine rebaptized Jerusalem in 325). In these early days, this meant essentially the excavation of buildings and objects in neighborhoods loosely thought to have been of some biblical significance, the “identification” of the resulting discoveries as authentic Holy Places and relics, and the construction of new, commemorative churches over them. While on pilgrimage in 328–329, for example, Helena presided over the excavation of Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher, the discovery of the True Cross, and the erection of basilicas in Bethlehem and on Mount Sion. Eusebius of Caesaria (ca. 260–ca. 340), Constantine’s contemporary and the first Church historian, accordingly memorialized Constantine as the inventor of the Holy Land in his Vita Constantini.
Read More »
I’ve recently returned from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, where I received the 2007 Carl S. Meyer Prize for the paper I delivered last year (entitled “A Holy Land for the Catholic Monarchy: Spanish Reconstructions of Palestine, 1469‚Äì1598;” see here for the abstract). The Meyer Prize, as the SCSC website explains, “is awarded annually for the best paper delivered at the yearly meeting by a scholar who is still in graduate school or has earned the Ph.D. in the last five years.”
I’m honored by the distinction, and pleased that so many found the paper of interest!
In addition to the two research papers I’ll be presenting this month (see “Two October Conferences,” below), in November I’ll also be heading out to Worcester, MA to participate in the New England Faculty Development Consortium (NEFDC)’s fall Teaching Conference. I’ll be joining forces with Cassandra Volpe Horii from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning (where I used to be a Lead Teaching Fellow) to lead a “Case Discussion on Video-based Faculty/TA Consultations: Handling the Challenges.” (You can read the abstract on p. 6 of the conference program.)
For anyone in the Greater Boston/New England area and interested in teaching, I highly recommend registering and attending the conference!
For the uninitiated, that’s the state motto of New Hampshire, where Maria and I spent the Columbus Day weekend hiking, leaf-peeping, and eating as much diner food as possible. (The Littleton Diner in Littleton, NH gets high marks!)
We took a bunch of photos out in the woods around Mount Washington; have a look, and enjoy the New England autumn!
One of the pleasures of my new job as Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies is that I now have a good excuse for reading widely beyond my own field–since most of our undergraduates specialize in modern American and international history, I have good reason to explore those fields and make sure that I’m current with their interests. And since two of my primary duties are (1) to advise new students on course selection, and (2) to connect the senior thesis writers in my seminar with individual advisers, I can also call it my “job” to read books by our faculty. I’ve recently read Maya Jasanoff’s Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East 1750‚Äì1850, and I’m now working through (only six years after the rest of the world!) Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. (Alright, so Menand doesn’t technically belong to our department–but he often teaches our students!) One of the most surprising aspects of my job is how frequently I meet undergraduates who simply aren’t aware of the kinds of research and writing that we do here in our department, and I’m embarrassed to say that I’m probably guilty of the same–but no longer!
October will be a busy month for me, as I’ll be presenting papers at two conferences. The weekend of 19-21 October I’ll be in Philadelphia for the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference at Villanova; then, the weekend of 24-28 October, I’ll be in Minneapolis for the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. In both cases, I’ll be fortunate to share the floor with co-panelists whose work I very much admire. At PMR my paper, entitled “Believing is Seeing: The Holy Land among the Antiquarians,” forms part of a panel on “Historical Imagination and Religious Origins in the Later Renaissance,” and my co-panelists are Kate van Liere (Calvin College) and Howard Louthan (University of Florida); Emmet McLaughlin (Villanova University) will chair. At SCSC, I’ll be part of a panel on “Early Modern Spanish Constructions of National and Imperial Identities” with Thomas Dandelet (UC Berkeley) and Nick Bomba (Princeton); James M. Boyden (Tulane) will chair.
Antonio Agust??n (1517-1586), bishop of Tarragona, was one of sixteeenth-century Spain’s most famous antiquarian scholars. Like his contemporaries Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1591), Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598), and Juan Fern?°ndez Franco (ca. 1520-1601), Agust??n was skilled in epigraphy and numismatics, and profoundly interested in applying the information that could be had from material remains to writing the history of Spain.
Agust??n was educated at the Spanish college of Bologna, founded by Cardinal Gil de Albornoz in the 14th century. From there, he became Auditor of the Sacred Rota in 1544. Read More »
I was recently forwarded a link to the blog written by Mar??a Amelia L??pez of Mux??a, near A Coru?±a, in Galicia, Spain. In many ways, it’s a perfectly ordinary blog–do?±a Mar??a writes about her daily life, including (by her own admission) “anything that comes to mind” (todo lo que se le pasa por la cabeza). Yet there is one interesting way in which this is not just the average blog: Mar??a Amelia L??pez is 95 years old. As she humorously notes at the top of what was, presumably, her first post, “Today is my birthday, and my grandson, since he is very stingy, gave me a blog as a gift” (Hoy es mi cumplea?±os y mi nieto como es muy cutre me regal?? un blog). How very Spanish.
I can’t say for sure why I’m so taken with the blog (is it the campy hot pink color scheme?), but it may well have something to do with this videoclip–how often do you see news reports on “abuelas internautas”? Congratulations, do?±a Mar??a, on your newfound fame. I’ll be reading.
