Renaissance Futurities by Charlene Villaseñor Black & Mari-Tere Álvarez

Author:Charlene Villaseñor Black & Mari-Tere Álvarez
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520969513
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 7.1. Hispano-Moresque Deep Dish, ca. 1430, tin-glazed earthenware, 45.72 cm (17 ⅞"), Accession 56.171.162. The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

FIGURE 7.2. Hispano-Moresque Basin, mid-15th century, tin-glazed earthenware with copper luster, 49.5 cm (19 ½"). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

In addition to their use in ceramic containers and tiles, cobalt-derived blues also appeared in Islamic architectural decoration and manuscripts in Medieval Iberia. For example, a recent technical analysis by a team of Spanish scientists of the fourteenth-century Madrasah palace in Granada, the first Islamic university in Spain, revealed the presence of cobalt in the blues employed in the stucco decoration in the Oratory, which dates from the Nasrid period (1232–1492).48 Tiles produced in Seville in the sixteenth century also reveal the presence of cobalt blue. Spain was home to major tile-making centers in the Islamic world, in addition to Syria and North Africa. Islamic-influenced tile making later spread to Venice from Spain by about 1500.49

What is significant here is that the technology to create blue pigments from cobalt, the basis of smalt, was introduced into Spain by Muslim craftsmen from the Middle East and was associated with objects created in Hispano-Moresque style in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. The production of cobalt ceramics, in fact, continued to be closely linked to populations descended from former Muslims into the seventeenth century. After the expulsion of the “moriscos,” or Spanish-Muslims, in 1609 under Philip III, the production of this type of ceramic declined dramatically.

My hypothesis is that cobalt blue retained an association with the splendor, luxury, sophistication, and advanced technology of Arabic culture well into the Early Modern period. To put it another way, blue smalt, derived from cobalt, produced a number of associations for period viewers in Early Modern Spain. Color is semiotic. Its meaning is not fixed but rather depends on signification in a specific time and place. Let’s further explore the semiotic value of cobalt blue in Spain.

We begin with the etymology of the word “azul” in the Spanish language, which scholars have suggested originated in Arabic and Persian. It derived from the Arabic word “lazaward,” or perhaps the Latin “lazurium,” based on the Persian “lajoard.”50 All three of these possible source words designated the same object, the precious blue stone lapis lazuli. (Today the word for blue in Arabic is “azraq.”) “Azul” was not in use in Spain until the High Middle Ages.51 Interestingly, the color blue rarely appears in early Medieval Spanish manuscript illuminations, which favored reds, yellows, browns, and blacks.52 Sebastián Covarrubias’s important early Spanish dictionary of 1611, the first to employ only Spanish in the definitions (as opposed to Latin), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, defines “AZVL” as the color of the sky and notes that “the name is Arabic,” or possibly derived from the Latin “ceruleus,” based on the stone called “lapis lazuli” by the “barbarians.” He concluded: “It has said color of the sky, and even of the starry sky, because it is seeded with little points of gold, in the manner of stars.

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