The mudéjares were the Muslims who remained in the lands conquered by the Christian kingdoms during the Reconquista. The name comes from the Arabic mudajjan, "allowed to stay". Many were skilled bricklayers, carpenters, potters and plasterers, employed by kings, nobles, bishops and Jewish communities. From this meeting came Mudéjar art, a uniquely Spanish style combining Islamic techniques and motifs with Christian forms and functions, developed between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.
Features
Mudéjar art turns humble materials into precious decoration:
- brick, laid in geometric patterns, interlaced arches and lozenges on towers;
- glazed ceramics, in plates, small columns and tiles (azulejos) set into façades;
- wood, in coffered ceilings carved with star patterns (artesonados), often painted and gilded;
- stucco, carved with arabesques, plant motifs and inscriptions.
Where to see it
- Aragon: Aragonese Mudéjar is a UNESCO site. In Teruel the towers of San Salvador, San Martín, San Pedro and the cathedral, with its painted thirteenth-century ceiling, are the symbol of the style; in Zaragoza the Seo, with its ceramic-decorated outer wall, and the Aljafería palace, enlarged by the Christian kings, stand out; Calatayud, Tarazona and Daroca have more towers and churches.
- Toledo: churches such as Santiago del Arrabal, the old Bisagra gate and above all the two synagogues of Santa María la Blanca, with white piers and horseshoe arches, and El Tránsito, with its cedar ceiling and Hebrew and Islamic stucco, now the Sephardic Museum (see Toledo).
- Seville: the Real Alcázar, the palace the Christian king Peter I had built in the mid-fourteenth century by craftsmen from Granada and Toledo, is the masterpiece of palatial Mudéjar; the Casa de Pilatos also combines Mudéjar, Gothic and Renaissance (see Seville).
- Castile and León: brick churches at Sahagún, Cuéllar, Arévalo and Toro, and the convent of Santa Clara at Tordesillas.
- Andalusia and the Canaries: the coffered ceilings of many churches and palaces, a craft later taken to the Americas.
Neo-Mudéjar
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the style came back into fashion as a symbol of national identity: Neo-Mudéjar was used for bullrings, stations, schools and markets. Famous examples are the Las Ventas bullring in Madrid and the Plaza de España in Seville, built for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition, which mixes Neo-Mudéjar and Neo-Renaissance. See also Muslim Spain and Gothic.