Medieval Spain at the Metropolitan Museum
Romanesque - Camel from San Baudelio de Berlanga - Metropolitan Museum
From August 30th, 2021 to January 30th, 2022, the Metropolitan Museum (Met Cloisters) is presenting "Spain, 1000-1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith", an exhibition showing the different artistic traditions that intermingled in medieval Spain.
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: Camel, mural painting of San Baudelio de Berlanga, c.1129-34. Metropolitan Museum, New York. Image via metmuseum.org.
In 11th- and 12th-century Spain there were major shifts in the balance of power between Christianity, predominant in the north, and Islam, predominant in the south (al-Andalus). The exhibition presents the idea that through the visual arts it is clear that the frontiers between the two cultures were permeable, and that considerable cultural exchanges took place. In the words of Julia Perratore, curator of the exhibition, in medieval Spain "communities of different faiths, while maintaining their own different beliefs, also developed shared interests and tastes—daily navigating the tension between separation and connection".
The 40 or so works in the exhibition are drawn mainly from the Metropolitan Museum's own collection, with some loans from other museums and institutions. Among them is a mural depicting a camel from the Mozarabic chapel of San Baudelio de Berlanga in Soria, whose paintings were sold in 1922 for 65,000 pesetas and dispersed among several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The exhibition is housed in the Fuentidueña Chapel, a Romanesque chapel reconstructed from its original apse (which arrived in New York in 1957 as a "permanent loan") at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum's branch museum for medieval art, built in the early 20th century from European Romanesque and Gothic cloisters.

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