Alfonso, the Learned of Castile as he was known. Perhaps the first known Renaissance man in the Middle Ages, he marshaled the talents of Christians, Jews and Moslems in an extraordinary outpouring of scholarship and art…
…The most astonishing of all his books are the superbly illustrated manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria – the royal collection of poems in praise of the Virgin, which is one of the great art treasures of the Middle Ages yet still one of the least known. If ever a work of art held up a mirror to its time, it is this vast compendium of music and poetry and pictures, now preserved in the library of the Escorial Palace near Madrid. The four surviving Cantigas are illuminated with over thirteen hundred miniatures in various stages of completion; they document virtually every aspect of life in thirteenth-century Spain, from architecture and warfare to medicine and sexual relations.
—The Rabid Knights Hospitaller
They lead them with difficulty, for they were snapping like dogs.—Read More:http://warfare.totalh.net/Cantiga/Cantigas_de_Santa_Maria-275-5.htm
Using a frame by frame narrative technique that anticipates the comic strip, the artists of Alfonso’s court created a sort of time capsule that preserves the very essence of an age that has been called one of the most fascinating and excellent moments of man’s creative history. Here, the whole pageant of medieval humanity passes in review: cloth merchants sail to England to buy wool; foreign pilgrims brave the dangers of the long road to Santiago de Compostela; Moorish horsemen are arrayed against the Christian cavalry; jongleurs fiddle and sing for the great lords in their castles.
—Group of Troubadours, illustration from “Cantigas de Santa Maria”, made under the direction of Alfonso X (“The Wise”) King of Castille and Leon (1221-84) (vellum)—Read More:http://www.bridgemanart.com/asset/68647/Spanish-School-13th-century/Group-of-Troubadours-illustration-from-
Day-to-day life in the towns and villages of Spain is depicted with an astonishing wealth and variety of detail: we meet the apothecary,the innkeeper, the greengrocer,and the moneylender; people play stickball and watch bullfights, peasants plow their fields and ride to market in oxcarts, a farmer’s family sits up with a sick mule in the stable; women give birth and nurse their infants, gamblers brawl in taverns, prostitutes ply their trade in the streets, monks prepare feasts in their refectories, caballeros go hawking and hunting, a queen is carried in a sedan chair…
—Read More:http://warfare.totalh.net/Cantiga/Cantigas_de_Santa_Maria-Pages.htm
Some of he other scenarios involve naval engagements and we see battle scenes with lovingly executed renderings of weapons and armor; shipwrecks, drownings, robbers and rapists attacking wayfarers, murder in the cathedral; the pursuit of cattle rustlers, criminals of all kinds being arrested and punished. We see them flogged, hanged, decapitated, stoned,speared, dragged through the streets,and burned at the stake.
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