Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 10th October 2023–14th January 2024  

This exhibition, curated by Joan Molina Figueras, examines the image medieval Spanish Christians had of Jews and Jewish converts.[1] It comprises a carefully chosen selection of seventy-one works of art that represent Jews and Judaism, created mainly by Christians between the thirteenth century and 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. Its title needs some explanation. The word mirror was widely used in medieval moral treaties, such as the Speculum maius (great mirror) of the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais (d.1264), and there was widespread interest in the ambiguities that arise from a person’s reflection in a mirror, being at once identical to and distinct from the person it reflects. The exhibition recreates the mirror image medieval Christians created of the Jewish Other, simultaneously questioning the identity of the Christians and their perception of the Jewish communities around them. It is ultimately made clear that, as Jacques Le Goff highlighted, medieval Christians were interested in the Other only to the extent that it would benefit their own salvation.[2] 

The central section of the exhibition, ‘Anti-Judaism and the Power of Images’, opens with the Códice Rico, or Rich Codex, of the Cantigas de Santa María (Fig.14), a compendium of Marian miracles commissioned by Alfonso X the Wise, which, among the surviving 195 Cantigas, includes fourteen stories that represent Jews as enemies of the Virgin. The manuscript is opened to show Cantiga 34. It depicts the story of a Jew in Constantinople who steals an icon of the Virgin and throws it into a latrine; when another Jew and his wife find it there, it is undamaged and emits a sweet smell. The miracle causes the conversion of a community of Jews, demonstrating the power of the image and at the same time justifying the cult of images practised by Christians, which Jewish people rejected. In a context where violence against Jews was systematic, as for example in the pogroms of 1391, representations of Jews evolved. To the image of Jews as blind and ignorant was added that of them as assassins of Christ, which is present in almost all Passion cycles created between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as in a panel painting of Christ before Pilate, which shows a group of Jews plotting his death (c.1375–1400; Museu Episcopal, Vic). In the same context, a growing Christocentric cult of the Eucharistic led to the appearance of another, now infamous, iconography: the desecration of the host by a Jew. A number of examples are on display, including the so-called Altarpiece of the Eucharist, made by Llorenç Saragossà c.1370–80, which shows in the centre the Last Supper below the Crucifixion. On the lower right is a scene of the host being desecrated in three ways: smashed by a hammer, pierced by a sword and dropped into a cauldron (Fig.13). Evidence of intolerance and prejudice, these images aimed at affirming Christian identity.

The last two sections of the exhibition, ‘Images for Converts, Images of Converts’ and ‘Scenes of the Inquisition’, are the most innovative, since these rooms examine art in relation to circumstances that were specific to the history of the medieval Spain: the great numbers of Jews who converted to Christianity, leading to tensions, and the consequent establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, founded, among other reasons, to persecute converts suspected of what was called Judaising. Christians began to consider religion as hereditary and developed notions of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) to signify the absence of Jewish or Muslim ancestry, which they incorporated into legislation. Converted or ‘new’ Christians were thus considered to be different from ‘Christians by nature’ (p.175). On display in the first of the two rooms are images commissioned by New Christians, such as a panel of the bust of Christ by Antoniazzo Romano (c.1495; Prado). It was commissioned by Juan López, a dean of Segovia with Jewish origins. This work, modelled on the icon of the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran palace, Rome, was probably a gift to the inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada: it was both a devotional work and a means of expressing the sincerity of López’s conversion. Although there were gestures of tolerance and desires for reconciliation, represented in the exhibition by such works as the Arragel Bible, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Spanish (c.1422–33; Fundación Casa de Alba, Madrid), the final years of the fifteenth century were marked by growing tensions that led to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. The last room comprises two altarpieces made by Pedro Berruguete for Tomás de Torquemada (both c.1491–99; Prado) and the convent of Santo Tomás, Ávila, one of the main seats of the Inquisition, alongside six images on canvas (all c.1550; San Martín de Tours, Burgos) that copy inscriptions painted on sambenitos, penitential garments worn by confessed heretics. The inscriptions reproduce the sentences pronounced against the heretics by the Inquisition. The exhibition closes with Berruguete’s depiction of an auto-da-fé presided over by Domingo de Guzmán (Fig.15), commissioned by Torquemada, showing how one of the most important artists of the time used his talent to depict the violence of the Inquisition in all its details. 

[2] J. LeGoff:‘Le juif dans les“exempla” médiévaux: le cas de l’“Alphabetum narrationum”’, in M. Olender, ed.: Pour Léon Poliakov. Le Racisme: Mythes et Sciences, Brussels 1981, pp.209–20. See also S. Lipton: Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti- Jewish Iconography, New York 2014; and N. Hatot and J. Olszowy-Schlanger, eds: exh. cat. Savants et Croyants: Les Juifs d’Europe du Nord au Moyen Âge, Rouen (Musée des Antiquités) 2018.