Lucy and the Four Bullies

Last week San Antonio Opera did a stripped-down Covid-friendly live performance of Donizetti's Lucia de Lammermoor with rising stars Brenda Rae (Lucia), Scott Hendricks (Enrico), Scott Quinn (Edgardo), and Musa Ngqungwana (Raimundo). This semi-staged production cut to the chase: the chorus was eliminated, so the drama had to be carried by key soloists. It worked very well, and Rae did a spectacular mad scene. Composed by Gaetano Donizetti and his librettist Salvatore Cammarano and first produced in 1835, the plot was based on The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott, written on commission in 1835. Scott himself based it on a late 17th-century historical incident concerning a noblewoman named Janet Dalrymple, who, forced to renounce her true love and marry a suitor approved by her family, stabbed him on their wedding night and though he survived, she shortly afterward died insane.

Scott's novel has many plot twists and retained the real villain-- the girl's ambitious mother, who engineered the estrangement of the original suitor via fake news (in this case, forged letters). The novel, set in 17th-century Scotland, is full of the complicated politics of the time, and pits the heroine's (here renamed Lucy) family against that of her true love (Edgar), who are on opposite sides both politically and as the result of a feud that has been going on for generations. On both sides there are crises of property ownership and many machinations and changes of plan that eventually lead to Lucy's forced marriage to Arthur

Bucklaw, whose wealth and influence can salvage her family's fortunes. Lucy, like Janet, loses her reason, stabs her husband, again not mortally, on their wedding night, and she soon after dies. /a>

In Covid Times, or The Big 8-0: where would I be without Vaxes?

This is a sort of personal musing after such a long hiatus for Covid times. But this morning, this headline was in my daily newspaper: "VACCINATED WORKERS BANNED AT FLA. PUBLIC SCHOOL" The story went on to say that a school has been established by anti-vaxers, and they would not hire anybody who had had a covid shot. I'm assuming these guys were born yesterday. If they were as old as I am (80), they would remember a world without many of them, and the fear and misery this lack used to cause. I'm glad I've reached this age, but 100 years ago I certainly wouldn't have reached it. Aside from surgeries for a few parts replacements, I was born in 1941, and at that time there were no antibiotics to treat sicknesses, and few vaccines to prevent them. We were all vaccinated against smallpox at birth, and as little kids we were vaccinated against diphtheria and tetanus, but that was about it. Lack of birth control aside, one of the reasons that people had so many kids up to the early 20th century and earlier was because it wasn't unusual to lose a few of them to lethal childhood diseases. There was nothing much to do but pray if your child got sick. The shots we take for granted now didn't exist then, and the general attitude was to let your kids catch measles, mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough, and hoped they'd recovered fine, because then they'd have immunity. I managed to dodge the bullet of whooping cough but got all three of the others when I was six and got the measles so badly that I was delirious and had a temperature of 104. I was lucky that I recovered, and with outside effects that sometimes come with it. We tend to forget that Measles wiped out more native Americans than wars did. In the bad old days, people would hear or read in the news about imminent epidemics and knew that they couldn't do anything about it but wait for it to come and pass and hope they didn't get it. In my childhood, before the Polio vaccine, parents would dread each summer, the usual season for the disease. I played with my next-door neighbor the day before he came down with it, and my mom was petrified for a few weeks, until it was evident that I didn't catch it. I did get rheumatic fever, though--that comes off a strep infection and there were no antibiotics then. Luckily, that was just after World War II, and penicillin had just been released for the general public and I was able to get it. Public health measures, when available, were more draconian too. In 1947, I was growing up in New York, and a man landed in the city from abroad with smallpox. No matter if we were vaccinated against it at birth, who knew how long that protection would last? My entire elementary school, students, teachers and staff were taken down to the cafeteria one day and we were all vaccinated again. More than a million schoolkids were inoculated en masse when the Salk vaccine came out, and the rest of us got it as soon as we could. The Covid epidemic is a wakeup call. For a year, we experienced what our grandparents did with far more frequency. Nobody realizes how awful these sicknesses are until you get them. I got my covid shots as soon as they were available. I'm still here and would like to be here for a while longer. _______________________________________________________________________ For an amazing website on the history of Vaccines, see:

A Little Touch of Harry In the Blight: Henry V in 1944

 England, 1944: still fighting in World War II.  In the fall of that year, Laurence Olivier's film version of Shakespeare's Henry V was released, two months after D-day.  It had been in production since the year before.  During this time, England was a drab place indeed, ravaged by the German Blitz bombings of 1940-41, and by 1944, though hope was increasing, there were shortages of things everywhere, the country was still in a belt-tightening wartime mode, and V-E Day would not come until May of the following year.  This film was made with backing from the British government's Ministry of Information, with an aim to giving some respite to the British public during this dark period, and this was the reason that the most brutal episodes of Henry in Shakespeare's play, such as the execution of the three treacherous English noblemen by order of the king were cut, and  Henry's basic aggressiveness in invading France at that historical moment was glossed over, and the whole justification of the war, the issue of Salic Law, was made comic, while the doings of Pistol, Nym and their mates were rather sanitized.

 

Many of the criticisms made by film historians have to do with the integrity of Shakespeare's play itself, and its proper context within the grouping of Henry V, and Henry IV, parts I and II.  To my reasoning, all of choices made in this production was the logical outcome of the film as a stand-alone production and the circumstances that drove its making in the first place. In that sense, it is more akin to Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), also a morale-raising propaganda movie, which probably influenced Olivier's treatment of the Battle of Agincourt.

 

Olivier and his production crew envisioned his version more as an extravagant pageant--an unreal, exciting yet comforting vision of a battle far removed from the realities of World War II, coming to us from a galaxy far, far, away. Not only that, there are two separate moments in time depicted here, one as a staged performance being done at the time of Shakespeare's Globe theater, the other, concerning the actual battle, in France of 1415, with a return to the Globe in 1600 at the end.  In addition, the film was shot in Technicolor, with its bright saturated colors, making the Battle sequence even more spectacular.

 

The Globe theater scenes are filmed with a zoom-in Smithsonian "Arial Britain" style over a pristine model of 1600 London and seamlessly into the little Globe "wooden O" theater where the play itself is presented, with views of both audience and backstage, with the initial scenes in Elizabethan dress.  The style of the actors'

Henry V at the Globe

presentation is exaggerated with broad gestures and declamatory manner, and audience response is very robust. The makeup is equally exaggerated.  There's even a rainstorm drenching the audience and players, but the show goes on. William Walton's score--contemporary British orchestrations of period music, provides accents.

 

As soon as Henry begins his departure in Southhampton we enter the even more imaginary world of the 15th century as is verbally invoked by the play's Chorus.  We know it is fantasy, because suddenly we've entered a 15th century as it is pictured in manuscripts of that period. Landscapes are painted with tilted perspectives, the distant fortresses also tilted--and broadly painted too.  This is staged as are the Globe sequences, but in a totally different way, particularly as envisioned with the eyes of the Limbourg Brothers' celebrated book of hours of

Très Riche Heures… January

1416--the Très Riche Heures of the Duke of Berry.  The costume references are so specific, that the Duke of Berry in the play is dressed in a costume that almost exactly matches his portrait in the January Calendar page.  The costumes of the other men invoke the same source, right down to the bowl-shaped haircuts of the younger men, the tall hats and turbans or chaperons on their heads, colored tights and long robes or shorter doublets. 

 

Ernest Thesinger as  Berry

The interior set of the King of France's palace evokes the images of architectural interiors in the illuminations too: thin columned and almost pavilion-like, some of these columns lacking shafts so as not to mask the characters' actions, and an interior entry point so tilted as to resemble a street access to a subway entrance marquee in New York City.

 

These sets, and the painted landscapes with their bird's eye views of distant high castles and vertically sloping pathways are invocations of the labors of the month calendar pages from the Berry manuscript, brilliantly achieved by matte paintings produced by Walter Percy and his associates. These create seamless setting for the real actors, skillfully placed so as not to seem out of scale. Foregrounds often have jagged rock faces.

Walter Percy Matte design

Added to this festive artificiality is the color scheme of the costumes in the fifteenth-century sections.  They are bright in hue and conceived in broad sweeps of ultramarine and vermillion--expensive pigments back then, as well as yellow, grass green, and of course a lot of metallic silver for armor. When the foot soldiers are massed, we are shown tiers of helmeted figures holding flags and spears.

 

Très Riche Heures: March

Henry Before the Battle

The battle scenes were filmed in Ireland in actual landscapes, fairly flat and very green. The charge of the French troops certainly owes much to Eisenstein's filming of the battle on the ice of Alexander Nevsky, but here they are also like the battles in French Manuscripts, including one in Enguerrand de Monstrelet's Chronique de France of the battle of Agincourt itself (though the actual illustration postdates the battle by eighty years).

 

Paradoxically, the lines in the 1415 sections are said much more naturalistically than those at the Globe. The rousing cheerleading of Henry's "Sts. Crispin and Crispinian speech, recited this way, serves to introduce the battle of Agincourt itself. The ground is muddy, as has been historically noted, but not enough to impede the French charge. There is blood and chaos in the battle, but certainly no hacked-off body parts.  One of the most exciting special effects here is the perfect grid pattern of the English archers' arrows against the sky hurtling towards the mounted French troops.  I've seen this film several times in theaters, and the audience gasps as this happens every time; it's as good as any modern special effect. Towards the end of the battle, when Henry unhorses the Constable of France in single combat, the battle becomes a tournament.

Enguerrard de Monstrelet: Agincourt

 

The set-pieces of the battle, the scenes at the French court and Henry's wooing of the Princess Katherine are all presented in the "International Gothic" conception of this fifteenth-century world.  The viewer gets so enchanted that incongruities are accepted. The battle took place in October, but the scene suddenly switches to the

Henry and Katherine 1415

dead of winter so that the snow-covered February page of Berry's hours can be used for the interlude scene of Fluellen and his leeks, then switching abruptly back to the autumn of 1415 so that Henry can court his Princess.Everything resolved, it's back to the Globe again where the actors portraying Henry and Katherine are seen once more in Elizabethan dress.

 

If we look at his film today, we actually have to deal with not two, but four time periods. Besides the two shown in the film, we need to be aware of the late World War II environment when it was released and towards which it was aimed. Early showings of the movie had an inserted dedication to "the commandoes and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture."  And now, some 76 years later, we have to consider the film's debut in the historical context of that 20th century war. Maybe in our own bleak times of fire, flood, plague and conflict, we could use another movie like this one.

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You can rent the 1944 Henry V from Amazon

Here are a few websites that discuss technical aspects of making this film:

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/designs-laurence-olivier-henry-v-hamlet

http://www.thepropgallery.com/painting-in-pictures-the-lost-art-of-the-matte-shot

Many interesting posters and stills from the movie can be found at:

http://michaelpjensen.com/henry_v_1944_page_1 (there are additional pages)

Here are three diverse reviews/discussions on this film:

https://www.taoyue.com/film/henry-v.html

http://criterioncollection.blogspot.com/2005/10/41-henry-v.html

And an excerpt from Andre Bazin's What is Cinema:

https://books.google.com/books?id=y3EKWOUQtxcC&pg=PA76&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

Fallen Monument Park: What to do with Used Heroes

San Antonio Express-News, 7/21/2020: p. 3

This past Tuesday, National Public Radio's Morning Edition had a short segment on what I've always known as the "Park of Fallen Idols."  I visited it in 2000, and of all the memories I have of a study conference in Moscow and Saint Petersburg that year, this is the one I remember best.  SInce I've seen it, it has been expanded and now comprises part of the Muzeon complex, that also includes the Tretyakov Museum of Modern Art, a sculpture

Lenins in the Park, Muzeon Complex, Moscow

workshop and contemporary exhibition space.  Here, the problem is nicely solved as to what to do with many of those triumphant images of real or imagined heroes and leaders of discredited regimes, religions or causes lost.  Numerous Lenins, Stalins and other titans of the USSR, and allegorical muscular workmen stand around on green lawns, often gesturing heroically, with nothing to do.

            

The offending statues cited in the headline above

 At this very moment, we in the U.S. are in the process of toppling our own monuments to now literally fallen heroes, now images of Confederate soldiers, most standing, a few on horseback.  Though they were memorials to the losers, we still see them as uncomfortable reminders of a horrific part of our history.  The same can be said for sculpted monuments to Columbus, who as well know now, didn't "discover" America--even as a European; he only represents the advent of European colonialism.  The Vikings before him and probably also European cod fishermen had already been there, but only came to get a few goods or hang out for awhile.

Tearing down monuments to disgraced former ideas or leaders has been around as long as humans have been making them.  Just think of the obliteration of Pharoah Akhenaten's whole city of Akhetahten (Amarna) by his successors, or the legend of the Golden Calf--a

Nicolas Poussin: The Golden Calf, London, National Gallery

would be rival to God by the stiff-necked Israelites and how that turned out. Sometimes, the destroyed monuments were simply erased, as in the recent case of the Taliban's destruction of the giant buddhas of Bamiyan.  In other cases, they were destroyed, and new sacred icons replaced them; as in the fraught history of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

 

The Bamiyan Buddhas: Before and After

On the other hand, sometimes they have multiple evocations as in the instance of the Vendome Column, a colossal self-glorification of Napoleon in the form of a big Roman-style triumphal column like Trajan's that the Emperor of the French had made to commemorate the Victory of Austerlitz in 1805. It was (and is) located in the place de la Vendome, on the site of an earlier equestrian statue of Louis XIV, destroyed during the French Revolution. Like the Roman one, the column was very tall (at 44 meters, or around 145 feet, or taller than its Roman prototype by around 15 feet) with a spiral of imagery narrating Napoleon's victory, cast from captured cannons from the Austerlitz battle, and topped by a bronze image of Napoleon as a reincarnation of a Roman emperor.  After Napoleon fell, the top effigy was replaced by several different flags, depending on who was in power, later by an image of Napoleon again in his more positive role as "the Little Corporal," and then, under his nephew, Napoleon III by a replica of the original Roman-style image again. 

Fallen Napoleon: The Vendome Column 1871

By 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war and Napoleon III's downfall, the revolutionary Communards who briefly held power had had enough.  They pulled the whole thing down, and therein lies the tale of the painter Courbet's populist role in the demolition, for which he was briefly imprisoned, presented with the bill for the column's restoration, and caused him to self-exile to Switzerland. It was re-erected shortly afterwards in 1873 by the Third

Republic with Napoleon-as-Roman Emperor on it once again and has stood unopposed in its luxurious plaza ever since.  Nobody has seen fit to criticize it much since then, except for the architect/architecural historian Daniel Gissen's proposal to make a dirt-mound installation to temporarily cover the columns base in 2013-14 in order to commemorate the temporary demolition of 1871.

So, once those Civil War soldiers and Columbus are all taken down, what will we do with them?  Many of them were previously in parks; do we collect them all like the Russians did?  I bet that if we had all of the statues and monuments of former gods and heroes in one place, they'd occupy more space than Arlington National Cemetery does.  When they were in situ, how many of us actually looked at them anyway?  Why do visible symbols have such power? But that's not the real point: why must we continue to make these graven images at all? Are humans hard-wired to fashion visible idols?

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The article in the Express-News covers the proposed monument demolition in Austin; many local newspapers in the U.S. have similar articles on other local examples.  For another reference to the removal of a statue of Columbus from San Antonio, see:https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2020/07/01/crews-remove-christopher-columbus-statue-to-fix-vandalism/

For a recent discussion of the Muzeon Fallen Heroes Park on NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/21/892914684/what-to-do-with-toppled-statues-russia-has-a-fallen-monument-park

For a nice overall discussion of the Bamiyan Buddhas: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/west-and-central-asia-apahh/central-asia/a/bamiyan-buddhas

The most interesting succinct discussion of the Vendome Column can be found in the French Wikipedia article :https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonne_Vendôme#/media/Fichier:Colonne_vendome.jpg

 David Gissen's proposal to cover the Vendome Column's base with an earthwork can be explored at: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/events/3430/the-mound-of-vendome

Extremes and Escapes

            A memoir and Netflix series partially based on a memoir, both popular in these Coronavirus times, deal with young women overcoming very difficult childhoods that kept them apart from normal life in the US in parallel but, on the surface at least, widely divergent situations.

            The first, Educated, by Tara Westover, which has spent several months on the New York Times bestseller list, deals with the narrator's departure from a survivalist family in Idaho.  Her family lived at the edge of the wilderness.  Although near a small town, Ms.

Westover and her brothers were isolated from the LDS society of their families and other
inhabitants of the town, both physically and psychologically.  Her father owned a salvage yard at the foot of their property, in which all of his children worked alongside of him, sorting heavy machinery and machinery parts for resale.  His wife was a midwife and an herbalist, whose tinctures of essential oils would later develop into a successful business, operated out of her home.  The children were all home-schooled.

            The term "survivalist" has many connotations, but one of these refer to people who basically live isolated from society and strive to be as totally self-sufficient as possible.  Though both parents were Mormon in their upbringing, Tara's Father developed his own religious philosophy, based on his own interpretations of the Old and New Testament, upon which he expounded frequently, and spent his time when not working laying in supplies for the inevitable day of judgement.  He particularly identified with the Weaver Family of Ruby Ridge fame and was obsessed with the idea that the Feds would come for him and his family sooner or later, and that he needed to be prepared to resist--and perhaps martyred--if the Day of Judgement didn't come first.

            There was a great deal of physical abuse in Tara's background, partially from injuries in the junkyard and various family construction projects.  She herself was severely injured in the process, her father nearly died, and there were also two harrowing car accidents.  All of this was complicated by the fact that her parents did not believe in doctors and trusted only her mother's herbal preparations to pull them through.  What is remarkable that these remedies worked, though family members suffered scarring that medicine probably would have made less extensive.

            In addition, she was repeatedly abused by one of her brothers over a considerable amount of time.  As the children grew, their paths diverged in two directions.  Tara and two of her brothers, in spite of haphazard homeschooling, were motivated to self-educate; all three three went on to receive Ph.Ds.  The others remained largely illiterate and stayed in their father's business.

            I don't want to say more here, if you haven't read the book, please do.  Tara's story is extraordinary, and her drive to secure her education is a study beyond impressive, for not only did she achieve all of this without initially having a high school diploma, but she had to experience severe culture shock as she literally hit the world running at Brigham Young University, and later beyond even that world at Cambridge.  In the process, she had to separate from her domineering father and some of her brothers, and then make some sort of emotional and psychological peace with that, a process that involved years of overcoming what was virtually PTSD.

            Deborah Feldman's memoir Unorthodox and its sequel, Exodus narrate her equally harrowing departure from a confining situation, except here it is not the microcosm of a country family, but the macrocosm of a closed urban community: the Satmar Hasidim of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  The Satmars are one of the most extreme sects of the ultra-orthodox wing of Judaism.  Organized around hereditary Charismatic Rabbis who each maintain their own communities of adherents, they are self-separated from American secular society, both Jewish and non-Jewish.  The men wear distinctive black dress and hats, do not trim their beards, and have curled sidelocks.  Women dress modestly, with long sleeves, modest skirts or dresses, and opaque stockings.  Upon marriage they cut off their hair and wear wigs or other head coverings.  Their everyday language is Yiddish, and they educate their children in that language.  They marry only among themselves and arrange their children's marriages.  Most have large families, and the Satmars believe that this is one of the essentials of their existence is to replace the six million Jews who were murdered during the holocaust, and the great fear that something like this might happen again.  Their entire lives are dictated by strict halacha, or Jewish law.  As a society within America, they are as closed as the Old Order Amish or polygamous members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

            Ms. Feldman was born into this community, and her two memoirs chronicle her early life among the Satmars, and her leaving the community. Like Westover, she came from a dysfunctional family: her father was mentally flawed, and her mother deserted the community when Deborah was a child; her mother was gay, completely unacceptable in the eyes of her family. Unlike Westover, Feldman was married off at seventeen to a member of the community and suffered a great deal of trauma consummating her marriage because of anatomical abnormalities, though she eventually bore a son.  Unusual among the Satmars, she was able to keep custody of her son after she obtained a divorce and left.

            Feldman had an equally difficult time adjusting to mainstream life; her trauma stems from the Satmar Community, holocaust survivors, and in many ways, she was as much a victim of post-Holocaust survivors as her grandparents, who raised her (like Westover, one grandmother provided some positive influence).  Through persistence and an inner strength, she too was able to get a college education and is now a writer.  After much moving around, she has finally settled in Berlin, where she writes in both English and German.  Like Westover, she is a strong and articulate woman, and like her, has journeyed through the tribulations of PTSD.  Her two volumes are also worth reading.

            In 2020, the Satmar part of Deborah's life became the initial part of the Netflix series, also entitled Unorthodox, and she was a consultant on its production.  However, the series' heroine, named Esther Shapiro (Esty's) process of adjustment to the outside world is different.  In it, she is married, but escapes the community when she finds out that she's pregnant, and she flees directly to Berlin, where her mother has settled with her partner.  It is as if she has entered not only a totally different place, but a new century. She is taken in by a group of multicultural music students, and eventually gains admittance to their elite conservatory via her extraordinary voice.  She reconciles with her mother, is able to part from her husband, who follows her to try and bring her back, and leaves us to make her place in her new world.

            Except for exteriors in the Satmar area of Williamsburg, the series, including the interior "Brooklyn" scenes was entirely recreated in studios in Berlin.  If you do watch the series, also watch the additional "Making Unorthodox" episode, that shows how it was done.  The Berlin footage is a love letter to that wonderful city, which incidentally has a growing Jewish population again.

            I am writing this as a privileged American Jewish woman who has suffered little hardship, and who has had a successful American career and a comfortable, loving family life.  I salute these two extraordinary women, who have overcome so much to be who they now are. Their books and the miniseries too, will transform your vision.

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Tara Westover, Educated, Random House (2018) is still on the New York Times Bestseller List, and is available in all formats.

Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox, Simon and Schuster, now available as a 2012 reprint: ISBN-10: 1439187010. You can also find it in a Kindle edition on Amazon.

Deborah Feldman Exodus (2014), is available in a Kindle Edition, and used print ones are available.

If you read German, Deborah Feldman's Überbitten, her revised and expanded memoir, written with Christian Ruzicska, just published by btb Verlag (2020), is also available in a Kindle edition.

Both the series, Unorthodox, and The Making of Unorthodox are currently screening on Netflix.

Tara Westover has her own website with information and links to interviews, etc. https://tarawestover.com

Interview with Deborah Feldman since she moved to Germany in 2013 can be found at:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/books/an-american-jewish-author-now-calls-germany-home.html

Of Brick and Wood: Multicultural Masterpieces

Humans are the dominant species in our age.  We are the most destructive to each other and to our environment.  But the upside is that we are creative and inventive in this environment too, and produce things that are beautiful to us--and often starting with the humblest of materials.  As art historians, we like to study these things, classify, organize and group them according to norms we establish within our lifespans.  Great stone cathedrals come to mind, or Norwegian stave churches, or the formidable structures that are driven by technological advances like those towering skyscrapers of Dubai and Singapore.

Cervera de la Cañada, Santa Tecla: Interior detail

Gwozdziec Synagogue: Portal of the Rabbis by Isidor Kaufman

For me, some of the most remarkable of these structures are those that are very regional and time-restricted, and that make something remarkably beautiful out of very modest materials.  There are many over time and geography, but I just wanted to mention two: 13th-16th century brick churches in the region of Aragon in Spain, and 17th-18th century wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe--now long gone but well-documented by pre-World War II photography.  Both were built by artisans of one religion for another.  Within the last sixty years or so, both groups of buildings have been well studied and analyzed, and I'll give you excellent links to detailed sites below.

Spain: Aragon at Upper Right

Art Historians have given a name, Mudéjar, to the Aragonese churches.  The term Mudéjar generally refers to the Muslim residents of Christian Spain during the Reconquest period.  In Aragon, Mudéjar artisans and builders dominated the construction trade and their principal building material was brick: they made brick and ceramics as well.  Presumably, the Mudéjars also made mosques for themselves and perhaps synagogues for Aragonese Jews,  but none of these survive.  A number of the Christian churches were built on the sites of former mosques in this region as the Christians continued

Ateca: Santa María.  Minaret-Bell Tower

to vanquish Muslims up to 1492.  Some of the towers we call minarets from these conquered mosques were appropriated, extended higher and converted into bell towers when they became churches, though most often the church proper was rebuilt to conform to the shape and orientation of Christian practice: longitudinal nave, polygonal apse.

 

Morata de Jiloca, San Martín

The builders of the churches were these Mudéjar craftspeople, who used local and inexpensive brick, and their own time-tested building methods.  Following their own traditions, they adorned the repurposed or new towers, apses and facades with geometric decorations of raised and angled brick as well as colored ceramic inserts to liven them up.  The interiors were plastered and painted with patterns to imitate stone, or repeated geometric motifs; windows and their supports were filled in with geometric patterns too.  Several of these buildings remained reasonably intact, such as those in Tobed, Cervera de la Cañada, Maluenda and Torralba de Ribota, and in the last few decades meticulously restored.

Cervera de la Cañada: Apse (with later retablo and painting)

What makes these structures so interesting is that this profusion of motifs merged with the interior objects and adornments provided by their Christian users: big brightly colored and gilded multi-paneled altarpieces called retablos were in most side chapels and over the high altar; elaborate stucco pulpits and choir screens use a Mudéjar technique but also Gothic pattern motifs.  The interior effect was a riot of pattern and color, but the long nave, sometimes side-aisles, lateral chapels and the apse with its high altar were undeniably and proudly Christian. So these churches were a design collaboration of Muslims and Christians that resulted in a unique fusion.

This fusion produced a very regional kind of architecture that achieved its opulence through brick, ceramic, stucco and painted and gilded wood: inexpensive materials that combined to produce something unique and rich.  There is a website that serves as a visual and informational treasure trove for this architectural movement illustrated with meticulously photographed details for all of them that are out there, maintained by José Antonio Tolosa.  I give the link below.

Map of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

If brickmaking materials abounded in late medieval Aragon, so did trees in eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Wooden architecture developed in the region and encompassed both housing and places of worship.  It is readily seen in old photographs of small towns in the countryside, in large manor houses, cottages and both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches in the region, as well as spectacular Jewish wooden synagogues. The greatest flowering of this multi-cultural renaissance took place during the existence of what was known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795).

Wolpa Synagogue: Bimah (c); Ark (r)

While masonry synagogues were built in larger cities, synagogues in the countryside were constructed of timber, and though the present consensus has it that the builders and carpenters themselves were not Jews, their  methods conformed to those of the general type of all architecture of the period.  As in the case of Mudéjar churches in Aragon, this was modified to meet the needs of Jewish practice. Interior synagogue space was basically a square, and had two liturgical focus points: the Ark, which held the Torah scrolls, generally located on the eastern wall, and the Bimah, here a pavilion-like platform in the middle of the room, where the Torah portions were read each Sabbath and on holidays, with seating around it.

 

Due to less durability and fires, these synagogues were often modified over time, with their roofline raised to accommodate interior cupulas of complex construction.  Exteriors were relatively plain, though as roofs were raised, the exterior profiles became multi-tiered.  Also, extra galleries, porches and other rooms were successively added, resulting in complex exteriors such as at Zabludow.

Zabludow: Synagogue

But much as the altarpieces and stucco screens of the Aragonese churches transformed their appearances to conform to a profound Christianity, the wooden synagogues' interiors were adorned with structures, and often wall and ceiling paintings that expressed their Judaism.  Torah Arks became tall narrow often filigreed affairs, often richly colored and sometimes gilded.  The bimahs rivaled the baldacchinos of Italian Baroque churches, with elaborate wooden carving.  And in some synagogues, the walls were covered with painted Hebrew religious texts, while the ceilings and painted cupolas could offer Zodiac imagery, various animals and painted ornament: human form might not be represented (except for the painted hands offering the Priestly blessing above some arks), but anything and everything else was.  It's not clear who actually executed the interior carvings, but the wall and ceiling painters were Jewish: they signed their work and formed itinerant teams who traveled from town to town, much like the Romanesque church

Khodorow: Ark and wall painting

painters in medieval Catalonia.

There is one irony, though: this superb environment was for men only.  Originally most of these structures had no accommodation for women at all; subsequently a narrow side upper or lower room for women was added on in many of them, but the only visual access was through a heavy grill or a narrow slit.  At least Aragonese Catholic women could sit or stand alongside of the men.

If any of these synagogues survived, they would surely be Unesco World Heritage Sites, but some vanished in the late 19th - early 20th century as small-town populations became very impoverished, and many Jews emigrated.  Those that did make it up to Hitler's invasion of Eastern Europe perished in the Holocaust.  Fortunately, many of them were photographed, analyzed and documented in the 1920's in a project sponsored by the Department of Architecture at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute.  A good portion of this archive survived World War II, and was utilized by the architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka in their superb wooden synagogue studies beginning in 1957 (I cite a reference to the later English edition below).  Building on this, the architectural historian Thomas Hubka produced a marvelous monograph on one Synagogue, that of Gwozdziec, and this inspired the new Museum of Polish Jewry and the American Handhouse studio to recreate the Synagogue's ceiling and bimah as the museum's centerpiece, joining an earlier recreation of the painted Chodorov ceiling at the Beit Hatefutsoth Museum in Tel Aviv.

 

The reconstructed bimah and ceiling from Gwozdziec

A more curious reconstruction is of the Wolpa Synagogue in the town of Bilgoraj, integrated into a reproduced Jewish Shetl, --is this a sort of Shtetl theme-park?  Bilgoraj now has no Jews, but it did--and a synagogue too, but not this one!

We often forget about the multicultural artistic collaborations found in so many places in the world at so many different time periods; human beings can coexist and produce masterpieces, but histories and the current news so often accentuate the negative.

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The very best place to see an encyclopediopic collection of images and many details of Aragonese Mudéjar architecture is José Antonio Tolosa's website Aragón Mudéjar:

https://www.aragonmudejar.com

The two superior works on Wooden Synagogues are Books:

1. María and Kazimierz Piechotka, Heaven's Gates.  Wooden Synagogues in the Territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Krupski i S-ka, 2004.

There are earlier versions, Wooden Synagogues, both in Polish and English, going back to 1957. There's a later edition published by Polin, The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and a sister volume on masonry synagogues in the same region: pricey, but worth seeking out.

2.Thomas C. Hubka, Resplendent Synagogue. Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth=Century Polish Community, Brandeis University Press, 2004, also pricey--but easier to find.

A short film on reconstructing the Gwozdziec ceiling can be found at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc-s-GfPrFs

For discussions of many and varied aspects of Jewish art, including synagogues of all places and times, I recommend Samuel Gruber's wonderful website:

http://samgrubersjewishartmonuments.blogspot.com