The invasion of Iberia in 711 and the establishment of the kingdom of al-Andalus inaugurated a Muslim presence on the peninsula that endured for almost eight centuries, and still resonates in Spanish culture today.  Under Islamic, and later Christian, political domination, Iberian Muslims, Jews, and Christians negotiated and shaped their visual and cultural identities in an environment of convivencia or “coexistence,” as individuals and subcultures reacted inventively when confronted with traditions and practices very different from their own. 

My research explores the rich artistic and architecture legacy of these interactions.  I am particularly interested in the tension between the tendency of art historians to focus on cross-cultural contact between what are called "different" Islamic, Christian, and Jewish visual traditions, and the evidence revealed by the works themselves.  This evidence instead points toward cultural assimilation, with individuals and groups manipulating a shared visual language in order to position themselves within the evolving structures of power on the Iberian peninsula.  In this fashion, a visual tradition developed that is distinctively Iberian, a tradition that is strikingly different from those seen elsewhere in Europe.

Stephen Clancy is Professor and Chair of the Art History department at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. He teaches the history of Ancient, Medieval, and Northern Renaissance art and architecture, as well as general courses on visual culture and the rhetoric of images.  He is particularly interested in the intersection between resistance and appropriation in medieval Iberian visual culture, including post-medieval appropriations of rejected past identities