Secrets of the arts : Enlightenment Spain's contested Islamic craft heritage

Abstract

This dissertation examines the artistic and architectural mutations occurring in Spain during the eighteenth century, when Spain decided to participate in the Enlightenment's philosophical project that emphasized the classification of art, crafts, and other knowledge, and thereby raised important questions regarding the value of national heritage relative to a universal one. Spain was always viewed by Northern Europeans and Spaniards alike as tainted by its Muslim history, and its culture seen as semi-Oriental. In endeavoring to become part of the Enlightenment, Spanish artists, architects, natural philosophers, and policymakers struggled to come to terms with two challenging factors: their inheritance from the peninsula's Islamic past, and their corresponding isolation from the institutions of Northern Europe. They were forced to consider the hierarchies of the "liberal" over the "mechanical," intellectual over manual, high over low. The quest of the Spanish crown for economic reform shaped the relations among art, architecture, and crafts, which were manifested in the contrasting institutional stances on those hierarchies in the Academy of San Fernando (est. 1752) and the Economic Societies (est. in the 1770s). This dissertation probes how the reconsideration of past categories in light of the economic reform affected the practice and theory of architecture. It looks at ornament as a key site where Christian Spain sought to confront the marginality imposed upon it during the Enlightenment. Spain's experience-grappling with its Christian Iberian identity, its Arab and Jewish legacies, and its relationship to European institutions-constitutes a neglected episode in the art-historical narrative, one that informs the history of the decorative arts and knowledge construction in the eighteenth century.