Gothic Art and Architecture in 15Th-Century Castile

Chapter 7 Converso Patronage, Self-Fashioning, and Late- Gothic Art and Architecture in 15th-Century Castile

Nicola Jennings

When the Spanish Rabbi and tax-farmer Abraham Seneor converted to Catholi cism in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs served as his sponsors and awarded him an Old Christian lineage.1 The new converso – the term for converts from Juda- ism and their descendants – was treasurer of the powerful Santa Hermandad, one of the wealthiest men in Castile, and an important source of royal finance. Fernán Pérez Coronel, as Seneor was now known, immediately commissioned an elegant Late-Gothic funerary chapel in the Segovian monastery of El Par- ral where Queen Isabella had just built a royal apartment.2 Coronel’s nearby palace, like the Casa de los Picos refashioned by the converso Juan de la Hoz, were the first in the city to adopt elements of Renaissance architecture.3 This article aims to provide an overview of the artistic patronage of 15th-century converso courtiers like Coronel – from a chapel in Tordesillas started in 1430 to the façade of the St Gregory College (Colegio de San Gregorio) finished around 1496 – looking at it through the lens of the new social, political and religious identities these figures fashioned for themselves, as well as highlighting the importance of converso commissions in the development of Castilian Late- Gothic art and architecture.

1 Conversos as Novi Homines

The seeds of Abraham Seneor’s commission can be located half a century earlier in the impressive limestone chapel commissioned by an earlier con- vert, Fernán López de Saldaña (ca. 1400–1456), at the convent of St Clare in

1 Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Coronel, 1492: de la aristocracia judía a la nobleza cristiana en la España de los Reyes Católicos,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 200-1 (2003), 11–24. 2 Efrén de la Peña Barroso, “Devoción y religiosidad de un linaje judeoconverso: la familia Cor- onel,” Hispania Sacra 65-2 (2013), 61–65. 3 José Antonio Ruiz Hernando, “Pervivencia de la arquitectura y urbanismo góticos en Segovia. Estado de la cuestión,” in Arte gótico postmedieval, (Segovia, 1987), pp. 38–39.

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Tordesillas. Described as one of the “purest” manifestations of Burgundian in- fluence in Castile, the chapel includes some of the earliest flamboyant tracery in Castile, monumental apostles carved in the style of André Beauneveu, and a carved retable with painted folding wings which was almost certainly the kingdom’s first (Fig. 7.1). Along with Pablo de Santa María, Juan Álvarez de To- ledo, and Diego Arias de Ávila, Saldaña was one of a first generation of court conversos who presented themselves as nobles by virtue of merit even if they were never themselves formally ennobled. Constructing grand tombs, funerary chapels, hospitals and monasteries, and often employing newly-arrived craftsmen from northern Europe, they used art and architecture to proclaim their piety as new Christians as well as their new quasi-noble status. Their example was followed in the second half of the century by a cadre of converso ecclesias- tics who instigated even larger prestige projects at cathedrals and monasteries in Burgos, Segovia, Palencia and Valladolid. These works were not only as state- ments about their commissioners’ political allegiances and religious beliefs, they were also critical staging-posts in the careers of the great Late-Gothic masters Juan and Simón de Colonia, Juan Guas and Gil de Siloe. Saldaña was a protégé of Álvaro de Luna – who favoured ambitious and edu- cated conversos, calculating that their new-found status made them easier to control – and the son of a tax-farmer who probably converted when Saldaña was a boy. He commissioned the chapel in 1430, soon after being appointed Contador Mayor or Chief Accountant to Juan ii. By that time, several decades of contact with the courts of Philip the Bold and his descendants had brought the Burgundian art of vivre noblement to Castile.4 Nevertheless, despite the import of increasing quantities of Flemish tapestries and other luxury goods, Castilian taste in architecture remained traditional and local.5 Chapels commissioned by wealthy Castilians in the early years of the 15th century were mainly built in brick and plasterwork in the aniconic Mudéjar style derived from the kingdom’s Islamic past.6 Saldaña chose instead to employ northern European craftsmen using innovative designs, durable materials such as

4 On the art of vivre noblement at the Burgundian court, see e.g., Walter Paravicini, “The Court of the Dukes of Burgundy: A Model for Europe?,” in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c.1450–1650, eds. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (London, 1991), p. 89. 5 Begoña Alonso and Javier Martínez de Aguirre, “Arquitectura en la Corona de Castilla en torno a 1412,” Artigrama 26 (2011), 104–05. 6 Ibid., 122–25, Joaquín Yarza Luaces, La nobleza ante el rey: Los grandes linajes castellanos y el arte en el siglo xv (Madrid, 2003), pp. 34–41; Manuel Valdés, “Patronazgo señorial y arte mudéjar en el Reino de Castilla,” in Imágenes y promotores en el arte medieval: miscelánea en homenaje a Joaquín Yarza Luaces, eds. Joaquín Yarza Luaces and Maria Luisa Melero (Barce- lona, 2001), p. 650.