Red wall painting. Images at the limits of time
Ondare Irekia Open Heritage Project Álava Medieval / Erdi Aroko Araba y del Área de Antropología Visual de la Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Director: PhD. Gorka Lopez de Munain
This research project is based on the collaboration between Álava Medieval / Erdi Aroko Araba (Cooperativa Kultur Soleil) y el Area of Visual Anthropology (University of Buenos Aires). Its development will be divided into 2 stepsInitially catalogación , the painting remains preserved in the province of Álava, one of the Spanish territories with the most examples, will be catalogued.
The province of Alava has a number of medieval painting coverings that are truly surprising in terms of their quantity and typological variety. It is often the dampness and peeling paint that sometimes reveal what is, in reality, only a small part of what lies beneath the numerous layers added over time. Similarly, visual inspections behind altarpieces or structures added later often provide interesting surprises in the form of lapidary pieces, figures, geometric shapes, etc. There are also other churches such as Alaitza, Añua or Arbulo that, after their restoration, show visitors the decorative splendour of their walls dominated by lines and shapes of intense red ochre. However, this situation of apparent heritage wealth has left very little trace in the specialised bibliography.
Of all the range of chromatic coatings that we find in the Middle Ages, in this project we will focus on the one made in red on a white support. This pictorial support is sometimes directly the plaster made with lime mortar or, in other cases, it is a thin layer of white lime applied on the mortar in order to visually even out the walls and achieve a white and luminous finish. On this whitish base, the painters applied the decoration dry with reddish pigments, obtained from ferrous earths. This reddish decoration outlined motifs that could roughly be grouped into three large blocks: lapidary painting, decorative stripes and narrative scenes.
The next step will address the difficult task of interpretation and (anachronistic) analysis of the most outstanding groups. To do so, a experimental methodology in which these paintings will be studied as links in a long chain of images whose origins are lost in the mists of the Paleolithic. If Aby Warburg introduced the notion of formulas of Pathos (Pathosformel) to study the surviving gestures that emerged at different historical moments, here we will have to talk about a kind of gestural survival, but also a “technical” one, which will require a unique and original approach. And the fact is that these paintings escape any attempt at study based on a formalist or iconographic methodology. The paintings, for example, from the church of San Martín de Arbulo, do not form part of any “history of styles”: they are neither Romanesque nor Gothic paintings, despite being executed in the same chronology (12th and 13th centuries). They are the expression of a Visual Culture that is unknown to us, that has hardly been studied and that requires methodological keys that have yet to be defined.
