Andres Amutio's Minstrels, Jugglers, Bell-capped Fools

...His expression is that of a deeply troubled, even angry man— as indeed, at that moment, a Spanish Jew had every reason to be...

...They decorated their Haggadot with sumptuously colored illustrations of the Six Days of Creation, and their illuminations for Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed rival those of the finest Christian manuscripts...

...As a master of facial expression, Andres knew very well why it was this beetle-browed image of himself that he was leaving to posterity...

...Apart from such propaganda pictures, the archaeological record affords only the rarest glimpses of a Jewish face...

...The brothers came from the nearby village of Cardenas, and the evidence suggests that all four of these artists were either practicing Jews or relapsed converses, known as judaizantes (a form of religious backsliding which the Inquisition punished with the stake...

...There are some other Spanish sculptures attributed to "Andres de Najera," but their dates indicate that they could not have been carved by the same man—conceivably the "Maestre Andres" who worked in Covarrubias in 1533 was a son of the man who left his portrait in lieu of a signature at Najera...

...The choir stalls and the small hinged seats known as misericords depict the animated faces of noblemen, merchants, churchmen and peasants...

...The monastery itself gradually fell into ruin: In 1889 it was designated a Monumento National, but serious restoration was not begun until 1964...

...it is nothing less than a whole cosmology—an illustrated representation of everything that exists in heaven, on earth or in the water...

...But the abbot must have known that he was getting his money's worth, since the result is widely regarded as the finest sculptured choir of the Spanish 15th century...

...In southern Spain, meanwhile, Ferdinand and Isabella had completed their hard-fought war against Granada, a ten-year campaign that succeeded in subjugating the last Muslim kingdom on the peninsula...

...His "Sigmund Freud Meets Gus-tav Mahler" appeared in moment in July-August 1979...

...The art history of the Jews is singularly deficient in such "ancestor portraits," for the Second Commandment's injunction against the making of "graven images" diverted Jewish energies away from representational art and into other forms of decoration...

...This did not prevent Jewish sculptors from producing figures and portraits for Christian patrons: Indeed, choir stalls for churches and cathedrals seem to have become something of a specialty among Spanish-Jewish wood carvers...

...The remaining sculptures have gone almost unnoticed by the art world, though several local savants have written about them, and informed opinion holds that there was no greater Spanish Gothic sculptor than Andres Amutio—a Jewish Tilman Riemenschneider...

...Andres Amutio must have seen some of these homeless refugees as they crossed Navarre on their way to France and points north...

...Jewish artists avoided depicting the human form, the early chapters of Jewish history books have always been illustrated with other people's images of defeated Jews: Assyrian reliefs of Israelite war prisoners, for example, and Roman sculptures from the Arch of Titus showing Jewish prisoners carrying off the sacred objects from the devastated Temple of Jerusalem...

...in Navarre itself the Jews were spared expulsion until 1498...

...The sculptor recorded his reaction to these traumatic events in a small but singularly eloquent side panel: the queen's initial, Y, is flanked by a heart pierced by a knife, and a pair of crossed knives that may be sculptors' knives—or perhaps those of a mohel...

...One of the manuscripts of the period explains, in passing, why Spain then had a flourishing tradition of sculpture: "Nowadays the Jews put many carvings in their synagogues, and the Christians make many images for their churches and the Moors place many decorations in their mosques...

...As Albert Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus, "There is no fate that cannot be overcome by scorn...

...The wording is very precise on this point, since only Christian places of worship admitted images in human form...

...His name, most probably, was Andres Amutio or Amucio, and he was the master sculptor who decorated the choir of the monastery of Santa Maria la Real in Najera, northern Spain, during the last decade of the 15th century...

...But it also warrants our attention for a compelling historical reason—it is the earliest known naturalistic portrait, and at the same time the first known self-portrait, of a medieval Jew...

...There had been Jews living in the region since 1170, when San-cho of Navarre entrusted a group of Jews with the defense of two strategic castles, and granted them the privilegios of Najera as a reward for their services...

...But early Jewish artists generally obeyed the image-making prohibition in Exodus 20:4, which was intended to prevent the Jews from reverting to pagan idolatry...

...Because most Frederic V. Grunfeld is roving editor of Connoisseur and author of a number of books, including Prophets Without Honour, a history of the German-Jewish literary tradition, and his most recent work, Wayfarers of the Thai Forest: The Akha...

...ANDRES AMUTIO'S MINSTRELS, JUGGLERS, BELL-CAPPED FOOLS Portrait of a master Jewish sculptor in Spain, c. 1490 FREDERIC GRUNFELD The magisterial face that gazes out at us from the portrait panel shown here would merit our interest simply as a work of art—it is one of the finest examples of Gothic wood sculpture in Spain, or anywhere in the world for that matter...

...All that is known for certain is that they were well paid for their work: 40 seats in the upper row of choir seats at 6,500 maravedis apiece, 27 in the lower row at 3,500 maravedis, and certain very elaborate seats that cost as much as 24,000 maravedis each—at a time when five or six of these copper coins represented a day's wages for an ordinary workman...

...There is a Hellenistic Moses in the synagogue of Dura-Europos, on the Euphrates, and an Egyptian mummy-cover of the Roman era that bears the portrait of a 2nd century Jewish matron...

...The victorious queen—la reina Ysabel, to her subjects—decided to further "unify" her dominions by expelling the Jews from Castile...

...At the 13th-century court of Alfonso el Sabio ("the Wise") of Castile and Le?n, it was they who translated such eastern classics as the Talmud and the Koran into Castilian Spanish, and the king's Jewish scientists produced the first European books on such subjects as astronomy, geology and the measurement of time and space...

...Hence the first known self-portrait of a Jew is also the first known portrait of an angry Jew...

...His work seems to have remained unmolested until the Napoleonic wars, when French soldiers mutilated many of the sculptures and carted some of them off as booty...

...Some documents refer to him as "Andres de Najera," but the records are not clear on this point, and in any case nothing is known about him except that he was one of the great sculptors of his time, and one of the many Jewish artists who flourished in Spain prior to the expulsion of the Jews under Ferdinand and Isabella...

...Andres Amutio, alias "Andres de Najera," appears to have been the principal sculptor in charge of decorating the choir stalls, but he was assisted by his brother, Nicolas Amutio, and at least two other sculptors...

...His portrait, fortunately, has survived almost unscathed, and although we may never know anything else about him, the face itself speaks volumes...

...Work began about 1490 and apparently continued until 1495...

...The Jews of medieval Spain, however, tended to take a more relaxed view of the matter...

...Andres and his helpers carved about 70 seats, and in addition there were scores of panels, also in walnut, that decorated the three sides of the tiered choir loft...

...its Jewish scholars and artists were largely responsible for bridging the gulf between the Muslim and Christian traditions...

...Yehuda and Abraham Cresques, the map-makers of Majorca, went so far as to create the great "Catalan Atlas" of 1375 in direct contravention of the Second Commandment...

...Given the historical circumstances, it is not too much to read into his gaze the anger and compassion he must have felt when he saw the tragic fate that had overtaken the Jews of Castile...

...So it is not a coincidence that the earliest naturalistic portrait of a Jew is a likeness not only of an individual but also of an archetype all too familiar in Jewish history: the gifted man caught up in a maelstrom of ignorance and persecution...

...A portrait of the commissioning abbot is included, but above all Andres chose to depict representative faces from the stream of humanity that passed through Najera on the pilgrim's road...

...The lifelike quality of these faces shows Andres to have been a master of Gothic realism, but he was also well versed in the esoteric symbolism of the Middle Ages...

...of minstrels, jugglers and bell-capped fools...

...Najera, in the 15th century, was an important way station on the great pilgrimage road to Santiago—a prosperous market town in the wine region of western Navarre, the Rioja, on the border of Castile...

...of Christian pilgrims and of Moors, Jews, Blacks...

...Culturally, medieval Spain was situated on the cusp between East and West...

...It was not at all unusual, therefore, for the abbot of the monastery of Santa Maria la Real, Don Pablo Martinez de Urunuela, to commission a Jewish artist to decorate the choir loft of the newly-constructed basilica of his monastery, which held the royal tombs of Navarre...

...During the summer of 1492, some 200,000 to 400,000 Jews were stripped of their possessions and driven from the kingdom, on pain of death, never to return...

...Many of the seats and panels are covered with heraldic animals and mythological beasts, interspersed with certain cryptic scenes that must have been intended to convey their message only to the initiated...

...Rafael Comez Ramos, Las Empresas Artisticas de Alfonso X El Sabio, Seville, 1979...

...The surviving records fail to tell us what became of Andres and his assistants when they left Najera...