Guided visit to the exhibition given by Cèsar Favà, PhD in art history and assistant curator of the Gothic art collection of the Museu Nacional.

Beyond their captivating aesthetic qualities, their remarkable artistic relevance or their typological and functional diversity, the treasures included in the exhibition The lost mirror. Jews and “Conversos” in the Middle Ages (1285-1492) highlight the conception of the Jew and Judaism reflected in Gothic art.

Based on the wide selection of exhibited works, mainly intended for the Christian majority of the peninsular kingdoms, the relationship between the images and the historical context that gave rise to them will be addressed, both to emphasise their dependence on the European framework as well as to underline the Hispanic particularity of the question under discussion and its instrumentalisation by the Inquisition. 

The careful repertoire of anti-Jewish iconography present in the exhibition will reveal the diversity of visual strategies and intentions present in the art of the period, which range from discrimination to the cruelest stigmatisation. The most characteristic denotative signs of the image of the Jew, such as physical features and clothing, will be revealed, as well as some of the main graphic resources used to defame it (caricatures, symbols, inscriptions or transmutations and malicious associations...). At the same time, the diversity will be analysed of issues that turned the Jew sceptical to the Christian revelation, into a deicide or, to put it bluntly, into the enemy par excellence of Christianity. (Text by C. Favà)