ABSTRACT
The marriage, around 1071, between Sancho Ramírez, King of Aragon, and Felicia of Roucy, with the acquiescence of the Papacy, highlighted his aspirations to bind his reign to the ideological agenda of the Gregorian Reform. In this context, the commission of the Jaca ivories, by the aforementioned queen evidences in a subsidiary way her intellectual efforts to reinforce her husband’s political procedures while it also operates as a mirror to reflect the mutability of medieval women’s identity in their interaction with the elite society that surrounded them. In this regard, the liaison between Felicia and the female convent of Santa Maria de Santa Cruz de la Serós, for whom the work was commissioned, could have epitomised the spirit that moved her husband in the construction of the Jaca Cathedral. A critical review on the acquisition, manufacture and reuse of the ivories and its arrangement as a memento allows us to reconsider the concept of the copy, the use of formal vocabularies from both Byzantine and Romanesque traditions, the ambiguity of the function of the works, as well as the dialogue among the arts.
