ABSTRACT
Peacocks and eagles are two of the motifs that appear in Hispanic Romanesque sculpture whose formal features reveal their inspiration in Andalusi art. This chapter examines both figurative topics and follows their spread in space and time, tracking their transmission and reception across Iberian art between the tenth and twelfth centuries.
The presence of these motifs was greater in border areas of the upper Douro River, where the Christian population had been able to see the image of the predatory eagle on the Umayyad military banners and luxurious objects for decades. This Caliphal emblem of victory was therefore well known among local people and started to appear in church ornamentation in the final quarter of the eleventh century, a time of far-reaching political changes in the peninsula, when the Christian kingdoms began to capture lands from a weakened and fragmented al-Andalus. The incorporation of figurative details typical of Andalusi art in some Romanesque representations of peacocks and eagles suggests an intended aesthetic appropriation. In the case of the eagle, aesthetic appropriation seems to have gone hand in hand with the assumption of the symbolic discourse associated with it.
