Wooden Beam with Figural imagery

While many Cordoban wooden beams decorated with vegetal motifs have survived, this later example features hunting motifs, a popular imagery shared throughout the medieval Mediterranean and commonly found on earlier ivories and textiles. The piece shows a huntsman blowing an oliphant, two others respectively with a spear and a hound, a running deer, a hound attacking a boar and a lion confronting a bull. Muslim craftsmen, who worked for Christian patrons, continued to use such motifs after the end of Muslim rule in al-Andalus. Examples of wooden beams from this period, carved or painted with figurative imagery and parts of horizontal wooden ceilings (alfarje), originate from the early 8th century AH/14th-century CE Palace of the Duques in Arjona (Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid, series 1926/52). Dichromatic blue and red background colours and their distribution are characteristic of the decoration of Andalusian carved and painted wooden ceilings, including those of the Alhambra and Teruel’s cathedral. Azurite blue and red vermilion were applied in a way that contributes to understanding the image: the red is located inside of the arches and the blue in the upper areas. A transparent brown colour is used as a base for the lacework, hunters and plants sections, while black highlights the carved motifs, outlines the shapes and details the elements of the composition. While the lacework is also decorated with black, red and white lines, traces of a silver-based layer was found between the ground and the polychromic parts, a known use in al-Andalus of metallic particles in the paint to provide more lustre and a brighter colour to the paint.