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Ricardo Fernández Gracia, Director of the Chair of Navarrese Heritage and Art.

Heritage and identity (37). The elephant in five contexts of Navarrese art

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 11:12:00 +0000 Published in Navarra Newspaper

The elephant is an animal that, exceptionally, appears in the heritage of Navarre, however, it does appear in outstanding works and, above all, in different chronologies and contexts. The few examples are compensated by the multiplicity of its messages in the respective environments where it is found.

Due to its peculiar appearance and disproportionate proportions, which set it apart from the rest of the animals, it has attracted attention for centuries in artistic representations, being an important presence in choir stalls, as Isabel Mateo Gómez studied in her book on the profane themes of the same.

Their strength, easy domestication, report and intelligence, as well as their aptitude for war were described by St. Isidore, when he recalled that "the ancient Romans called them lucas oxen; oxen because the ox was the largest animal they knew, and they called them lucas, because Pyrrhus employed them in Lucania, for the first time, in the war against the Romans".

Medieval bestiaries considered them as a symbol of purity, due to their natural lack of concupiscence, also assimilating them with Adam for their way of engendering, approaching the mandrake tree, from which they took fruit to acquire vitality. From there and from certain legendary facts, several writers gave it an ethical-moral and religious meaning, assimilating it as a symbol of chastity and strength.

About their strength and aptitude for military campaigns, the text of the Book of Maccabees, states: "on each of these beasts there was a strong wooden tower, which served as a defense, and on the tower, war machines; going in each tower thirty-two strong men, who fought from it and an Indian ruled the beast .... and Eleazar, son of Saurah, watched an elephant that was harnessed". The aforementioned Saint Isidore affirmed, in the same sense, that "These animals are very apt for war, and the Persians and Hindus, who use them, throw their arrows on some wooden towers placed on the back of the elephants, and thus they are defended as by a wall".
 

In Leire's casket

In the famous Hispano-Muslim chest of Leire, today in the Museum of Navarre and a work A of the Cordovan caliphal workshops of 1004-1005, signed by the master Faray and his disciples, we find elephants on the back and on the lid, executed with refined realism. In the first case, the ivory is signed by Jayr and we find, in one of the lateral medallions, a hunting topic with two very small pachyderms in a tournament with their warriors with swords and shields. It makes pendant with another scene with the horsemen with the same elements, but mounted on horses. On the lid of the piece, warriors on elephants appear again inside lobed chamfers in a scene that seems to recreate another tournament, similar to the one we have mentioned on the back of the piece.

Connoisseurs and scholars of this subject of pieces point out that, although scenes of feasts and hunts are relatively frequent, the topic of the tournament only appears in this chest from Leire. The size of the elephants led to think that it was a dwarf race of pachyderms, something that Malaxaecheverría refutes in his well-known work on The Bestiary Sculpted in Navarre, with the argument that the perspective, as applied from later times, was not contemplated by the medieval artist, partly due to the limitation of space, partly due to his own ignorance of the sizes in relation to the human body.
 

Santa María de Olite's façade

Two elephants can be found in this A Gothic doorway, presided over by its titular Saint Mary with the Child on her lap and made between 1300 and 1330, by three masters and in relation to Parisian workshops and the doorway of the Clock of the cathedral of Toledo. Recently, this set has been studied in a monograph, whose iconographic part has been carried out by Professor Clara Fernández-Ladreda. In both cases the pachyderm is represented carrying a castle on its back. The first of these appears on the left jamb, together with scenes from Genesis and real and fantastic animals which, separately, have their symbolism, but which, in general, seem to be due to a decorative intention. The elephant of the jamb carries a small castle with a hooded man leaning over it, holding a horn in one hand and a branch in the other. Its reason for being in this place could lie in the association of the animal with the original sin, since it is next to scenes of the earthly paradise. According to The Physiologist and some bestiaries, the elephant lacked concupiscence and when it wanted to have children, it went to the East, approaching the tree called mandrake of Paradise, from which, as we have indicated, they took the fruit, first the female and then she gave it to the male. From this story the couple of elephants were identified with Adam and Eve who, while they obeyed God, were virtuous, but when the woman ate the fruit of the tree and fed Adam, she became pregnant with evil (Cain).

The second elephant is located in the gables of the same cover. In the left gallery we find a lion disputing a bone with a kind of hydra and the elephant crushing a dragon and carrying on its back a castle with a head protruding from it and blowing a horn. The detail of the dragon is in agreement with different texts of the bestiaries that Malaxecheverría and Martínez Lagos have studied. This last professor indicates that, in the scenes where the pachyderm appears crushing the dragon, it does not usually carry the tower. The reason for the enmity between the two animals is rooted in the literary stories that narrate that when the elephant is about to give birth, she submerges herself in a pond until the water reaches her udders. There the calf is born, because if it were born out of the water, the dragon with a fiery temperament would come, eager to drink the fresh blood of the pachyderm, devouring the newborn. In any case, the father elephant, always on guard, would be ready to trample the dragon and destroy it.
 

In the stalls of the cathedral of Pamplona

On one of the fronts of the armorial bearings of the armchairs of the cathedral of Pamplona we find an elephant, interpreted by Pedro Echeverría, in this case as a symbol of consistency, chastity, peace and, suggestively, of obedient humanity. The choral ensemble of Pamplona was carried out between 1539 and 1541, during the priesthood of Don Sancho Miguel Garcés de Cascante (1512-1549), a relative and supporter of the Pope for 2,600 ducats, from the chapter rents, alms from the canons and rents from the Crown. The director of the project was Esteban de Obray, with whom Guillén de Holanda, a sculptor from the Bigarny workshop in Burgos and active in the stalls of Santo Domingo de la Calzada (1524) and Calahorra (1534), the Biscayan San Juan de Arteaga, a group of French masters collaborated: Peti Juan de Melun, Peti Juan de Beauves (helped by his son?) and Pierres Picart, master of the University of Oñate, the Guipuzcoans Diego de Mendiguren and Juan de Amasa (a connoisseur of "Roman style" decoration) and the Riojan Francisco Martínez Cornago, Obray's servant. 

In that context of the century of Humanism, it should be remembered that the meaning of the pachyderm was collected in the emblematic books of numerous authors such as Alciato, Piero Valeriano, Sebastián de Covarrubias, Picinelli or Rollenhagen. In them they deal with their religion, meekness and eternity. A study by García Mahíques on topic points out: "the history of the elephant is rich. As a subject that carries meanings, Western culture has used and abused its character to denote gentleness, strength, compassion, temperance, report, humanity ..., in the end, the most interesting thing is that they have valued a series of qualities that make it a being close to man. It gives the impression that it shares the same common sense, and is the closest member of the animal kingdom to possessing a soul like the human one".


On a funerary emblem of 1758

In plenary session of the Executive Council Siglo de las Luces, in one of the emblems painted for the funeral of Queen Bárbara de Braganza (1758), commissioned by the Pamplona regiment, by Juan Antonio Logroño, under the supervision of Fray Miguel de Corella, there are two elephants and two hearts on flames of fire. Next to the pair of pachyderms a registration reads "Nulla noscunt adulteria" (They know no adultery). Next to the hearts is another text that reads: "Amor hos accendit amores" (Love has kindled these loves). Regarding the heart of flesh, we must remember that it was a secular and universal symbol as an emblem of moral and emotional life. Moreover, we must remember how, since the sixteenth century, the heart was considered not only as the seat but above all the agent of affection, so that in the Renaissance it was adopted, in general terms, as a symbol of love. 

J. L. Molins and J. Azanza have studied the message of the composition that tries to gloss the conjugal fidelity of the deceased queen and her husband Fernando VI, during the years of their marriage and the love they professed to each other, with purity of heart and without letting themselves be dragged by passions, which would allow them to enjoy divine love.

As a concrete literary source , in this case, we can remember what Aristotle himself says about the male elephant that, while the female is pregnant for almost two years, he refrains from approaching her thanks to his cold and chaste temperament. Another writer Claudius Elianus, a writer and professor of rhetoric who lived between the second and third centuries, wrote De Natura Animalium, with short stories about nature and animals from which moral lessons were drawn. Among the latter, he states that the elephant was not only chaste, but an advocate of marital chastity, very contrary to adultery. These messages survived in medieval bestiaries and reached the emblematic repertoires of the 16th century.


In the Recoletas Nativity Scene of Pamplona

The crib of the Augustinian Recollect Nuns was enlarged in plenary session of the Executive Council XVIII century with different animals. When the chapel of the Virgen del Camino was inaugurated in 1776, and each community and institutions took the most attractive things to the streets to attract attention for their richness or rarity, the aforementioned nuns placed the nativity scene, which according to the chronicle: "they have it very special, with very strange and perfect animals, which caused admiration...". Among those animals, especially some very rare camels invoice, was the elephant that has been preserved and is still placed in the large convent nativity scene.

The incorporation of the elephant to the Nativity scene was relatively recent and was motivated and increased by the arrival of a specimen in the embassy of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmut I to Charles of Bourbon Farnese, King of Naples and Two Sicilies, future Charles III, in that same year of 1741, as we see in the painting of Giuseppe Bonito of that year. That embassy of 1741 was a social and political event in Naples, both for the issue of visitors and for the unique and exuberant costumes and exotic animals that accompanied them. It was not the only elephant that Charles III received as a gift. In 1773, another one arrived from Manila, which traveled through many regions until it arrived at the court, with all the care subject .

The monarch's fondness for the nativity scene since he reigned in Naples, made it acquire in Spain in his time authentic cover letter. The different novelties, among them the presence of the elephant, made that a reduction of the pachyderm became a three-dimensional representation of the birth of Christ and that other nativity scenes included it for its exoticism in their showy cavalcades.