The art historian Serafin Moralejo once described a group of twelfthcentury Spanish ivories as “erratic, strange and isolated”. These adjectives are equally apt for other works – from buildings to manuscripts – produced in northern Iberia in the middle decades of that century. These artefacts frequently lack both evident local formation and a clear legacy. In some circumstances a high rate of loss could account for this effect, but intent also is at play here. Above all, this art is eclectic, not in a merely derivative sense but as an expression of experimental collecting. The importation of diverse styles and techniques, sometimes within one work of art, sits alongside the re-display of material from archives and the re-deployment of earlier pieces. This body of work delights in varietas, in jarring juxtapositions, and in playful rhetorical approaches. It can also be remarkable for the quality of its invention and execution. It rarely yields to familiar categorisations and yet offers tantalising resonances. The difficulty in classifying these works is perhaps one reason why these decades of the twelfth century are rarely the focus of art historical studies.

The range of the corpus requires this study to stretch geographically across the north of the Peninsula, from Portugal to Catalunya, and over the Pyrenees into modern-day France and Italy. Chronologically, it will cover the period c.1110 to c.1170. These decades are bracketed by instability: at the beginning, civil war between Leon-Castile and Aragon; at the end, uncertainties engendered by minority reigns in both Castile and Aragon- Catalunya. In the middle of this were two relatively settled reigns: those of Alfonso VII (r.1126–57), son of Count Raymond of Burgundy and Queen Urraca, in Leon-Castile, and Ramon Berenguer IV (r.1131–62) in Catalunya and, from 1137, in Aragon.