A world of colours: the houses of the Arabic manuscript 528 of the Escorial (al-Andalus, 15th c.?)

Abstract

Arabic manuscript 528 in the Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial depicts the interiors of houses, characterised by a wide range of colours that make up a world of colours. First of all, the source document of the study is presented, with the doubts expressed by the research about the time and place of the manuscript’s composition. Then, the colours used by the artist are studied, both the tints and the brightness and saturation, where possible, and a mapping of the colours in the houses is proposed, in order to distinguish between mural decorations, pavements and furnishings. And finally, the world of colours in the houses is compared with other cultural horizons of the period, Nasrid, Moorish and Castilian, to try to highlight their singularity within a cultural horizon, the Middle Ages, which made such great use of colour. It is not easy to identify precisely this singularity, undoubtedly because the world of colours of the houses in ms ár. Esc. 528 are inserted, at the end of the Middle Ages, within a very complex cultural environment, the result of centuries of cultural transfers and exchanges within the framework of the Iberian Peninsula and, beyond that, the Mediterraneanhy not see the law as a Roman tale analogically and imperialistically projected inside the study of “primitive” societies by anthropologists? This article’s main topic is firstly the capacity of law to be the science of its own rationales and practices, and secondly the biases drove into anthropological thinking while borrowing legal concepts and modes of reasoning. Altogether descriptive and prescriptive, the law depicts and organizes human realities in a single move. That thus creates a major epistemological difficulty when and where indigenous confession occurs, i.e. the phenomenon by which local cultural schemes are locally formulated in the alienating terms originated in the legal corpus. Beyond a law-dependent legal anthropology, the anthropology of law is aware of the importance of legal fictions and reaches the substance of the law as a western and westernized set of concepts, logics.