Leather carvings of mudéjar aesthetics at the Guerra Junqueiro House-Museum and Foundation – memories of al-Andalus in Portuguese lands

Abstract

The author analyses three chairs and five upholstery pieces of the collection of the poet Guerra Junqueiro, nowadays at the House-Museum and Foundation bearing his name; these leather carvings show aesthetical peculiarities that turn them part of Mudejar art of Umayyad lineage that remained in the West of Iberia Peninsula after the Reconquest. The connections that such motives allow highlight Portugal as a deposit of continuities and adaptations of archaic aesthetics; they have remained in the elite’s leather art c. 1500-1600 before the Renaissance motives becoming dominant.