5 - Conclusion

Summary

el tiempo, según me pareçe, se nos va, como

dizen, dentre las manos [. . . ] todos los come ya

la tierra; todos yazen en sus perpetuas moradas.

(Rojas 1998: 301)

INTRODUCTION

In my investigation of orador and defensor attitudes to death, from those of the dying to those of the bereaved, I have described two coherent and distinct ideologies which I believe co-existed and came into conflict in fifteenth-century Castile. Though I have drawn my evidence mainly from written sources, we have also seen that the division between the orador and defensor ideologies can be detected in the visual arts. The most striking images of death created in the fifteenth century were probably those of dancing skeletons and hideous beckoning corpses, but while some individuals may have believed that the macabre representations of a personified Death were accurate portrayals of reality, this was probably not the case for the intellectual elite of the oradores:

piensan las gentes que la muerte es persona invesible que anda matando ombres e mugeres; pues non lo piensen, que non es otra cosa muerte sinón separaçión del ánima al cuerpo. E esto es llamado muerte o privaçión desta presente vida, quedando cadáver el cuerpo que primero era ornado de ánima. Esta es dicha muerte. Así que non diga ninguno: ‘Yo vi la muerte en figura de muger, en figura de cuerpo de ome, e que fablava con los reyes, etc., como pintada está en León’, que aquello es fiçción natural contra natura. Es natural porque natural es el morir; pero non que la muerte sea cosa que mate, segund que la pintan en fecçión, que sería contra natura, como dar cuchilladas, lançadas o saetadas a los bivos la muerte.

(Martínez de Toledo 1979: 271–72)

Macabre iconography was not the only artistic response to death and Martínez de Toledo’s definition of death as the separation of body and soul finds its artistic expression in the Arte de bien morir which, rather than showing a personified Death, emphasizes the struggle between angels and devils for the soul of Moriens. The illustrations accompanying the Arte de bien morir indicate the moment of death by a small human figure, which we can assume is the soul, emerging from Moriens’s head and ascending towards the angels hovering above the bed.