Graham Barrett, ‘Imagining the Visigoths in Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Art’.

There are no contemporary depictions of the Visigoths who ruled the Iberian Peninsula from the fifth century until the Muslim conquest of 711. From the tenth century onward, when the first representations begin to survive, all images of Visigoths are by definition works of imagination, reflecting the concerns of their creators as much as the realities of their subjects. In this lecture, I survey Visigothic royal portraiture from its origins in medieval manuscripts held at the Escorial of law codes and chronicles from La Rioja and Castilla to the commissions of the Siglo de Oro by court artists such as Hernando de Ávila (d. 1595) for the Alcázar de Segovia. I then explore their legacies in historical painting and sculpture in Spain and Portugal from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, including the royal statues in the Plaza de Oriente, Madrid, and the series of kings instigated by José de Madrazo (d. 1859) for the Real Museo de Pinturas, today’s Prado. I argue that in the long history of imagining the Visigoths, however idealised the representations, they have proceeded from a basis in what the past was understood to be, and attempted to reconcile that past with the demands of the present. 

Graham Barrett was educated at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford, and after eight years at the University of Lincoln he joined the Department of History at Durham University in 2024 as Assistant Professor of Early Medieval European History. As a social and cultural historian of language and literacy in the Iberian Peninsula and the Western Mediterranean, he is interested in the life of the written in the world, or the biography of text: who used it and how, for what ends and with what consequences, the points and modes of intersection and interaction between text and society and culture. His first monograph, Text and Textuality in Early Medieval Iberia: the Written in the World, 711–1031 (OUP, 2023) won the La Corónica International Book Award for 2025. He has published widely on Latin and Latinity, as well as Christian-Muslim relations, and he co-founded the journal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources (ARC, 2024).