The Spirit of the Letter: The Hebrew Inscription in Bermejo’s Piedat Revisited

Abstract

The Hebrew inscription in the Piedat attributed to Bartolomé Bermejo is usually viewed in relation to the possible involvement of conversos in the painting. Offering a broader exploration of the local setting as well as the visual and textual models available to Bermejo, this article goes beyond a narrow converso interpretation and situates the inscription within two different contexts: an environment of growing Christian interest in Hebraic knowledge and an Aragonese artistic experimentation with the iconography of the Man of Sorrows.