To the left, the Muslims fight, but little by little they begin to flee; on the right, the Christians form an iron wall that falls like a steamroller on the enemy. And in the center of everything, like a heavenly envoy, the good Don Pelayeither. Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau has done it again. After months of documentation and hard work, the ‘Painter of Battles’ has taken with his brushes a reliable snapshot of one of the key moments in the history of Spain: the battle of Covadonga. The one with which, according to tradition, the Reconquest began in 722. Because yes, despite the fact that there are still deniers of this contest –there are some, like the Meigas–, the confrontation was as real as the canvas.
“It is a key moment in our past, and we needed to put an image on it,” Ferrer-Dalmau explained to ABC. The artist, an expert in photographing moments orphaned by snapshots, has measured to the millimeter each element that he has introduced into the composition. He has not left anything to chance; from the belt buckles –yes, believe it, they are historically accurate–, to the same region of Covadonga, in Cangas de Onís (Asturias). “I toured the area to be able to reproduce it exactly,” he completes. He has always been farsighted, and for this reason, he was sure that ‘The First Victory’ – the title with which he has baptized the painting – was going to shake up the historiographical world. And boy did he get it right. The debate is served; that if he reconquers, that if he skirmishes… He is clear: “The contest was real.”
He presents it just as crystalline Yeyo Balbás, adviser to the painting and author of ‘Cova Dónnica’ and ‘Sword, hunger and captivity’. Speaking to ABC, the historian laughs when asked about the possibility that the battle of Covadonga was nothing more than a later invention. «There is academic consensus: the battle was magnified for centuries. The figures given by the Christian chronicles of the Muslim contingent are absurdly high, but that does not mean that it did not exist », he confirms. In his favor he has an infinity of documents and chronicles of one and the other. He is also struck by the fact that theses that have already been destroyed by experts such as Armando Besga Marroquín or Sánchez Albornoz are taken into account.
There is no debate; it’s stupid. There was contention, and it was a key moment for the history of that Spain that would start with names and surnames several centuries later. “Skepticism is natural due to the lateness of the sources, but against it you have to do pedagogical work,” adds the historian. And what better way to collaborate in this task than ‘The First Victory’, a two-meter-high work commissioned by a group of Mexicans from Guanajuato state which will be presented at the beginning of April in Cangas de Onís, where it will be exposed so that visitors can enjoy it. There, in the same region where Don Pelayo started a revolt that Alfonso II himself left blank in his will.
artistic revolution
But not everything is history; or shouldn’t. As explained to ABC Maria Fidalgo, A scholar in Art History and adviser on the work, ‘The First Victory’ gathers all the best of ‘Painter of Battles’: «It has a vertical orientation, which means that there are two parts. The first, landscape, is the one above. It has an extraordinary topographic fidelity because Covadonga is almost the same as it was a millennium and a half ago. The second is that of the figures».
The expert maintains that the composition hides more than thirty fighters – thirty-four, specifically – but each one has been elaborated in a unique way. «They are not a cut and paste. Each man is a story in itself that integrates a whole. That they all make sense together is something very complex, only at the level of great painters».
Fidalgo, on the other end of the phone, invites you to see the painting to understand its complexity. In fact, he insists that we have an image of the canvas in front of us while he explains the details of it to us. We listen to him. «Look, one of its main characteristics is that the scene has a kind of mist. It’s water vapor, drizzle… It’s not easy to get that atmosphere from a technical point of view. They are a kind of transparencies on color. That is something unique to Ferrer-Dalmau », he completes. Nor does he want to overlook that the work “is a fight, not a carnage.” And he explains why: «There is no mockery against the enemy. Upside down, he is given dignity. The blood, in addition, is quite muffled, there are no red impacts that stand out ».
Step by step, he makes an analysis of ‘The first victory’. He talks about the volume of the figures, painted on different planes, and the Covadonga cave, in the background. But he dwells on a characteristic ‘made in’ Ferrer-Dalmau: «Within a genre in which everything was invented, Augusto has gone one step further and has created his own label. Before, the painting of battles was seen from the stalls. He integrates the viewer into his own work. In the ‘Degollá’ the horses come upon you; in San Marcial the bayonet sticks into you. There is an immediacy between what he paints and the viewer’s reception». In this case, he refers to a gap that exists between both armies. “That is the space that he has left for the viewer.”
Covadonga, truth and myth
From a historical point of view there are two versions of this battle. On the one hand, the Alphonsine chronicles explain that “Alqama, the Muslim leader, ordered the combat to begin and the soldiers took up arms.” They affirm that the Muslims used trebuchets to throw stones at “the house of the Holy Virgin Mary, which was inside the cave”, but that they failed to hit. And it ends with some exaggerated figures:
«As God does not need spears, but gives victory to whom he wants, the Christians left the cave to fight against the Chaldeans; They fled, their host was divided into two, and right there they went to the stalemate Alqama. In the same place 125,000 Chaldeans died and the remaining 63,000 climbed to the top of Mount Auseba.
The Muslim version is different, but it corroborates the existence of the battle. In it, it is stated that a few thousand soldiers under the command of Alqama went to Galicia to fight against “a wild ass called Pelayo”. In the words of the enemies, the Arab soldiers surrounded the Christian troops until they died almost entirely of starvation. This is evident in the texts prepared by the historian Ahmed Mohamed al-Maqqari in the sixteenth century:
“Isa ben Ahmand Al-Razi says that […] A wild donkey named Pelayo arose in the land of Galicia. Since then the Christians in Al-Andalus began to defend against the Muslims the lands that were still in their possession, which they had not expected to achieve. The Islamists, fighting against the polytheists and forcing them to emigrate, had taken over their country until they reached Ariyula, the land of the Franks, and they had conquered Pamplona in Galicia and all that was left was the rock where the king called Pelayo had taken refuge. with three hundred men. The soldiers did not stop attacking him until his soldiers died of hunger and only thirty men and ten women remained in his company. And they had nothing to eat except the honey they drank from the honey left by the bees in the cleft of the rock. The situation of the Muslims became painful, and at last they despised them saying: ‘Thirty wild asses, what harm can they do us?’
Balbás, for his part, charges against the theory, extended over and over again, that the Muslims were part of a patrol that collected taxes. “We know the Islamic tax system well, and they weren’t sending small groups to undertake this task,” he explains. He also recalls that, thanks to the Roman legions, we know exactly how the invading armies moved in the area of Asturias and Cantabria. “They went to the top of the mountains, they did not enter small valleys because they knew they would be vulnerable to the classic Hispanic guerrilla,” he completes. For this reason, he is convinced that Alqama’s troops formed a long column that went up the Sierra de Covadonga in the direction of the peaks of europe and the valley of Liébana. “They didn’t go into the valley to avoid trouble,” she completes.
It does seem logical to him that the Christians took refuge in a cave: «It is something very typical of the Bronze Age. Before an incursion, the settlers, dispersed throughout the area, would get together, grab their cattle and go to a fort or a hilltop. And the Auseba meets these requirements.” His idea is that the Muslim column was on the move and that the Christians attacked part of it. “That would explain why the vanguard continued its march towards the Picos de Europa, the direction that the Alfonsine chronicles tell us they took.”