The Universitat de València inaugurates on Thursday, 7 April, at 18:30, the exhibition ‘Ramon Llull i l’encontre entre cultures’ (‘Ramon Llull and the meeting point of cultures’) on the ocassion of commemorating the 700 since the death of Ramon Llull. The showing offers a tour of the life and work of the Majorcan thinker in which it is highlighted the relationship that he had with the Muslim world in a period of conflict, but also of intense cultural and commercial exchanges in the Mediterranean.
This showing is organised by the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed), due to the ‘Any Llull 2012-2016’ (‘Llull Year 2012-2016’), the Office of the Vice-Principal for Culture and the Department of Catalan Language of the Universitat de València, with the collaboration of the AVL (Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua). On the occasion of the exhibition, at 18 hours, the Gonzalo Montiel Hall will hold the conference ‘Ramon Llull en el món del segle XXI’ (‘Ramon Llull in the world of the XXI century’) in charge of Josep E. Rubio, professor of the Department of Catalan Language of the Universitat de València, and afterwards it will be inaugurated with guided visit by the curator of the exhibition, Albert Soler.
This itinerant exhibition includes illustrations, texts and interactive audio visual material, where it can be seen representative bibliographic pieces of the production of Llull preserved in Majorca and Catalonia. The exhibition, structured in 10 areas, can be visited until the 20 May in the Claustre of the Universitat.
The first part explains the Mediterranean medieval context with the commercial and political expansion of the Crown of Aragon, at a moment when the Kingdom of Majorca played a first class strategic role. The following areas are focused on the person of Ramon Llull and they take a journey through his missional, intelectual and political project. The areas five and six are referred to the contact among religions in the Middle Age to end the final sections with the singular strategies that Llull developed for the conservation and the propagation of his work, as well as the amazing diffusion that Ramon Llull has had in Europe for 700 years. All this context can be visualised through the installations of the Claustre of La Nau.
The exhibition includes, moreover, two interactive touchscreens that allow to see the 12 miniatures of the ‘Breviculum’ in Catalan, Spanish and French, that explain in a graphic and visual way the life and work of Ramon Lllull.
From Llull it is preserved around the world almost a thousand manuscripts copied between the XIII and the XVIII centuries, a legacy that is wider to other huge amount of medieval authors, and the biggest collections are preserved in Palma de Mallorca, Rome, Paris, Munich and Milan.
However, there is not a single manuscript of the works that Llull wrote in Arabic, despite there are records of some exemplars in Maghreb in the XIV and XV centuries. According to the curator of the exhibition, Albert Soler (University of Barcelona’s Ramon Llull Documentation Centre), even though Lull gets closer to the Islamic world intending to prove the true of the Christian faith, he does it with an admirable effort of adapting his work to the Muslim interlocutor and from an open to dialogue position. Llull made three missional trips to the North of Africa, two of them to Tunisia and the other one to the Algerian city of Béjaïa in 1307. Such tenacity led the scholar of Arabic thinking and civilisation Dominique Urvoy to declare that Llull ‘has the advantage of summing up in one biography the essential part of the contact problems among religions and civilisation’.
Last update: 6 de april de 2016 09:17.
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