ARTES is delighted to share Philip Muijtjen’s report of his research trip, funded by the CEEH/ARTES Travel Scholarship.
The ARTES-CEEH Travel Scholarship enabled me to travel to the beautiful town of Burgos in May 2023 to carry out extensive archival research on the Spanish bishop and legal scholar Juan Díaz de Coca (d.1477).
Juan de Coca’s life is interesting for a number of reasons: he was from a family of conversos in Castille and he also became one of the most senior judges in the Catholic Church. During his busy and eventful life, he was very interested with his own burial and commemoration. During his time in Rome, he commissioned one of the most important fifteenth-century funerary monuments which can still be viewed in the Eternal City. Shortly before his death, however, he changed his mind and chose the cathedral of Burgos as his final resting place.
Juan would also play an important role the continuation of the so-called Chapel of the Visitation inside the Cathedral of Burgos, which was founded by his famous relative Alfonso de Cartagena (d.1456). Juan chose his second and final tomb there. Despite these and many other interesting details, Juan de Coca’s life remains almost completely unstudied.
With generous funding from ARTES-CEEH I was able to travel to the cathedral archive in Burgos, where I found extensive collections of new documents on Juan Díaz de Coca and on his interest in tombs and chapels. It was a great experience for a number of reasons. Apart from the joy of finding good sources for research, this archival trip made a dream come true: Burgos had been high on my list for years but I had never found the chance or means to visit it. The Travel Scholarship finally made that possible for me.
While I spent a substantial part of my time in the archives in Burgos, I was able to see many things in person. This included the aforementioned Chapel of the Visitation (see photo), which still holds the second and final tomb of Juan Díaz de Coca. After spending a long time trying to trace Juan and reconstruct his life, it was fantastic to finally experience his physical presence and see the cathedral which he had so loved in the early years of his life before permanently moving to Rome.
Because Juan’s final tomb in the Chapel of the Visitation was a product of Burgos-based sculptors in the 1480s, I took the opportunity to see some other sites where examples of this sculpture could be seen. This included the famous Charterhouse of Miraflores and the stunning Cistercian abbey of Las Huelgas. I was able to appreciate how Juan’s own tomb in the cathedral was part of a bigger production of sculpture in and around the city.
My visit to Burgos was an extremely valuable experience for me, as it opened me to new avenues of research topics on fifteenth-century Spanish art production. I owe it to the ARTES-CEEH Travel Scholarship that I could take this significant step as a researcher.
ARTES 