Abstract
Following the conquest of Islamic Majorca in 1229, the Christian settler-colonizers embraced a purist identity that rejected altogether the island’s Islamic past and its artistic heritage. Visually, this new identity found its expression in the form of a clean, restrained, and mathematical gothic style. Palma’s towering gothic monuments embodied an ideological attempt at cultural erasure that has shaped Mallorquin identity to the present day. However, through the interstices of collective memory and material evidence it becomes clear that Islam and the Islamicate lingered beyond the singular point of the conquest through the continuity of local artistic production, the arrival of new Muslim artisans, imports of Islamicate objects, and the survival of monuments. The result was a hierarchical aesthetic system with two axes: the first consisted of the superimposed monumental, public, and official Gothic, while the second consisted of portable and less durable Islamicate objects that circulated in the gothic halls.