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Love and death: the intense and violent mix of these two basic elements of the human condition is the perfect recipe for creating the most memorable of stories. If the love between Pyramus and Thisbe, Ariadne and Theseus, Dido and Aeneas or Troilus and Criseyde has nowadays largely been forgotten, the names of Tristan and Iseult or Romeo and Juliet are still very much alive in popular culture. The success of such stories is largely due to the fact that they deal with impossible loves: stories where a fragile and passionate couple is at odds with fate, the will of the gods or the social organization of the time. They are romanticised tales that usually end in tragedy and death, thus leaving them to linger long in the memory.
Traditionally, the tale of Prince Pedro of Portugal (1320-1367) and Inés de Castro (1320-1355) is considered to be distinct from these stories because it is based on real events. In the Crònica de D. Pedro^, written in the late 1430s, reference is made to this differentiation in order to highlight the superiority of the romance between Pedro and Inés when compared to the stories of Ariadne (and Theseus) and of Dido (and Aeneas), two female lovers made popular in Ovid's Heroides2. The author of this chronicle, Fernäo Lopes, considers such "composed loves" as merely the creations of talented writers, without the value of historical facts. Inevitably, however, this true story is also assembled with various topoi deriving from secular culture, including the tragic loves that occupied medieval court literature and imagery3. The presence of this imagery is quite evident in a variety of details of the funeral monuments that Pedro commissioned for himself and Inés at the Cistercian Abbey of Alcobaça between 1358 and 1363 [Figs. 1-2]4. Their ornate sumptuousness and discursive complexity substantially contributed to feeding the legendary nature of the love story between Pedro and Inés, exemplifying, as we shall see, the ambiguous nature of the relationship between Art and Life5.
Pedro and Inés: a Story of Love, Murder and Revenge
The fate of Pedro and Inés' relationship is utterly entwined with the politics of Portugal and Castile during the second quarter of the fourteenth century. The first act of this story began in...