This article presents a unique late thirteenth-century fresco in the apse of S. Antonio in
Polesine, Ferrara, which might be the only surviving full-size representation of a portable
Islamic tent to have survived to our day. The tent, painted to represent a baldachin over the
high altar, recalls descriptions of the Andalusi silk and gold tents seized by Spanish armies
from the Almohad camps during the wars of Christian expansion into al-Andalus in the
thirteenth century, some of which were sent across Europe as diplomatic gifts. In its
extraordinarily precise, illusionistic details, the fresco appears to depict an existing, rather than
an imagined, object and could therefore be the only extant visual testimony of the practice of
displaying and reusing such precious Islamic structures in a Christian context.
