Iberia (125 page)

 

The remaining north plaza, known as the Plaza de la
Azabachería (The Place Where Trinkets of Jet Are Sold), would
be world-famous if it were located, say, in Toledo, whose cathedral
cannot be seen from any vantage point, but in Compostela, where
it must compete with three finer plazas, it seems ordinary, for the
façade which faces it is a dull baroque affair of jumble and
confusion. However, from the steps of the monastery across the
way one obtains a good view of the cathedral as a whole, with its
varied towers and turrets, and one can begin to unravel the
complexity of this strange monument. The earliest church must
have been a wooden affair built shortly after the discovery of the
body of St. James in 812, and we know from excavations that it
was built upon the ruins of an extremely ancient Roman cemetery
which dated back to before the time of Christ. This wooden
church was quickly replaced by the stone church of Alfonso II,
which was in turn rebuilt by Alfonso III at the end of the ninth
century. The Muslim al-Mansur al Allah (Victor by the Grace of
Allah) destroyed everything in his invasion of 997. A temporary
replacement was erected in the early 1000s, but in 1075 Alfonso
VI authorized the building of the Romanesque church which has
ever since formed the core of this magnificent edifice. In the early
1100s Alfonso VII and his cantankerous Archbishop Gelmírez
completed a cathedral which in outline must have looked pretty
much as it does today. To this permanent nucleus was then added
one feature after another, the last major change being the erection
in 1738-1750 of the tempestuous baroque main façade by
Fernando de Casas y Novoa.

 

All this, one can decipher from the supposedly uninteresting
northern plaza, but one can see a great deal more. When I looked
up at the pile of figures topping the neoclassical monastery facing
the cathedral, I asked a guide, ‘Who’s the man on
horseback?’‘Santiago,’ he said without hesitating. But as I studied
the figure I saw that the rider was cutting his cloak in two with a
long sword and I realized that I was looking not at Santiago but
at one of the most popular saints of the medieval period, the jovial
Hungarian known as St. Martin of Tours, patron of roust-abouts,
tavern brawlers and reformed drunkards. And this reminded me
that I was standing in what for centuries had been the powerful
French section of Compostela and the financial capital of this
part of Spain. Just as Medina del Campo had determined the value
of international coinages in the Renaissance, so the Azabachería
had determined it in the Middle Ages, and through this plaza
every pilgrim from northern lands was required to pass when he
entered the cathedral. This was where the journey from Paris and
Brussels and Stockholm ended. This was the French town within
the Spanish town, and to reach the Plaza de la Azabachería and
to know that you were again within the protection of French
power must have been reassuring.

 

To see the work of art for which this cathedral is famous you
must go back to the main plaza, climb the long flight of stairs to
the entrance and pass through one of the doors of the façade.
Immediately inside, and before you enter the cathedral itself, you
find yourself in the enclosed Pórtico de la Gloria, fifty-one feet
long, thirteen feet wide and some sixty feet high, one of the major
glories of world art which a week of visits will not exhaust. On
the floor there is nothing and on the ceiling only routine carving
on the ribs of the vaulting. On the two small end walls, nothing,
and on the western wall, which is, of course, the back of the
baroque façade, merely a set of sculptured Biblical figures and
angels: Mark stands by himself in the left corner; then Luke and
John the Baptist together; Esther and Judith; and off by himself,
Job. The angels aloft are not noteworthy; those who play trumpets
direct the bells of their instruments down toward the observer.

 

So for five-sixths of this portico there is not much to comment
about, but the remaining wall, through which one enters the
cathedral, contains such a wealth of sculpture and of such
stunning quality that I am perplexed as to why it is not better
known. It is a masterwork of Romanesque art, an enticing
summary of medieval thought, yet as modern in execution as a
painting by Picasso. Psychologically it is profound; humanistically
it is one of the most delightful works ever composed; artistically
it is of the first order; and religiously it recapitulates the faith of
an epoch. But having said this I have still missed the essential
quality of this masterpiece. It is fun. It has a throbbing sense of
real human beings. It depicts laughter, not tears. It contains
hundreds of separate figures and a huge proportion of them are
having a good time. The oppressive heaviness of much medieval
art is here missing and a kind of jollity suffuses the figures. Even
Jesus himself is staring wide-eyed at the world about him and
finding it good. The Pórtico de la Gloria is not only one of the
world’s supreme artistic creations; it is also one of the most
human, alive and joyous.

 

The massive wall is broken by three large arches which give
entrance to the nave and aisles of the cathedral. This means that
from left to right as one faces the wall he sees, in this order, a
corner column, the left doorway over which is a large curved area,
then a large composite pillar, then the central doorway and it,
too, has a very large curved area above it, then a second composite
pillar, then the right doorway with curved area above, and at the
far right-hand end, a final column. It is in the harmonious
utilization of these seven separated areas—four columns, three
arched spaces—that this wall is so superior artistically. Actually,
there is a fifth column, because the span of the central doorway
is so great that it requires this column for support, and there is
no better point at which to start enjoying the portico than here.
Observe that I say enjoying and not studying, for this is a wall to
be chuckled over, and pedantry would kill it.

 

The slender central column is, like all the others, built up from
separate pillars, in this case five plain ones plus one highly carved.
Its base is noteworthy in that it depicts the defeat of Hercules,
representing old religions, by Christianity. Two lions who
accompany the fallen hero have their mouths wide open for the
purpose of admitting light into the vaults below. The carved pillar
is extremely lovely. It shows the Tree of Jesse, from which Jesus
sprang, and by itself would be a memorable work. Some time
after it appeared at the gateway to the cathedral a pilgrim whose
name is unknown discovered that among the vines and leaves of
Jesse’s tree were five indentations, perhaps put there intentionally
by the artist, into which a thumb and four fingers would fit, and
it became the custom for newcomers to the church to stand before
this column and insert their fingers into the spaces and pray. Now,
eight hundred years later, the weightless force of these hundreds
of millions of fingers has worn deep indentions into the marble,
so that the dead Tree of Jesse seems to have acquired a kind of
life.

 

Sitting on a platform atop the tree is a benevolent statue of
Santiago, and with him we begin to discover the characteristics
of this massive work, for he is calm, his robes are at rest and are
not exaggerated, his hands are big and capable and his feet are
the ordinary feet of a workman. His face is almost beautiful in its
repose and his cheeks are ruddy, for from the beginning the statues
were polychromed, and in 1651 their faces were repainted; now
they exude only a faded glow.

 

With this tender and human carving of Santiago the pillar itself
ends. Its capital, extremely well carved, depicts the divine origins
of Jesus. Atop the capital, and therefore in the main body of the
work, sits Jesus enthroned, showing his wounds and surrounded
by angels. This, too, is a remarkably human statue of a patient
and loving man, as unpretentious as the Galician farmer or
fisherman who probably posed for it.

 

We were now in the central tympanum, a work bewilderingly
rich in images and joy. About the figure of Christ rest the four
evangelists in the animal evocations we saw earlier in the
tetramorph at San Isidoro’s in León and which I could not then
decipher. Father Precedo now explains that this tradition stemmed
from an apocalyptic passage in the first chapter of the Book of
Ezekiel, in which the prophet sees a fire: ‘Out of the midst thereof
came the likeness of four living creatures…. As for the likeness
of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a
lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the
left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.’

 

Another Church historian told me later that the identification
of the four figures came from the recension of the above passage
in Revelation, in which John beholds the throne of God: ‘…and
round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and
behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast
like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth
beast was like a flying eagle.’ It was the early Church fathers who
conceived these animals to be allegorical representations of the
evangelists, but they found no key as to which symbol applied to
which evangelist. St. Jerome made the definitive application on
the basis of the way in which each Gospel opened. Matthew was
assigned the man since his account begins with the human
genealogy of Jesus; Mark, the lion, because he opens with the loud
voice of John the Baptist crying in the wilderness; Luke, the bull,
for the sacrifice of Zacharias; and John, the eagle, for the
high-soaring flight of his thought in the prologue.

 

Outward from Jesus and the evangelists stand eight wonderful
figures, four on each side. These are the angels who bear the
instruments of the Crucifixion, on the left the column to which
Jesus was tied, the cross, and the crown of thorns; on the right
the nails and lance, the parchment of the verdict, the jug of water
with which Pilate washed his hands, the lash, and the lance with
the sponge which carried vinegar to the dying Christ. In spite of
the lugubrious mission of the eight angels, they are themselves
gentle and in repose. The anguish is past and they hold the cruel
instruments in loving remembrance rather than in passion or
resentment. In this respect they typify the recurrent theme of this
wall, that Jesus has ascended to glory and the world rejoices.

 

Skipping over the multitude of angels who hover above the
Lord, singing and rejoicing, each face a separate identity and all
of them delightful, one comes to a unique feature of the work
and one of the best loved. It is an outer semicircle depicting the
twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse: ‘And round about the
throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four
and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had
on their heads crowns of gold…four and twenty elders fell down
before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden
vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints. And they sung
a new song.’ In accordance with this passage, the twenty-four are
shown with musical instruments, providing us with a portrait of
medieval music: fourteen zithers, four psalteries, two harps, two
lutes, plus a surprising device I shall speak of in a moment. They
are grouped two by two, not ostentatiously but with rare subtlety,
and according to the text they should be singing, but it seemed
to me as if they were talking amiably among themselves. My two
favorites are the fifth and sixth in from the right. The fifth plucks
a lute or some such stringed instrument and the sixth has a harp.
They talk together as if they had played in many different bands,
and I wish I could overhear the conversation, for the harpist seems
much pleased with himself as his fingers strum the strings. If I
had to choose two figures who best established the serene
atmosphere of this great work, I would take these, for whenever
I look at them I chuckle.

 

If the sculptor had disposed his twenty-four musicians into
twelve facing pairs, the top of the semicircle, that is, the point
immediately above the head of Christ, would be empty, for the
two musicians who bordered that spot would be looking away
from each other, and this would be artistically displeasing. The
artist obviated this by taking the four top figures in the semicircle
and arranging them in this way: the two outer figures have no
partners but look toward the center, while the two central figures
share across their knees a strange contraption called a zanfoña,
the left half of which looks like a large guitar while the right half
consists of a series of cranks. It is the world’s first instrument for
cranking out automatic tunes, or more precisely, semi-automatic
tunes, because I suppose the man on the left had to finger the
strings in order to insure that the man on the right cranked out
the correct notes. At any rate, these four central figures, so
disposed and with the zanfoña across the knees, bind the massive
composition together in a manner that is positively pleasing.

 

Of the two lesser arches, the left is a construction of quiet poetry
suffused with mystical implications. It is built up from three
concentric and receding semicircles, each of which is tied together
by luxuriant foliage. The inner circle consists of eight crowned
figures accompanying a nude Adam and Eve and a benign Jesus.
The middle circle contains eleven partriarchal figures seated
behind what could be a stylized table but which is more probably
a representation of a massive rope symbolizing the continuity of
life. The impression one gets from this beautiful arch is order,
dignity and a mass of men living together within the boundaries
of nature. An undocumented tradition claims that this arch
represents the Jewish concept of life as it flourished before the
coming of Christ and is a fantasy lifted from the apocryphal Book
of Enoch. If so, it contains one of the gentlest commentaries on
Judaism ever constructed by a Christian artist, in that the whole
archway of Judaism is linked to the central archway of Christianity
by a simple, symbolic device. What do you suppose it is? Two
little children holding a long parchment indicating the New
Testament, which the Jews merely have to accept to be saved.