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 poly-chromed, 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 wi
thin 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.
The right archway is a much different matter. Here the artist is dealing not with alien Jews whom he hopes to conciliate but with Christians who ought to know how to behave within the body of the Church. The right half of this arch is a terrifying depiction of those condemned at the Last Judgment. In the quaint English which is apparently obligatory for all guidebooks in Spain: ‘To the right, small reptiles and horrible big monsters harass and tear off the flesh of men, slaves of vice, with their claws and fauces. It is surprising the Dantesque expressiveness of this composition.’ The left portion, that is, on the right hand of God as He and His son sit in judgment, are the saved, and they are a happy lot. I have studied this great arch for many hours, finding in it always something new and compelling, but in the end I think the excellence of the work can be reported in two facts: here paradise seems really more to be preferred than hell, which is not always the case in medieval and Renaissance art; and the conspicuous aspect of this work, an aspect not before commented on by writers but one surely planned with much care by the artist, is that we see both hell and heaven through the eyes of little children who share the torment and the glory with their guilty or saved parents. The children shown in this panel are among the finest ever portrayed in-art, and I cannot praise them highly enough. In hell they perish in dreadful agony, and in heaven they rejoice with parents who love them, making each aspect more psychologically believable. Spanish religion features this involvement of children in the faith, and one of the most fearful aspects of the Inquisition was that it insisted upon the display in the parish church of a condemned man’s sanbenito for at least ten generations with his name clearly upon it, the purpose being to condemn that man’s children throughout those same ten generations. It could well be that this harshest of the Inquisitional laws stemmed from this right-hand arch at Compostela; at least, it was an extension of the majestic idea here represented, that heaven and hell are more meaningful when seen through the eyes of children.
Again, just as the Jews were offered salvation through the intervention of two small children, so in this panel the saved are led into paradise by two other children who show the way into the central archway.
We have now seen the six walls of this remarkable portico and more than a hundred and eighty-five different figures, but we have not yet come to the feature which has always been its chief claim to artistic fame. About the four principal columns are ranged, their feet resting at about the eye-level of the viewer as he studies them, sixteen life-sized statues of men in robes, and no matter how much one enjoys the twenty-four bearded musicians or the children of the Last Judgment, he must finally admit that this parade of splendid men is the highlight of the wall.
They are unbelievably well carved, tall, bending slightly forward, extremely human in aspect and mobile of face. Tradition says that each was modeled after a specific man who lived in Compostela at the time, and I find this easy to accept, for this gallery of men could not have happened by either accident of imagination. They are so real they could speak, yet so artistically contrived that in their silence they sing, and to have seen them intimately, day after day and in all lights is to have shaken hands with the Middle Ages.
Meet them. On the left-most pillar, below the world of the Jews, stand long-bearded Joel and quizzical Abdias. (‘What name do we know Abdias by?’ I ask Father Precedo. ‘Abdias,’ he replies. ‘Everybody knows him by that name.’ Back in America I would learn that he was Obadiah of the King James Bible, Abdias of the Douay.)
On the left-hand edge of the first main column stand Hosea, who had such a miserable time with his wife, and Amos. The remaining portion of this column contains the most famous of the sixteen. Jeremiah is properly grave and heavy, but Daniel is a young, beardless man with one of the most ingratiating smiles in the history of art. Standing on one leg with the other playfully crooked at the knee, he seems like a schoolboy about to play some mischievous trick, and he is by far the most popular of the figures in the procession. Since his roguish grin is directed across the portico to the enchanting figure of Queen Esther, who faces him on the opposite wall, tradition says that one of the self-righteous kings of northern Spain directed that Esther be made to appear less attractive, for she was disturbing the propriety of the cathedral, whereupon the artist shortened her nose and made other alterations, without much success, for Daniel still gives her the merry eye.
Next to Daniel comes my favorite figure, an old, smiling Isaiah, heavy with beard and marked by a golden cap, which none of the others wear. To me it seems no great accomplishment for a young man like Daniel to smile; but it is reassuring when old Isaiah with his burden of prophecy should still be able to raise a muffled laugh. Beside him stands Moses with the tablets, and his burden of law is so heavy that he cannot smile.
Elaborate rituals are maintained in the smaller chapels of the cathedral for the sanctification of pilgrims who come from parts as faraway as Denmark and Turkey.
On the comparable portion of the main right-hand pillar stand Peter with his massive keys, Paul with a book, James the brother of Jesus, and John the Divine, also beardless and with a face of heavenly purity. He seems wide-eyed with surprise that revelation should have been accorded him, but he is not ponderous about it. On the smaller portion of this column, and facing the arch of the Last Judgment, stand solemn Matthew and conversational Andrew, while in the corner, on the last of the pillars, stand heavily bearded Thomas and preaching Bartholomew.
It is a magnificent parade from which Judas Iscariot is missing. The Middle Ages found it objectionable to picture him in such scenes, so he is often omitted. But the others march in a grandeur which seems the more impressive because of its compelling simplicity. With their appearance we leave the Pórtico de la Gloria, but not before we notice one small detail.
I spoke earlier of the angels who appear on the west wall of the portico and of how the two bearing trumpets direct them down as if playing for the delight of the observer. At each end of the opposite wall, which contains the Gloria, appears an additional angel so placed as to form part of both the Gloria and the end wall, constituting a harmonic link between the two unequal halves of the composition. They, too, point their trumpets below, and if you look at these four figures, who form a kind of thematic material for the whole composition, you realize that they are trumpeters announcing the day of resurrection, and they are summoning you to that paradise where music and joy and laughter and winking saints and beautiful queens and the benevolence of children abound, and you may well recall the John Donne sonnet on this theme:
At the round earth’s imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow …
What of the cathedral itself? Could any church be worthy of such an entrance? At Compostela the interior is about what it should be, if one thinks of this building as the spiritual center of a religious nation. It is beautifully Romanesque and cluttered with just enough paraphernalia to remind one that this is Spain. In spirit it is very warm, in aspect majestic, and in its operating manifestations devout. The first thing one encounters inside the church itself is a statue to the man who carved the portico, for the intricate work which I have just described appears to have been accomplished by one man whose name is known: Maestro Mateo (in Galician, Mestre Mateu), a Spaniard who worked in nor
thern Spain during the last third of the twelfth century. Documentary records state that he finished the portico in 1188 and it is supposed that it occupied him for about twenty-five years. His statue, which he may have carved himself, is a properly jaunty thing whose head is covered with lively stone curls, and through the centuries it has been the custom of all who visit Maestro Mateo’s supreme work to bow before the kneeling statue and to touch one’s head against his in hopes that some of his genius may rub off. O Santo d’os Croques, he is known in Galician, the Saint of the Bumps, and I, like many others, have touched my head against his, hopefully. When I reflect that this great artist is generally unknown, while much lesser figures of the Italian Renaissance are treasured as geniuses, I wonder at the unfairness of history, for to compare Maestro Mateo with those lesser but more famous artists is like comparing the Himalayas with the Poconos of my home district. The Poconos are lovely, for sure, but to mistake them for the Himalayas is an error.
I was fortunate in reaching Compostela at the precise point in the year when I could best witness the significance of the town and its cathedral in Spanish life, for El día de Santiago (The Day of St. James) occurs each year on July 25 and is the occasion for a religious celebration of great dimension. Toward midnight on the evening of the twenty-fourth it seemed as if everyone in the city had crowded into the plaza before the cathedral, where for two days workmen had been hiding the façade behind a huge wooden imitation featuring a panel with the words ‘Al Patrón de España.’ Now, at eleven, two large rockets were sent aloft to explode with a force so strong that my coat was lashed by the following blast of air. Then to constant applause one rocket after another lifted into the air for about half an hour. I had noticed earlier that this display, which had been publicized during the preceding week, was to be in the hands of a firm from La Coruña, and since the best fireworks are generally considered to come from Valencia, I expected little, and during the first half-hour saw nothing to make Valencia worry.
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