Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela
An excerpt from GE Street's 'Gothic architecture in Spain'
Archbishop Diego Gelmirez was consecrated in the year 1100, and died in 1130, and the history of his arch-episcopate is given in great detail in the curious contemporary chronicle, the 'Historia Compostellana'. Here it is recorded that, in 1128, 'forty-six years after the commencement of the new church of St James', the bishop, finding that the subordinate buildings were so poor that strangers absolutely 'wandered about looking for where the cloisters and offices might be', called his chapter together, and urged upon them the necessity of remedying so gave a defect, finishing his speech by the offer of a hundred marks of pure silver, thirty at once, and the rest at the end of a year. This would put the commencement of the new cathedral in 1082, during the episcopate of Diego Pelaez, though, as will be seen, the same History elsewhere says that the church was commenced in 1178, a date which occurs also on the south transept door-jamb; and the works must have been carried on during the time of his successors, Pedro II and Dalmatius (a monk of Cluny) to its completion under Gelmirez.
This cathedral is of singular interest, not only on account of its unusual completeness, and the general unity of style which marks it, but still more because it is both in plan and design a very curiously exact repetition of the church of Saint Sernin at Toulouse. But Saint Sernin is earlier in date by several years, having been commenced by Saint Raymond in 1060, and consecrated by Pope Urban II in 1096; and the cathedral at Santiago can only be regarded, therefore, as to a great extent a copy of Saint-Sernin, the materials being, however, different, since granite was used in its construction in place of the brick and stone with which its prototype was constructed.
The dimensions of the two churches do not differ very much; Santiago has one bay less in its nave, but one bay more in each transept; it has only one aisle, whilst Saint-Sernin has two on each side of the nave; and its two towers are placed north and south of the west front, instead of tot west of it, as they are at Saint-Sernin. The arrangement of the chevet and of the chapels on the east of the transept was the same in both churches. Here they still exist in the chevet, but in the transepts traces of them are only to be found after careful examination.
The proportions of the several parts of the plans of the two churches are also nearly identical; and owing in part to the arrangement of the groining piers of the transepts, in which the aisles are returned around the north and south ends, the transept fronts in both churches have the very unusual arrangement of two doorways side by side – a central single doorway being impossible. The triforium galleries surround the whole church, being carried across the west end and the ends of the transepts, so that a procession might easily ascend from the west end, by the tower staircases, and make the entire circuit of the church.
The exterior of the cathedral at Santiago is almost completely obscured and overlaid by modern additions. The two old western steeples shown on the plan are old only about as high as the side walls of the church, and have been raised to a very considerable height, and finished externally with a lavish displays of pilasters, balustrades, and what note, till they finish in a sort of pepper-box fashion with small cupolas. Between them is a lofty niche over the west front, which contains a statue of the tutelar [St James]. Fortunately the whole of the façade between the steeples was built on in front of, and without destroying, Master Matthew's great work, the western porch.
Master Matthew was first at work here in 1168, and finished the doors in 1188...
[Street describes the chapel underneath the raised west porch, which he believes also to be by Master Matthew.]
the doorway facing the Plaza de Plateros
The old façade is fortunately preserved. It has two doorways in the centre division, and two grand and deeply recessed windows above them... The detail of the work in this front is of great interest, inasmuch as it is clearly by another and an earlier workman than that of the western part of the church. There are three shafts in each jamb of the doors, whereof the outer are of marble, the rest of stone. These marble shafts are carved with extreme delicacy with a series of figures in niches, the niches having round arches, which rest upon carved and twisted columns separating the figures. The work is so characteristic as to deserve illustration. It is executed almost everywhere with that admirable delicacy so conspicuous in early Romanesque sculpture. The other shafts are twisted and carved in very bold fashion.
The jamb of this door retains an inscription deeply cut in large letters, which appears to give the same date, 1116, 5 Ides of July, that I have already quoted from the Historia Compostellana.... The tympana and the wall above for some feet are covered with pieces of sculpture, evidently taken down and refixed where they are now seen. They are arranged, in short... as if the wall were part of a museum. One of the stones in the tympanum of the eastern door has the Crowning with Thorns and the Scourging; and on the other stones above are portions of a Decent in to Hades [Harrowing of Hell] in which asses with wings are shown kneeling to Our Lord. Asses and other beasts are carved elsewhere, and altogether the whole work has a rude barbaric splendour characteristic of its age.
The windows above deserve special notice. Their shafts and archivolts are very richly twisted and carved, and the cusping of the inner arch is of a rare kind. It consists of five complete foils, so that the points of the lowest cusp rest on the capital, and to a certain extent the effect of a horseshoe arch is produced. This might be hastily assumed to be a feature borrowed from the Moors; but the curious fact is that this very rare form of cusping is seen in many, if not most, of the churches of the Auvergnat type, and it must be regarded here, therefore, as another proof of the foreign origin of most of the work at Santiago, rather than of any Moorish influence.
The complete change in the character of the work as one goes through the door is more than usually striking, for you are at once transferred from what is all modern, to what is almost all very old, uniform, and but little disturbed. The interior of the transepts is very impressive; their length is not far from equal to that of the nave, and the view is less interrupted than in it, as the rails between the Coro and the Capilla Mayor are very light, and the stalls are all to the west of the crossing. The whole detail of the design is extremely simple. The piers are alternated throughout... the capitals are all carved, generally with foliage, but sometimes with pairs of birds and beasts. Engaged columns run up from the floor to the vault, and carry transverse ribs or arches below the great waggon-vault. The triforium opens to the nave with a round arch, subdivided with two arches, carried on a detached shaft. .. The height of the interior, from the floor to the centre of the barrel-vault of the nave, is a little over seventy feet. This dimension is, of course, insignificant when compared with the height of many later churches; but it must be borne in mind that there is no clerestory, and that, owing to its absence, there is much less light in the upper part of the church than is usual, and one consequence of this partial gloom is a great apparent increase in the size of every part of the building. The original windows remain throughout the greater part of the church.
The chevet has been a good deal altered; most of the chapels remain, but the columns and arches round the choir have all been destroyed, or, at any rate, so covered over with modern work as to be no longer visible...
It is now necessary to say something about what is to an architect the chief glory of this noble church – its grand western entrance, fitly called the Portico de la Gloria. On the whole, with no experience to warrant my speaking, and with a due sense of the rashness of too general an approval, I cannot avoid pronouncing this effort of Master Matthew's at Santiago to be one of the greatest glories of Christian art.
Its scale is not very grand, but in every other respect it is quite admirable, and there is a freshness and originality about the whole of the detail which cannot be praised too much. If we consider the facts with which we are acquainted, we may understand how it is that it has these great merits. Let us assume that Master Matthew was, as he no doubt was, extremely skilled when the king sent him to Santiago with his special warrant and recommendation. From that time until the happy day came, after twenty years of anxious labour, when he was able to write his inscription on the lintel of the door, it is probably that this same man wrought on slowly but systematically on this great work. During all this time he had but a very moderate opportunity of studying similar works in his own neighbourhood, or of receiving incitement by the competition of others of his craft; and I think the whole work bears about it evidence that this was its history. There is up to a certain point a conformity to common custom and precedent, and yet at the same time a constant freshness and originality about it which seems to me to show that the sculptor was not in the habit of seeing other similar works during its progress. The figures are almost all placed in attitudes evidently selected with a view to giving them life and piquancy. But these attitudes are singularly unconventional; and though they are by no means always successful to an eye educated in the nineteenth century, they have all of them graces and merits which are almost entirely unseen in the productions of nineteenth-century sculptors; whilst again, in strong contrast to what is now the almost invariable rule, there is no doubt that here we have the absolute handiwork of the sculptor, and not a design only, the execution of which has been relegated to a band of unknown and unrewarded assistants!
The bases of the doorways are all very bold, and rest generally on monsters. That under the central shaft has a figure of a man with his arms round the necks of two open-mouthed winged monsters; whilst on the other side is a figure of a person kneeling towards the east, in prayer, and about life-size. The central shaft is of marble, and carved with a tree of Jesse. The detail of this shaft is so delicate and characteristic of the whole work; nothing can be prettier or more graceful than the design, and the execution is admirable.
The capital of the central shaft has the figures of the Holy Trinity, with angels on either side censing; and above is a grand sitting figure of St James, with a scroll in his right hand, and a palmer's staff in the other... The main capital of the central shaft, above the saint's head,. Has on three sides the Temptation of Our Lord, and on its fourth side angels coming and ministering to Him.
The tympanum of this central door has a central seated figure of our Lord, holding up His open hands. Around Him are the four Evangelists, three of them with their emblematic beasts standing up on their hind legs, with their paws in the Evangelists' laps. Beyond them are angels holding the various instruments of the Passion, and above those angels a multitude of small figures worshipping – the hundred and forty-four thousand, many of them naked, ie free from sin. The archivolt is perhaps the most striking feature in the whole work, having sitting figures of the four-and-twenty elders arranged around its circumference, in a manner at once quite original and singularly effective. The skill and fancy shown in the treatment of this crowd of figures is beyond praise, and there is a certain degree of barbaric splendour about the profuse richness of the work which is wonderfully attractive. Traces everywhere remain of the old delicate colouring with which the sculpture was covered, and this just suffices to give a beautiful tone to the whole work.
The side jambs have standing figures on a level with that of St James. On the north jamb are Jeremiah, Daniel, Isaiah, and Moses, and on the opposite side St Paul, and, I suppose, other New Testament saints, though I could not tell which. The side doorways, though there is no sculpture in their tympana, have figures corresponding with the others in their jambs. Under the groining against the north wall is an angel blowing a trumpet, and there are other angels against the springing of the groining ribs holding children in their hands.
The whole scheme is, in fact, a Last Judgment, treated in a very unconventional manner; the point which most invites hostile criticism being the kind of equality which the sculptor has given to the figures of our Lord and St James, both being seated, and both in the central position; and, though the figure of the apostle is below that of his Lord, it is still the most conspicuous of the two.