Romanesque Architecture and its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000-1120: Exploring Frontiers and Defining Identities 9781442689046

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Introduction
1. Frontiers and Pioneers: American Art Historians Discover Medieval Spain
2. Victory Proclaimed: The Architectural Patronage of Sancho el Mayor (1004–1035)
3. Piety in Action: Royal Women and the Advent of Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain
4. Shaping the Christian Presence in Aragon: The Frontier Fortress-Monasteries of King Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064–1094)
5. The Frontier of Eternity: Church Portal Decoration in Romanesque Aragon
Afterword
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

RO MA NES Q UE AR CHI TECTU RE AN D ITS S C ULPT URA L D E C OR ATI ON IN C HR IS TIA N S PA IN , 10 0 0– 1 1 20

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JANICE MANN

Romanesque Architecture and Its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000–1120 Exploring Frontiers and Defining Identities

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn 978-0-8020-9324-0

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Mann, Janice, 1953– Romanesque architecture and its sculptural decoration in Christian Spain, 1000–1120 : exploring frontiers and defining identities / Janice Mann. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8020-9324-0 1. Architecture, Romanesque – Social aspects – Spain. 2. Christian art and symbolism – Social aspects – Spain – Medieval, 500–1500. 3. Christianity and culture – Spain – History – Middle Ages, 600–1500. 4. Spain – Church history. 5. Spain – History – 711–1516. I. Title. na1303.m29 2009

720′.9460902

c2008-906486-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

To my parents

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction

xi xiii

3

1 Frontiers and Pioneers: American Art Historians Discover Medieval Spain 7 2 Victory Proclaimed: The Architectural Patronage of Sancho el Mayor (1004–1035) 46 3 Piety in Action: Royal Women and the Advent of Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain 75 4 Shaping the Christian Presence in Aragon: The Frontier FortressMonasteries of King Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064–1094) 101 5 The Frontier of Eternity: Church Portal Decoration in Romanesque Aragon 132 Afterword

161

Notes 163 Bibliography

213

Index 237

Illustrations follow page 114

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Acknowledgments

I am extremely fortunate in the research and writing of this volume because I met with no major stumbling blocks except those I placed in my own road. The vast majority of people from whom I requested help, from archivists in prestigious universities to the custodians of the church keys in small Aragonese villages, gave it willingly and cheerfully. For this good fortune, I am grateful. My research and travel were aided by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and Bucknell University. I am thankful for this support without which the research for this book could not have been executed. I would like to thank the staffs of Avery Library, Columbia University; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Bertrand Library, Bucknell University; The Frick Fine Arts Library; the Library of the Hispanic Society of America; and the New York Public Library. Everyone with whom I dealt in these libraries was amiable and helpful, even when it came to the most difficult or peculiar questions. In particular, I am grateful to the staffs of the institutional archives at Harvard and Yale Universities and Bryn Mawr College, who allowed me access to unpublished material and photographs. I owe special gratitude to Isabella O’Neill and Candice Hinckley at Bertrand Library. Both were generous with their time and expertise when it came to tracking down and ‘interlibrary loaning’ obscure publications. I am also grateful to Deb Balducci at Bertrand Library who helped with the drawing of the maps and the chart, and Amy Golder-Cooper, Visual Resources Curator, at Bucknell who assisted me with the preparation of the illustrations for this work. Thanks go to my friends Rachel Esner and Rachel Dressler for reading early drafts of this work and to Deane Ellen Clements and Dorothy Baum-

x

Acknowledgments

woll for proofreading near the end of the process. My appreciation also goes to Sabrina Kirby at Bucknell’s writing centre, who patiently read through the manuscript aloud with me when it was near completion. I am grateful for the helpful comments I received over the years from the attendees of the Canadian Conference for Medieval Art Historians at which I frequently presented early versions of the ideas written about here. I also owe my gratitude likewise to the two anonymous readers who reviewed my manuscript for the press. Their thoughtful questions and suggestions strengthened and deepened my work. I would like to thank my friends Selma Margaretten and Lydia Dufour for vital contributions to this volume. I’m grateful for their companionship on trips and hospitality, as well as for their broad expertise and advice on all things Spanish. My deepest gratitude goes to Hilary Hinzmann. No one offered me stauncher support, more meaningful suggestions, or more helpful editorial comments. To a large extent this book took the shape it did thanks to him. I feel most fortunate in having the superb editorial and production assistance of Suzanne Rancourt, Barb Porter, and Miriam Skey at the University of Toronto Press. Without their patience and expertise this book would not have been possible.

Illustrations

1.1. Georgiana Goddard King (Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library) 1.2. Pyrenean Village, from King, The Way of Saint James, 1:149 1.3. A Pilgrim in Santiago, from King, The Way of Saint James, 2:483 1.4. Arthur Kingsley Porter (Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives) 2.1. Iberian peninsula, c. 1035 2.2. San Millán de Cogolla, exterior view 2.3. San Millán de Cogolla, nave looking east 2.4 San Millán de Cogolla, nave looking west 2.5. San Millán de Cogolla, plan (after José Esteban Uranga Galdiano and Francisco Íñiguez Almech 2.6. San Juan de la Peña, lower church 2.7. San Juan de la Peña, lower church, plan (after Uranga Galdiano and Íñiguez Almech) 2.8. San Juan de la Peña, Mozarabic arches 2.9. San Juan de la Peña, lower church, Sancho el Mayor’s extension 2.10. San Michel de Cuxa, interior 2.11. Cathedral, Palencia, crypt of San Antolín 2.12. Cathedral, Palencia, crypt of San Antolín, Visigothic portion 2.13. Santa María del Naranco, crypt 2.14. Oviedo, Cámara Santa, crypt of Santa Leocadia 2.15. San Salvador de Leire, exterior view 2.16. San Salvador de Leire, exterior, east end apses 2.17. San Salvador de Leire, crypt 2.18. San Salvador de Leire, interior, nave looking east

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Illustrations

2.19. San Salvador de Leire, photo of excavation, from Príncipe de Viana, vol. 5, fig. 18. 2.20. Saint-Martin-du-Canigou, nave 2.21. San Pedro, Teverga, nave looking east 2.22. San Pedro, Teverga, capital 2.23. San Salvador de Leire, plan of crypt (after Íñiguez Almech) 2.24. San Salvador de Leire, window 3.1. Map of Spain, c.1065 3.2. Genealogical chart of the kings and queens of the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula 3.3. Doña Sancha Sarcophagus, front face 3.4. San Salvador de Nogal de las Huertas, view of ruins 3.5. San Salvador de Nogal de las Huertas, plaque 3.6. San Salvador de Nogal de las Huertas, rinceau capital 3.7. San Salvador de Nogal de las Huertas, figure capital 3.8. San Martín, Frómista, rinceau capital 3.9. San Martín, Frómista, exterior 3.10. San Martín, Frómista, nave looking east 3.11. León, San Isidoro, Panteón de los Reyes 3.12. Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós 3.13. Book cover (?) from Santa Cruz de la Serós (Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917) 4.1. Castle of Loarre 4.2. Santa María, Castle of Loarre, exterior 4.3. San Pedro, Castle of Loarre, exterior 4.4. San Pedro, Castle of Loarre, interior 4.5. Santa María, Obarra, exterior 4.6. San Pedro, Lárrede, exterior 4.7. San Juan de la Peña, Romanesque apses 4.8. Santa María, Ujué, apses 4.9. Santa María, Iguácel, façade 4.10. San Juan de la Peña, Daniel and Habakkuk capital 4.11. San Pedro, Castle of Loarre, Daniel and Habakkuk, side face Daniel in the Lions’ Den capital 4.12. San Juan de la Peña, capital with rosettes 4.13. Santa María, Ujué, capital with rosettes 4.14. Santa María, Iguácel, capital with rosettes 4.15. Santa María, Iguácel, capital with figure in vines 4.16. Jaca Cathedral, capital with figure in vines 4.17. Santa María, Alquézar, Sacrifice of Abraham capital

Illustrations

4.18. 4.19. 4.20. 4.21. 4.22. 4.23. 4.24. 4.25. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5. 5.6. 5.7. 5.8. 5.9. 5.10.

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Aljafería, Zaragoza, exterior Aljafería, Zaragoza, courtyard San Pedro, Lasieso, exterior Jaca Cathedral, south porch, Sacrifice of Abraham capital Castle of Loarre Castle of Loarre, entrance, relief Castle of Loarre, entrance, capital Church of Santos Emeterio y Celendonio, Samitier, exterior Jaca Cathedral, tympanum San Caprasio, Santa Cruz de la Serós, west portal Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós, west portal Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós, tympanum Chrismon, Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós (tympanum detail with pax artificially enhanced) San Juan de la Peña, Mozarabic portal Santa María, Iguácel, west façade, inscription Church, Navasa, tympanum Church, Binacua, tympanum San Martín, Uncastillo, tympanum (Durliat, La sculpture romane, fig. 228, p. 247)

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RO MA NES Q UE AR CHI TECTU RE AN D ITS S C ULPT URA L D E C OR ATI ON IN C HR IS TIA N S PA IN , 10 0 0– 1 1 20

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Introduction

The frontier is a place where the limits of different things meet. More than just a boundary or a border, it is a site where one thing drifts into another. It is where the wilderness is transformed into civilization, ignorance is overtaken by knowledge, innovation conquers convention, or the present edges towards the future. When the buildings examined in this book came into being, during the period roughly from the year 1000 to just after 1100, the Iberian peninsula was a frontier in just about every sense of the word. A new millennium had safely arrived, at least in many places, depending on the calendar followed. With the collapse of the Cordoban caliphate, Islamic political and military power on the peninsula began its long slow decline towards its final demise in 1492. As if placed on the other side of the balance, the fortunes of the Christian territories in the northern part of the peninsula began to ascend as those of the Muslims subsided. Their increased wealth and territory enabled the Christians to make their power visible through the construction of monumental buildings. The appearance of the churches and castles they built offered something new. Their semicircular arches, complex door and window mouldings, Latin inscriptions, and carved capitals and relief sculpture, looking to both biblical and Roman sources, differentiated these buildings from those of the Muslims and, likewise, from earlier Christian architecture built on the peninsula. With the construction of these edifices, Christian Spain changed from being a culture where building was the result of practical, local needs to one where art and architecture were calculated tools used to serve the ends of the powerful. These distinctive new buildings, later referred to as Romanesque, made visible the Christian rulers’ claim that they held the land by virtue

4 Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

of both military might and superior beliefs. The buildings in effect embodied the spiritual power that supported the Christians’ military force and the righteousness of their hegemonic ambitions. In this way, they not only reflected but also played a role in redefining the emerging cultural identities of those who lived in the frontier kingdoms of Christian Spain at this time of crucial change. The Romanesque churches built in the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula enter the canon of art history just after the turn of the twentieth century, a time of social, political, and artistic transition in many ways parallel to eleventh-century Spain. Uncannily, the monuments seem to have beckoned across time to those for whom notions of cultural identity and an understanding of frontiers were particularly poignant issues. Two Americans, Georgiana Goddard King (1871–1939) and the better-known A. Kingsley Porter (1883–1933), brought the significance of these churches and their decoration to the attention of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Imagining themselves as pioneers, these two Americans understood medieval Christian Spain as a new frontier, rich in monuments just waiting to be discovered. These two explorers were drawn, rather than daunted, by the remote and inaccessible locations of some of these buildings. They blazed a trail to Romanesque Spain and, in addition, they led the avant-garde in the field of art history that was just emerging as a scholarly discipline in their country. The paradigms their scholarship established continue to inform the way Romanesque art and architecture are understood today. The first chapter of this book will set the stage for the rest by examining the way national identity informed the scholarship of King and Porter. While both scholars thought of themselves as pioneers, they were influenced, nevertheless, by a romantic understanding of Spain based on earlier American writers, such as William Prescott, who established the paradigm of a charmingly backward Spain juxtaposed to a progressive America. With romantic notions of ‘discovery’ in mind and an impetus provided by the closing of the western frontier at home, these two scholars explored the rustic villages of northern Spain in search of new art historical territory. Porter, whose scholarship is frequently viewed as more neutral than that of his more overtly nationalistically minded European contemporaries, in reality viewed eleventh-century sculpture through the lens of American identity. He saw the pilgrimage roads leading to St James’s shrine at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain as a kind of melting pot, where intercultural exchange produced the new amalgamated Romanesque style in the same way that immigrants com-

Introduction 5

ing to the United States mixed their Old World habits with New World customs to reinvent themselves as Americans. Inspired by the notions of the frontier and identity found below the academic surface of the scholarship of King and Porter, I then examine the meaning of a number of the earliest and most significant monuments built in the Romanesque style in eleventh-century Christian Spain. In addition to being linked by their similar innovative visual language, these monuments are all the result of a frontier sensibility. Built in the midst of a changing society, shifting boundaries, and political instability, they played a role in defining more clearly the culture that was coming into being. The second chapter of this book explores how the need to establish a strong Christian identity was played out in the buildings constructed and extended thanks to the patronage of Sancho el Mayor (r. 1004–35), the first Christian monarch to challenge the Muslim domination of the Iberian peninsula. By repairing and extending holy sites, this king linked a somewhat unstable Christian present to the firm foundation of an older Christian past, symbolically healing and transcending the damage inflicted by both Islamic and Christian challenges to his rule. By juxtaposing new architectural elements, such as the semicircular arch, with older elements, such as an anchorite’s cave, Sancho’s churches linked the new order of his kingdom with a venerable Christian past. A number of documents from the eleventh century name princesses and queens, such as Doña Mayor, as the patrons of some of the earliest Romanesque churches constructed in Aragon, León, and Castile, including the important San Martín at Frómista. The third chapter examines the churches built by these royal women and the claims modern scholars have made about them. In contrast to their counterparts in other European realms and the Islamic taifa kingdoms, royal women in eleventhcentury Christian Spain held their own land and were as free as their male relatives to use its income. By building churches with their wealth, these royal women established pious reputations by making their virtue visible in stone and mortar. The public display of piety was especially significant at this time in Christian Spain when husbands were frequently absent on campaigns against the Muslims. In her husband’s absence, a wife’s virtue was under particular scrutiny. Likewise, royal women’s prayers and, by extension, their patronage of religious institutions were understood as a means of ensuring that God would favour their realm. The fourth chapter examines how King Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064– 94) and his family carried out an ambitious campaign of building

6 Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

Romanesque churches in the kingdom of Aragon. Along with their obvious liturgical function, these churches served to maintain the cultural and religious identity of Aragonese Christians by reminding them visually that their lives were defined by beliefs distinct from those of their Muslim neighbours. This was especially true at border locations where Sancho Ramírez built imposing castles with highly visible Romanesque churches. For instance, the disposition and decoration of the church of San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre, where the only way into the castle is up a vaulted stairway running under the nave of the church, clearly expresses the belief that God protected the king and his realm from the enemy. The tympanum of Jaca Cathedral and its copies are the focus of the last chapter of this book. With this relief and its copies the kingdom of Aragon crossed the divide from being a culture where the production of pictorial images was rare and uncalculated to one where monumental images were self-consciously deployed in the service of those with power. This chapter shifts the terms of the argument away from the usual scholarly concerns of chronology, the international artistic context, and the artistic and theological sources of the Jaca tympanum. Instead, it examines the influence of the local frontier culture on its creation and the way the sculpture served as a point of negotiation for the identities of its multicultural audience. One step removed from the spiritual but enmeshed with the religious, the large chrismon and lions carved on the tympanum made evident to both his subjects and his enemies the divine aegis under which the king promulgated his power and laws. This relief confronted both believers and non-believers with a clear message of Christian power. While the non-believers might not accept the spiritual meaning expressed by the tympanum, they could not deny its ideological message. At the same time, the carving offered Christians a validation, in a monumental and permanent visual form, of their religious beliefs and their privileged position. For the most part, the scholarly discussion of these buildings has largely continued in terms set by King, Porter, and their contemporaries. This book, I hope, will bring renewed attention to these significant buildings and stimulate new ways of considering their complex meanings and the scholarship that has framed their understanding thus far.

1 Frontiers and Pioneers: American Art Historians Discover Medieval Spain

But of all the advances made by the history of art in the last half century, none was more unexpected than the discovery of the early churches of Spain – a discovery which in its far-reaching and vital consequences is quite as significant as those of Morelli, of Cattaneo or Strzygowski.1 Kingsley Porter’s simile of archaeology as archery might well be carried a step further. Successive arrows strike nearer and nearer the mark; one may strike the bull’s eye, but the wind varies, the rules are altered, and sometimes even the target is changed. In any retrospective of archaeological study one must know something of the targets set up by successive generations in order to appreciate the accuracy of their aim.2

Just at the time when art history in the United States began to emerge as a systematized discipline distinct from archaeology, art criticism, and aesthetics, a number of scholars employed at prestigious east coast American universities left the better travelled roads of classical Greece, Renaissance Italy, and Gothic France to strike off into the virtually uncharted territory of medieval Spain. In the first decades of the twentieth century Georgiana Goddard King (1871–1939) of Bryn Mawr College, Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883–1933), who taught first at Yale and then at Harvard University, his colleague at Harvard, Chandler Post (1881–1959), and Walter Cook (1888–1962) of New York University’s newly inaugurated Fine Arts Department were among those who regularly left their comfortable offices to seek out obscure sites in remote areas of rural Spain. They were followed to Spain only a little later by their students, best-known among them Kenneth Conant (1895–1984) and Walter Muir Whitehill (1905–78).

8 Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

King, Porter, Post, and Cook were part of the vanguard of professionalized art history in the United States. They had been preceded by American scholars, such as Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), who had examined the fine arts as the means to moral edification and cultural refinement, but it was not until after the turn of the century that the systematized study of the history of art began in earnest.3 Erwin Panofsky typifies this phase of American art history as animated by ‘the spirit of discovery and experimentation’ and ‘a spirit of youthful adventurousness.’4 James Ackerman characterizes the art historical scholarship of this time as ‘distinguished by an extraordinary perseverance and enthusiasm in the search for unknown monuments and documents, especially when they were to be found in inaccessible places.’5 Panofsky felt the ebullience of American art history in the 1920s was stimulated by a shift of power from one side of the Atlantic to the other when the United States emerged as a fully fledged world power in the later years of the First World War, able to play a decisive role in European affairs. America’s military, political, and economic clout engendered an increased sense of entitlement to move into intellectual territory understood before the war as the domain of Europeans. Free from the centuries-old national allegiances and prejudices of Europeans, American scholars, at least according to Panofsky, approached the Old World’s cultural heritage with greater impartiality, often moving into areas that their trans-Atlantic counterparts had not bothered to explore. The art of medieval Spain beckoned enticingly to American art historians of the early twentieth century. It was a field barely known to serious scholars and much maligned as unoriginal by amateurs. In the early twentieth century Spain was perceived by the rest of Europe as unprogressive and hopelessly backward, hence, not worthy of intellectual consideration. Spain’s rusticity enhanced its appeal for American art historians like King, Porter, and Cook. Although their scholarship claimed a positivistic objectivity founded on a sound empirical basis, it was to a great extent generated by the romantic and escapist sentiments that coloured the views of many white, Anglo-Saxon, educated east coast Americans recoiling from what they perceived as the increasing coarseness of the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century.6 Spain and its Middle Ages appealed to American art historians because they seemed more authentic and profound than their own time and country. American interest in the architecture and sculpture of medieval Christian Spain was spearheaded by Georgiana Goddard King (fig. 1.1).7 She

Frontiers and Pioneers 9

was a well-educated woman, graduating from Bryn Mawr College with a BA in English in 1896 and staying on to pursue graduate work in political science, philosophy, and English until 1898, when she left for a semester of study at the Collège de France in Paris. King returned to Bryn Mawr in 1906 to teach literature but she soon abandoned this established discipline for art history, and by 1914 she had convinced the college that this nascent discipline merited its own department. In spite of at least two job offers, King would remain at this female bastion of intellectual life until ill health forced her to live with her sister in California in 1935.8 In a 1937 interview given on the occasion of her retirement King disclosed the romantic attitude that motivated her preoccupation with the sculpture and architecture of medieval Spain. She declared herself a ‘real Hispanophile’ and spoke of how the country’s ‘black magic’ was still for her ‘the most exciting thing in the world.’9 With open sentimentality she informed the interviewer, ‘I came there last and it still trails clouds of glory for me, as the last love always does. It has not yet become a part of the general scheme of things as Siena, for instance, has.’10 In other words, the lure of the unbeaten path drew King to Spain along with her understanding of the place as a mysterious land of enchantment. Although she was the pioneer of Spanish medieval architectural studies in the United States, King’s first venture followed a trail blazed by an Englishman. In 1914 she published an annotated edition of the earliest book in English on Spanish medieval architecture, George E. Street’s Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, originally issued in 1865. Archer Huntington, founder and director of The Hispanic Society of America and one of America’s most ardent promoters of Spanish culture at the time, suggested the project to King perhaps as early as 1909.11 Street, a British architect better known for his Gothic Revival buildings and his association with the Oxford Movement than for his writing, intended the book to be a vade mecum for the traveller interested in medieval architecture. In his day Spanish medieval architecture had not yet been studied in a comprehensive and systematic manner by either Spaniard or foreigner. Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain is part architectural history and part travel guide. Street treats Spain’s Romanesque and Gothic churches monographically without much attempt to relate one building to the next until the end of the book, where he offers a sketchy résumé of their development. His attention to architecture is interrupted by discussions of travel arrangements, accommodations, and social commentary. Like other European authors he has a tendency to praise Spain’s

10 Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

Middle Ages while viewing contemporary Spain as less progressive than his own country.12 King’s goal was to update Street and to ‘widen his range a little.’13 She saw her business as editor as ‘helping out’ the author ‘with as little ostentation as may be.’ She fulfilled her task by adding lengthy annotations at the end of each of Street’s chapters. She corrects minor details only, for she felt that disagreement in fundamentals would put her ‘in the wrong place.’14 If modest in its aims by today’s standards, King’s first project was nevertheless an ambitious undertaking in terms of research. She was no armchair art historian. Her annotations were the result of three trips to Spain, following Street’s ‘tracks with an exact piety all the way.’15 From the beginning of her career she lived up to her own dictum that ‘the only way to know anything is to go and look ... nothing else will serve. The opinion of one’s master, the description of one’s companion, the best of photographs, will not yield the secrets that personal study on the spot can solve.’16 Through her work on Street, King came to understand the desire generated by thoughts of the distant monument, the importance of firsthand knowledge of ‘the stones,’ the tenacity required of the travelling scholar and the appeal of combining personal commentary with archaeological observation. Most significant, she came to feel that the Spanish Middle Ages offered an architecture that was ‘not decadent, not moribund nor morbid nor corrupted by the gold of the Indies, strong, virile, spontaneous, the expression of personal independence and manly piety.’17 The process of annotating Street – the repeated reading of his text and her three research trips – provided a kind of apprenticeship for King in which she taught herself her craft. King had no formal training in art history. Bernard Berenson, the eminent connoisseur and King’s friend, supplemented what she had learned from Street.18 From him she learned the importance of developing a connoisseur’s eye, trained to see and compare the essence of works in order to distinguish the qualitative difference between master and apprentice, or between a dominant tradition and the provincial in art.19 With the lessons she had learned from Street and Berenson, King mixed what she had garnered from her more formalized philosophical and literary training to create her own genre of art history. She combined an archaeologist’s concern for fabric and dates with an art historian’s interest in iconography and style. To these she added an aesthete’s attention to beauty and poetry and an anthropologist’s awareness of cultural customs and legend. Bits of travelogue are interspersed among these

Frontiers and Pioneers

11

other concerns. Some of her works, especially The Way of Saint James, Heart of Spain, and the articles written for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, incorporate lengthy personal confessions. All are written in an emotive prose that holds more in common with romantic nineteenthcentury travel writing than with most twentieth-century art history. King’s most ambitious and significant work, The Way of Saint James, is also the most revealing in terms of her attitudes toward Spain, art history, and the Middle Ages. Begun in 1911, The Way examines the medieval monuments lining the road that pilgrims followed from Toulouse to Saint James’s shrine at Santiago de Compostela.20 The work is divided into four books printed in three volumes. ‘Book I: The Pilgrimage,’ establishes the context for the rest of the book through an account of medieval sources discussing the pilgrimage to Santiago, not the least among them the Codex Calixtinus. ‘Book II: The Way,’ which forms the bulk of the text, gives an account of King’s trip with a companion named Jehane along the road from Toulouse across the Somport pass and through northern Spain to Santiago. The results of King’s rigorous art historical investigations are woven together with the more personal account of her own trip. Jehane, although a fictional character, might in part be based on King’s real travel companion, photographer, and collaborator, E.H. (Edith) Lowber, who took some of the photographs used in The Way.21 Their journey provides more than just a framing device for the history and analysis of the architecture and sculpture encountered along the route. King’s observations of her own times serve to link the present with the past, revitalizing what the passage of time made dormant.22 Throughout The Way she weaves together the present with the past, the legendary with the historical, and her personal experiences with her more objective scholarly account to produce a book far out of fashion by today’s scholarly standards but not without its insights. The book, however, is most valuable for what it indicates about its own time rather than for what it says about the art and architecture of medieval Spain. Santiago de Compostela, including the medieval church, the modern town, history, folklore, and the monuments in the surrounding region, is described in ‘Book III: The Bourne.’ A brief tying up of loose ends is provided by ‘Book IV: Homeward,’ which also discusses the cathedral’s Pórtico de la Gloria and its artistic context, a handful of other sites in Galicia, and finally the passage back to France through the historic pass at Roncevaux. King was the first art historian to examine the now widely accepted idea that pilgrimage to Santiago stimulated artistic creation and cultural

12 Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

exchange, although she is seldom given credit for it. Later, after the adoption and deployment of this conceptual framework by Kingsley Porter, Émile Mâle, and Paul Deschamps in their heated quarrel over the national origins of Romanesque sculpture, it became and remains a standard art historical paradigm.23 The ultimate source of inspiration for this approach to medieval creativity was the French philologist Joseph Bédier, who claimed that the free movement of jongleurs and pilgrims along the pilgrimage routes generated and disseminated the chansons de geste.24 Unlike Bédier, who could formulate his ideas from written texts, King had to travel along the route followed by the pilgrims in order to gather her material for The Way. This made for a different kind of understanding of the Middle Ages and their relationship to the present. For King, the road carried one back through time as well as across geography.25 It is both the means to, and the repository of, history. Written in an age before art history was subject to a set of regulatory regimes that prescribed a problem-solving teleology, The Way of Saint James is more descriptive than analytical. Occasionally King offers opinions about dates and sources of style or motifs, but her main aim is to reveal unknown and obscure buildings and make them familiar to the reader through her words. For early twenty-first-century readers King’s prolix descriptions of monuments might seem at best tedious and at worst pointless. Her prose does not yield ‘the facts’ or conclusions in the efficient, orderly way we have come to expect. It demands a reader with both leisure and an active visual imagination. King placed more faith in the mimetic preciseness of words than in photographs. She claimed that ‘Spain is a long way off, and pictures are not always explicit.’26 Not surprisingly then, The Way of Saint James is not lavishly illustrated. As often as not, its few photographs will represent a picturesque scene such as a narrow unpaved street in a mountain village rather than an important monument (fig. 1.2). She was willing to trust photographs to establish context more than to depict the buildings about which she wrote. King’s text never focuses on an art historical monument in isolation. The process of getting to the site; the setting, not simply the geography of the site, but the surrounding people, aromas, and sounds; and the present social and historical contexts of the building are all parts of the discussion. For instance, in her treatment of the Romanesque church of Santa María in Santa Cruz de la Serós, King describes ‘the purple starlight’ of the early morning, the flowers by the riverside, loggers at their work, and the sound of water rushing through an irrigation system and into the fields.27 Against this backdrop of the present, King describes the

Frontiers and Pioneers 13

medieval convent church in prolonged detail, concluding that its tympanum, copied from that of Jaca, is ‘Benedictine, twelfth century, regional.’28 Next, she gives an account of the foundation of the convent and its subsequent history; and finally, she returns to the present, describing the village, its few art treasures, and her departure. By situating her comments about the medieval church and its history in the anecdotal immediacy of the present, King erases the distance between the Middle Ages and her own day. Santa María and the other medieval churches she treats live in the here and now rather than in the cool detachment of the past. For King nowhere are the Middle Ages more alive in the present than at Santiago de Compostela. It is ‘the bourne, the end of heart’s desire ... like places to which you come in a dream and remember that you have known them long ago.’29 She overlays the modern with the medieval by focusing on the legacy of the Middle Ages in the present, the bells ringing, candle-lit churches, religious rituals, relics, legends, and the vestments of the clergy. She tends to ignore the middle class and focuses instead on the upper and the lower reaches of society: the archbishop surrounded by cardinals, or royalty accompanied by soldiers and canons in the order of Santiago, or peasants and beggars ‘tricked out in calico capes sewn over with scallop shells, and staffs on which the gourd is reduced to a symbolic knob.’30 Cars, trains, cameras, and other clear signifiers of modernity, while mentioned elsewhere in her account, all but disappear from her discussion of Santiago. King intersperses her text with the observations made by pilgrims from other eras that harmonize with her own, creating an intertextuality that reinforces the notion of the timelessness of Santiago and the universality of pilgrimage experience.31 King understood the pilgrimage to Santiago as transcendental. She wrote that it predated Christianity and was as old as the human race.32 This paralleled her understanding of Spain itself as timeless.33 The road’s magnetic draw, she contended, was rooted in the very forces of nature that summoned the pilgrim. ‘Along that way the winds impel, the waters guide, earth draws the feet. The very sky allures and insists.’34 The pilgrimage cannot really be rationally comprehended but only accounted for by mystics who ‘can tell how journeys to such shrines are made: The way is opened before you, and closed behind you. Simple, that: believe it or not, it happens. So with Compostella [sic].’35 The poetry of King’s words seems calculated to mobilize the imagination rather than the intellect of the reader and thereby to communicate a kind of knowledge not wholly dependent on fact.

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King does not expunge deeply felt religious sentiments from her text. For her, as for Ruskin, the aesthetic and the spiritual were joined. In the foreword to The Way of Saint James she pays gratitude first to Saint James himself and last to ‘the glory of religion and of Spain.’36 Throughout the book she makes reference to prayer, saints, and the liturgy without irony or cynicism. Both religious and romantic by nature and not yet bound by the concept of ‘scientifically objective’ art history that would come to dominate the field after 1930, King believed that the way art, architecture, or ritual expressed the sacred and inspired the sublime was of the utmost importance. She understood that the authority of medieval architecture lay in its power to evoke religious exaltation across the centuries. This was for King as significant a part of art historical knowledge as construction campaigns, iconographic identification, or a monument’s historical context. For instance, in describing the ‘sacred darkness, and the lights and the devotion’ in the crypt at Santiago she cites at length a highly evocative passage written by Alexandre de Laborde early in the nineteenth century: Dans les échoppes ... des objets d’obscure piété chrétienne: chapelets par milliers, croix, lampes religieuse, images ... Des chants, des cris, des lamentations discordantes, lugubres à entendre, s’en échappent avec des senterus d’encens ... Sous les hautes colonnes, dans les galeries ténébreuses, mille petites flammes se suivent ou se croisent. Des hommes prient à haute voix, pleurent à sanglots, courant d’une chapelle à autre.37

Like King, Laborde stresses the profound emotion felt and expressed by worshippers. For her, Spain with its fervent Roman Catholicism and centuries-old rituals, where ‘you listen to the magical bird’s song, and the sound of it is never out of your ears again,’ provided an opportunity for spiritual exaltation in a way that a modernized, mechanized America never could.38 King found cause for sublime elation in the prosaic as well as the profound. She frequently stops the flow of her scholarly account to relate a personal encounter with ‘the picturesque.’ For example, she diverges from a description of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela to say how she saw a peasant in pilgrim’s dress, with an ecstatic face, who looked a little like S. Francis. His head was the same shape, and his brown frock helped the illusion. For a long time I watched him praying, and when he got up and went out I ran after and

Frontiers and Pioneers 15 asked leave to photograph, readily yielded: then he asked an alms. Why not? Give and take is fair.39

She includes a photograph of the pilgrim as if to add weight to her testimony or in hopes of allowing the reader an actual glimpse of local colour, albeit two-dimensional and black and white (fig. 1.3). Although her evocative prose imbues these vignettes of Spanish daily life with a sense of dignity, they are generated by King’s understanding of Spain as ‘still unspoiled and romantic.’40 Nevertheless, they are more than just a romanticized anthropology; they serve to foreground the medieval architecture King discusses by erasing the void between past and present, and creating a putative continuity between now and then. Writing at a time before intellectual discourses such as deconstruction or political shifts such as the collapse of the British Empire forced authors to question the objectivity of Eurocentric values, King believed in the universality of qualities such as ‘the aesthetic’ or ‘the spiritual.’ At the same time, much of her commentary is consciously grounded in the subjective. In The Way of Saint James King’s personality and gender frequently break through the surface of her scholarly text. It should come as no surprise, considering that she lived in a female scholarly community and that her closest emotional ties were with her two sisters and her female friends like Edith Lowber, that King’s account of the pilgrimage puts an emphasis on women but without the self-conscious feminism evident in scholars of a later period. Her text expresses as much interest in Spanish women in both the present and the past as it does in men. The accomplishments of medieval Spanish queens, such as Doña Mayor of Navarre, find as revered a place in King’s account as do those of their husbands. King’s eye is equally engaged by contemporary Spanish women and she often notes them, their concerns, and habits; for instance, she comments: Every town has these little churches, that stay open after dark for a few veiled, whispering women. They have a special feeling, like the scent of dried leaves, like the taste of night air, like the hushed Friday evening of the return from Calvary in Ribalta’s painting. To Spanish women they are very comfortable. The subdued glow of light, the warm smell, the rustling human figures, offer something of the attraction of the hearth, without the ennui of home. The great point is that in church one is never bored; that prayers lull, like the nursery rocking-chair ... It will be hard to break the

16 Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain women of the habit, at winter nightfall, while men are in the cafés, of going to church.41

Drawing from travel literature, King describes her experience as a woman researcher in the field without reserve. To this extent she exposes much of the process by which she constructs her narrative. She makes clear how gender can complicate research when she relates a story of how a young male guide maligned her moral character for coming alone with him on a trip on horseback to remote sites around Villafranca.42 In an account of her stay in Pamplona she points out to the reader how socially prescribed gender roles make life unpleasant for the female researcher, especially on long winter evenings: For a woman alone, they are hard. She has been out seeing things while the daylight lasted and is honestly tired ... She cannot walk up and down the pavement, in the light of shop windows, as men are doing. She goes back to her room at the hotel. There she cannot go to bed to keep warm, for dinner is still three hours away; she makes her tea, then fills a rubber hot-waterbottle, and wrapping it and herself in a rug lies down under a faint electric bulb to read and shiver and not dare to doze.43

Although she makes plain the disadvantages for women in a world where social customs restrict the behaviour of women, King does not see herself as a victim of such circumstances. She does not see herself as marginalized by her gender. To the contrary, she tends to present herself as more intrepid than and morally superior to men. For instance, she ridicules the English travel writer Richard Ford for a slack pace of travel and for his snobbery, while commending her own efficiency and resolve.44 A former student reported that King frequently told her all-female classes, ‘I have done everything known to man.’45 She clearly believed that she was entitled to occupy the public sphere of erudition so often associated with the masculine and to extend her research into any uncharted area of the discipline. The extent to which some of her students were made uncomfortable by King’s bold character and challenge to women’s traditional social roles lurks beneath the humorous mockery of the following poem, which circulated among the students at Bryn Mawr: Hark the herald angels sing, Here’s to Georgiana Goddard King. Who is this who knows each thing

Frontiers and Pioneers 17 Yet she wears no wedding ring? Peace on earth and mercy mild Has she ever had a child?46

Nevertheless, The Way of Saint James must have provided a sense of legitimacy for women readers who were more adventurous, or wished to be, for it presents an unglamorized picture of a woman successfully pursuing her desire to perform a challenging task. The book was written at a time when social roles for women in America were shifting not just because of improvements in women’s education but because of the increased career possibilities opened by the First World War and the success of the suffrage movement. The amalgam of the personal with the scholarly and the past with the present confused at least one reader of The Way of Saint James. An anonymous reviewer in The London Times Literary Supplement opined that King had been unable to ‘make up her mind whether to write a series of rather romantic travel sketches or a serious work of research, and she confused the two.’47 Rather than stemming from indecision or conflict, King’s dialogistic method simply exposes the private experiences in which her scholarly observations were formulated. For an author writing before postmodern critical theory, King shows a remarkable awareness of the fictional contingencies of scholarship and the importance of personal positioning. In the foreword of The Way she unreservedly acknowledges that she has made ‘one straight story out of three years’ wanderings, and places visited and revisited.’48 In chapter 1, entitled ‘Intentions,’ King writes that she followed the Pilgrim Way at first in order ‘to discover and record’ the impact of foreign sources, especially French, on Spanish medieval architecture.49 But her purpose shifted in the process of investigation and grew ‘long since from a mere pedantic exercise in architecture, to a very pilgrimage.’50 In other words, a rational academic task evolved into a spiritual journey that coloured what she saw. She may have sought facts but what she experienced was in part transcendental. Sadly, it was the personal grounding of King’s work that caused it to lose credibility with the next generation of art historians whose art historical methods were more regimented. In her later books, such as Pre-Romanesque Churches of Spain, researched between 1912 and 1915 and published in 1924, and Mudéjar, published in 1927, King shifts to a more putatively objective method. Both books are chiefly concerned with informing the reader of littleknown buildings and their related historical contexts. Although she has

18 Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

virtually eliminated personal confessions from these books, their evocative prose and the sense of immediacy it creates are reminiscent of The Way of Saint James. King may have changed her approach in response to the demands of a rapidly professionalizing field thirsty for new data communicated in a straightforward way, but her romantic view of Spain and her evocative prose remain. King stated publicly that Pre-Romanesque Churches was her best book but privately she confessed that Heart of Spain – a series of poignant essays on Spanish towns and monuments – was the work about which she felt most deeply.51 Hoping to provide an opportunity for understanding rather than information, Heart of Spain, like The Way of Saint James, is interdisciplinary, poetic, and written in a personal voice.52 Although she finished it in 1926 King could not find a publisher for the book, and it did not appear until after her death in 1939. She revealed her disappointment in a letter to her friend, the avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, saying, ‘I am not competent to have an opinion about publishing, having never succeeded in selling the one thing I really cared for to any publisher – Edith’s and my Heart of Spain.’53 Taste was already changing to a more methodical art history that would eventually erase King’s works from its canon of scholarship. King explored the dual frontiers of art history in the United States and the field of Spanish medieval art. Her love of opening up new territory persisted to the end of King’s career. Her only doctoral student, Delphine Fitz Darby, described her when she was in her sixties and impaired by a stroke, ‘yet hoping for one last trip – this time to Portugal, then a nation less attractive to travelers than was neighboring Spain. But G.G. loved to pioneer.’54 King’s place at the forefront of her discipline and her self-image as a trailblazer led her to intellectual territory that had not been previously explored. Geography, discovery, and art history sometimes elided in King’s mind as is evident in the following words she wrote to Gertrude Stein: I saw they have excavated [some] of the palace of the Western Caliphs at Cordova – it was immensely picturesque & vined & the scraps of stone & pottery had beauty absolute besides the exciting implications: it was more wonderful as landscape than Tiryns or Knossos or Mycenae or I suppose I felt it more.55

Her romantic nature drew her to the obscure and the mystical. She found both in the land and the Romanesque art and architecture of Spain.

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While Georgiana Goddard King has been all but forgotten in the field of art history, the life and work of Arthur Kingsley Porter have become the stuff of legend (fig. 1.4). Even for art historians outside of the field of medieval art his name lives on to distinguish excellence in the College Art Association’s annual book award and the endowed chair named for him at Harvard University. As Linda Seidel has aptly pointed out, Porter’s mysterious disappearance during a storm from his isolated cottage on the island of Inish Bofin off the coast of Donegal in 1933, when he was at the height of his career, contributed to the mythification of his life and work.56 Porter was such a well-known figure at the time of his disappearance that rumours of his having been sighted alive and well in different places circulated for many years thereafter. Unlike King, who was a Hispanophile interested in every aspect of Spanish cultural production throughout her life, Porter devoted only a portion of his scholarly career to Spanish Romanesque art beginning around 1920 and trailing off after his first trip to Ireland in 1928. Nevertheless, it was he who made Spanish Romanesque art and architecture seem significant, worthy of wide-spread study and intense intellectual scrutiny to art historical circles in the United States and in Europe. Born in 1883 into an old Connecticut family in Stamford, Porter lived in a world of economic privilege.57 When his banker father, Timothy, died in 1901, Porter’s freshman year at Yale, he inherited the financial resources needed to underwrite the lengthy research trips on which his scholarship depended. In 1912 after marrying Lucy Bryant Wallace, whose family was even wealthier than the Porters but somewhat lacking in social pedigree, he became even more financially secure.58 On graduating from Yale in 1904, Porter seemed destined to become a junior partner in the law firm of his brother Louis. But his life was derailed from its expected course by a transcendental experience inspired by an aesthetic encounter with the medieval on foreign soil. Unlike Georgiana Goddard King, who confessed her intense personal responses in her work, Porter never publicly disclosed the epiphany that changed his life. It was only revealed after his death in a memorial tribute by his devoted wife, Lucy, who wrote, ‘One day in front of the Cathedral of Coutances there suddenly “shined a light round him” and it was as if he were in trance. When he awoke he knew he could never be a lawyer.’59 In the fall of 1904 Porter entered the Columbia School of Architecture instead of his brother’s law firm. During the two years he spent there he began research for his first book, Medieval Architecture: Its Origins and Development, published in 1909.60 Except for what he might have learned

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in the one undergraduate class at Yale on the history of architecture and during his architectural training at Columbia, Porter had no formal preparation for the book.61 He was essentially a self-taught amateur. Nevertheless, Medieval Architecture was the first scholarly history of medieval architecture written by an American and it launched Porter’s career both at home and in Europe.62 Right from the start, Porter sought to do what he perceived no one before him had done. In Medieval Architecture Porter sets up a teleology of formative styles –‘a wonderful chain of evolution’– that begins in antiquity and reaches its culmination in the French Gothic cathedral.63 His main focus is this supposed orderly development of architectural forms. To a lesser extent he examines the impact of social and economic factors on architecture and the aesthetic quality of the monuments. Unlike King, Porter’s analysis is detached and impersonal. Even when he rhapsodizes about the evocative quality of Gothic architecture he cloaks his own taste and reactions in the illusion of universality. For instance, he writes: But the Gothic cathedral alone possesses the power to lift the mind entirely from the cares and thoughts of the world, de materialibus ad immaterialia transferendo, the power to call forth within the soul a more than mortal joy, until for the moment the material world is forgotten, and the mind is carried captive to that strange shore of the universe which is more of the mould of Heaven than of Earth.64

The interest in evolution of form and the establishment of chronologies evident in Medieval Architecture would obsess Porter for the rest of his career. The impersonal, seemingly detached quality of this initial book would persist throughout his art historical scholarship with little exception, lending it the appearance of objectivity and rationality. The architecture of Spain is not mentioned in Medieval Architecture. In this work Porter stuck mainly to the better-known territory of Gothic France. But in the course of its research, at least according to his wife, Lucy, he discovered ‘how important the churches of Lombardy were, and how unknown.’65 In his next two projects, The Construction of Lombard and Gothic Vaults (1911) and Lombard Architecture (1915–17), Porter struck out into this less familiar territory, which by a circuitous route would eventually lead him to the art of Romanesque Spain.66 Porter initially turned to Lombardy searching for the earliest examples of the rib vault in an attempt to chart its ‘logical evolution’ from Roman architecture to French Gothic.67 But his interest grew and he wrote the first synthetic

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study of the architecture of this region. In Lombard Architecture, as he would later do for Spanish Romanesque, he introduced unknown monuments and established a chronology based on documentary evidence and comparative masonry analysis, which allowed him to track the development of style. During the years he was studying Lombard architecture, Porter began to grow curious about Spanish medieval art. It was Georgiana Goddard King who first piqued his interest. In 1914 Porter heard King deliver a paper at Haverford College on the impact of pilgrimage on the formation of Spanish sculpture. Although he never acknowledged that he was influenced by this paper, he mentions in an incidental comment in ‘The Development of Sculpture in Lombardy in the Twelfth Century,’ published in 1915, that photographs recently shown to him by King led him to believe that Benedeto, the sculptor of the ciborium at San Ambrogio in Milan, may have derived his inspiration in part from Spain.68 If King sparked Porter’s interest in Spanish art, it was Émile Mâle’s hostile review of Lombard Architecture that fanned the flames into a raging blaze by ensnaring him in a scholarly argument in which Spanish Romanesque sculpture would eventually play a significant role.69 In his review, written in 1918, Mâle denounced as ludicrous Porter’s early dating of Italian Romanesque monuments, his assertions that monumental sculpture was reborn in Modena with the work of Guglielmo, and his suggestion that sculpture from the Emilia-Romagna region exerted some influence on artistic developments in France.70 For Mâle, it was self-evident that all significant artistic developments began in France and thus Lombard sculpture could never be more than ‘un miroir, qui déforme un peu, les divers aspects de la sculpture française.’71 His harsh criticism must have wounded Porter deeply because the American had modelled the portion of Lombard Architecture devoted to iconography on Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Majus in admiration of Mâle’s use of the work to structure his L’art religieux du XIIe siècle en France. Porter replied to Mâle’s critical review within months. In the ‘Rise of Romanesque Sculpture’ he challenged the French author’s Francocentric views and insisted that there were a number of local artistic schools throughout medieval France and Italy that were all interrelated. Possibly remembering King’s 1914 lecture, Porter saw artistic exchange between these schools as facilitated by the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, which he construed as ‘a sort of melting-pot in which artists from all over Europe met and exchanged their ideas.’72 He suggested that Lombard sculptors made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, passing

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through Languedoc and exchanging trade secrets with the carvers there, before moving on to Spain. If Lombard artists learned from France, they taught the French something in return. With this first skirmish intellectual battle lines were drawn between the two scholars. For Mâle, France would always be the inspiration but never the beneficiary of artistic innovation. The pilgrimage roads would serve as a conduit carrying fully formed French art to other regions. Porter, on the contrary, would argue for an artistic internationalism characterized by many centres of original creation and frequent artistic exchange.73 They remained deadlocked in their opposition until 1923, when Mâle left France to become the director of the French Academy in Rome. His younger colleague Paul Deschamps continued the debate over the chronology of various innovative artistic forms along the lines already set down by Mâle.74 In spite of Mâle’s derogatory remarks, Lombard Architecture won the prestigious Grande Médaille de Vermeil presented by the Société Française d’Archéologie in 1918.75 This recognition in France and America did not ease Porter’s bitterness toward Mâle. Although he never admitted it directly, the desire to find new ammunition to use against the Frenchman’s nationalistically based arguments probably played a substantial role in motivating Porter’s first trip to Spain in 1920. In a letter to Bernard Berenson in January of that year, while he was planning his Spanish trip, Porter confessed: I am delighted with some of the things that have turned up from the Burgundian photographs we made last summer. There is more than one point that will give Mâle something to think over. There are so many things I want to find out about that the excitement of the chase perhaps lends an interest not purely aesthetic.76

Porter had already accepted an offer to teach at Harvard when he went to Spain in the summer of 1920.77 He was in the midst of researching his ten-volume Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, subsequently published in 1923. He invited both Bernard Berenson and Georgiana Goddard King to join him and his wife Lucy on this excursion. His letter of invitation to Berenson clearly reveals that Porter perceives Spain as an art historical wilderness, just waiting to be claimed: It would be amusing to follow the route of the Lombard masters, as nearly as convenient, and see what we can see along the road [to Santiago de Com-

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postela] ... There are a quantity of glorious things all through the region which I am on fire to see. Possibly you might even be tempted to recross the frontier into Spain. You have recently skimmed the cream, but that country is so little known it might not be an entire waste of time to browse around. I am hopeful that Puig y Cadafalch of Barcelona may know of some interesting and unknown things.78

Porter’s wish to know the ‘unknown’ suggests, paradoxically, that knowledge of Spanish monuments on the part of Spanish scholars, such as José Puig y Cadafalch, did not really count. Apparently, King’s publications had done little to map this virgin territory in Porter’s mind either. For her part, King seems to have seen Porter as something of a neophyte. As Berenson had, she declined his offer to travel in Spain. She explained why to Archer Huntington: ‘Kingsley Porter has invited me to motor with him and his wife for awhile in Spain – but I guess I won’t. I want to work, not to instruct. He is very nice but I am too busy.’79 Unlike King, who travelled by public train, bus, horse-drawn diligence, or foot, Porter cruised through Spain in a chauffeur-driven motor car. His elite means of travel, cocooning him in his own private space with Lucy, his personal encounters mediated by his servants, allowed him a distance from twentieth-century Spain that softened any challenges to his preconceived idealization.80 His ample touring car facilitated Porter’s ability to travel in relative ease to many monuments and to carry the large format camera and equipment required to create the vast quantities of photographs upon which his scholarship depended but perhaps not in the ways proposed by Wilibald Sauerländer. Sauerländer suggests that the car allowed Porter access to monuments for which there were not commercial photographs available and more significantly, it shaped his view of Romanesque sculpture by permitting him to move quickly from site to site, annihilating the distance between monuments, and ignoring the boundaries between regions.81 Automobile travel was not as brisk as Sauerländer supposes. Porter’s correspondence indicates that it took three months for him and Lucy to tour northern Spain in the summer of 1920. Although his car may have made travel somewhat more convenient, he too had to resort to hiking or horseback when no roads were available to remote sites such as San Juan de la Peña.82 The car may have allowed Porter to procure the written evidence, first-hand experience, and photographs needed to support his thesis of the pilgrimage roads as an extraordinary site of artistic creation but this notion was already present in Porter’s mind by 1914, well before

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his actual trip along the route to Santiago in 1920. The concept came before the car not the other way around as Sauerländer suggested. After his first research trip to Spain was over, Porter wrote to Berenson with enthusiasm: The whole thing was an exciting experience, and I feel it has singularly widened for me the Romanesque horizon. I am now at the stage where I begin to realize all the things we didn’t see, and all the books we didn’t read, so that a return in the near future, with I trust less hurry seems inevitable.83

Porter did indeed return to Spain and his visits resulted in seven articles devoted to Spanish medieval art, including his polemical ‘Spain or Toulouse? And Other Questions’ (1924); several chapters of Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (1923); and Spanish Romanesque Sculpture (1928), which he wrote in response to Bernard Berenson’s urgings.84 Porter perceived Spain as a place left behind by the modern developments that he believed were destroying America. He was drawn to Spain for professional reasons, but also by his romantic image of Spain, similar to King’s, as timeless and quaint, albeit on the verge of corruption by modernity. This is made abundantly clear in Porter’s 1924 description of his visit to the area around Jaca in Aragon: Jaca turned out to be one of the paradises on earth, as unspoiled as a beneficent God and inspired Middle Ages left it ... I fear we saw Jaca about its end. A railway is in construction across the port of Aspe and they are building a great summer hotel and an automobile road to San Juan de la Peña is under construction and other things equally fatal. San Juan itself is in the throes of a restoration which will reduce it to the condition of the alleged medieval monuments of France and Italy.85

Within this Edenic land Porter fashioned a romanticized role for himself that was as much knight in shining armour, pilgrim, and pioneer as it was scholar. For instance, in his foreword to Mildred Stapely Byne’s The Sculptured Capital in Spain, 1926, he confesses that what has spurred the writing of his text ‘is the desire to point a moral.’86 His quest is to rescue the ‘mistreated’ art of Spain from the abject position assigned to it by ignorant and prejudicial scholarship.87 With a romantic self-righteousness and an almost religious zeal he seeks to right the wrong through impassioned rhetoric like the following: It turned out that this so-called backward and uncreative race (Spaniards),

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the artistic dregs of Europe, always incapable of originating and content to lick the platters of more gifted neighbours, had in reality preceded and excelled the rest of the Occident during half of the Middle Ages; that it had been producing architecture of high technical perfection at a time when Italy and France and England and Germany were sunk in barbarism.88

The same crusading enthusiasm and self-righteous tone appear in all of Porter’s works on the pilgrimage roads or Spain written throughout the 1920s. In ‘Pilgrimage Sculpture,’ he defends Spanish art from nationalistically biased French scholars, claiming, ‘If the author was French, he has found at Toulouse originality, power, inventiveness; in Spain thoughtless copying of French motives [sic].’89 In ‘Spain or Toulouse? And Other Questions,’ a lengthy review of Mâle’s L’art religieux du XIIe siècle en France, Porter takes revenge on the French scholar while presenting himself as the noble defender of the innate creativity of Spanish medieval art. The American challenges Mâle’s conviction that Toulouse was the generating centre of Romanesque sculpture, contending that, ‘where he has written Toulouse we should often rather read Spain or Burgundy.’90 In ‘The Tomb of Doña Sancha and the Romanesque Art of Aragon’ and ‘Iguácel and More Romanesque Art of Aragon,’ Porter calls attention to the significance of this previously ‘unrecognized school of Romanesque art,’ which in his opinion flourished before that in Toulouse.91 In these articles he discovers new territory and defends its significance in the face of French detractors.92 In ‘Leonesque Romanesque and Southern France,’ a review of Manuel Gómez-Moreno’s Catálogo monumental de España: Provincia de León, Porter asserts with confidence, ‘On the whole, art seems to have flowed from Spain into Roussillon as steadily and overwhelmingly as it did from Spain into Toulouse.’93 Porter’s longer works, Architecture and Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (only portions of which were devoted to Spanish art) and Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, promote the same early chronologies for Spanish Romanesque sculpture. In these books as in his articles, Porter used a conceptual strategy that depended on written documents, detailed comparative visual analyses made on site, and the evidence of abundant photographs to promote his belief in the precocity of Spanish Romanesque and likewise to refute the claims of French archaeologists who held that Romanesque art originated in southern France.94 Unlike King, he is little concerned with effect, meaning, or historical context. Dating, classifying, and ordering Spanish Romanesque art in order to establish a chronology that gives it a place equal to that of France are his main goals. Neither book swayed French archaeologists, such as Aubert or Des-

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champs, who remained wedded to the belief that Toulouse provided the origin for the alleged revival of monumental sculpture which occurred in the eleventh century. Even in the magnanimous context of an obituary for Porter, Aubert cannot resist the urge to criticize his views on the chronology of Romanesque sculpture. He faults Porter for not accepting that artistic style evolves in an orderly, progressive fashion towards naturalism and for reading documents without precision. Just as Porter had accused Mâle of having been blinded by nationalistic bias, Aubert locates the source of Porter’s scholarly weakness in his nationality, saying: Fils d’une race jeune, où la science de l’archéologie était encore en formation, il n’a pas nos certitude; il ne pas surtout notre besoin de logique, de clarté, notre esprit de déduction, qui, partant d’un point précis, établit des cadres bien déterminé, topographiques et chronologique, suivant un odre rigoureux, où toute droit entrer et se classer méthodiquement.95

In his quest to present an objective taxonomy in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads and Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, Porter pushes the personal and the ideological deep beneath a thick veneer of data. Photographic evidence was often used to back his claims. Unlike King, Porter believed in the absolute objectivity of the camera lens.96 He relied heavily on the assumed veracity of photographs to provide visual backup to his detailed written visual analyses, and as unassailable evidence of the existence of the hitherto unpublished monuments he had ‘discovered,’ such as Nuestra Señora at Iguácel. Both Lucy and Kingsley Porter were accomplished photographers.97 William Henry Goodyear (1846–1923), curator at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences from 1890 to 1923 and one of Porter’s early mentors, wrote to him when he was in Italy doing research for The Construction of Lombard and Gothic Vaults in 1909, advising him to make an accurate photographic record of the monuments he visited.98 Photographs, he tells the young scholar, will help him remember what he has seen and verify his observations. Goodyear had made a career on the basis of mounting exhibitions of enlarged photographs of ancient and medieval buildings, the earliest of which was in 1896.99 Unlike Porter’s first book, Medieval Architecture (1909), in which most of the photographs and illustrations were purchased, those in The Construction of Lombard and Gothic Vaults were made by Porter to specifically illustrate and provide visual evidence for his text. After his interests broadened to include Romanesque sculp-

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ture around 1915, Porter used photographs for the close reading of sculptural details and subsequently the assignment of a carving’s authorship to a sculptor, a method he adopted from connoisseurs of Renaissance painting, such as his friend Bernard Berenson.100 Lombard Architecture with almost 1000 illustrations and Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads with its 1527 photos provide comprehensive photographic archives of the monuments under study that went well beyond the number it would have taken to illustrate his commentary.101 This sheer mass of visual data carried with it the assurance of thoroughness, competency, and objectivity. Porter could feel confident that he had done more than anyone else to present published images of the Romanesque churches of France, Italy, and Spain. Porter’s epistemology of scholarly ‘truth’ was more complex than he lets on in his art historical texts. Truth for him is not absolute, but contingent, making scholarship to some extent fictive. Unlike King, who readily admits this in her scholarly discourse, Porter only reveals it in his plays, letters, or forewords. For instance in the preface to his play, The Seven Who Slept, based on the legend of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, he confessed: Scholarship, which seems so cumbersome, so bound hand and foot to fact, is in reality based on illusion. The student one day conceives intuitively a thesis. He then sets out to collect facts to support his point of view. If he be of altogether exceptional integrity, he may alter his preconceived opinion slightly – never very much – to conform with the result of his researches; usually, however, his original idea remains inviolate.102

In 1925 Porter expressed similar sentiments, but without the cynicism, in the advice he proffered to a group of students at Trenton High School, saying, ‘We often forget that Truth has twin children, Fact and Ideal. For Fact is clamorous, while Ideal is strangely silent, with the quiet stars in her look. In the noisy instance of her sister, do not forget her.’103 Only a year later he wrote to Berenson expressing a more jaundiced view: The insuperable difficulty with artistic scholarship I suspect is intellectual dishonesty – I don’t mean willful, but the more dangerous subconscious kind which makes it almost impossible, even for the few who try, to look at things without bias, whether derived from herd instinct, reaction, self-interest or what not. I don’t suppose unemotional thinking along our lines is attainable and I am convinced that most people are warped by some com-

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Although he seems to believe in the possibility of truth, some mitigating factor – misguided intuition, lack of attention to idealism, or psychological complexes – always makes it unattainable. In his foreword to Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, Porter more openly recognizes his belief in the conditional nature of scholarship: Archaeology is an ephemeral product of an ephemeral age. It runs the same race with Truth that a parallel line runs with its fellow; it constantly tends to approach, but in this world coincidence will never be realized ... Classic works do not exist in this field. Its fascination, like that of the flame, lies largely in the very fact that it is changeful and transitory. Successive arrows strike about the bull’s eye; one may occasionally even reach it; with skill and practice we shoot nearer and nearer the mark; but who shall claim that his aim is infallible?105

The confident empiricism of the following chapters, nevertheless, seems to negate the belief expressed in the foreword. Although John Beckwith has interpreted the passage above as Porter’s epitaph for his own scholarship, it is equally possible that it was a veiled invitation to his French rivals to abandon their orthodox position in favour of his revisionist chronology based on the new material he discovered in Spain.106 That Porter was still deeply preoccupied with winning the chronological war with the French is made clear in a letter to Berenson in which Porter describes his new discoveries in Aragon but insists that the connoisseur keep them secret from the French.107 French scholars were unwilling to accept Porter’s invitation to revise their views. According to Stephen Nichols, French medievalists then considered it their patriotic duty to demonstrate the origin of their national identity in both language and art.108 They were compelled by the desire to fashion a glorious medieval past without rival.109 In the atmosphere of exaggerated patriotism after the First World War, their predisposition to see the origins of Romanesque sculpture in France went unchallenged at home. The extent to which their investment in French primacy was a personal one is revealed in a comment made by the eminent French archaeologist Camille Enlart to Mildred Byne, a friend of Porter’s and an amateur art historian. She wrote to Porter that when she told the Frenchman that she accepted the early dates being assigned to the Asturian

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churches in Oviedo, he sighed, ‘Eh bien! Si vous avez raison toute ma vie d’archéologue ne compte pour rien.’110 Unlike the French, Porter had no national medieval past to reclaim in honour of his country. His theories about the rise of Romanesque sculpture in southwestern France and northern Spain professed an international spirit that denied the existence of boundaries. In 1923, he suggested: The art on two sides of the frontier (between France and Spain) is precisely the same. One style stretched from Santiago along the pilgrimage road to Toulouse and Moissac and Conques. This art is neither French nor Spanish. It is the art of pilgrimage.111

In Porter’s conception, the pilgrimage to Compostela functioned as a crucible in which a new artistic style was created through the amalgamation of different visual characteristics from various origins, as opposed to Mâle’s notion of a conduit which delivered fully formed French art into a Spanish cultural wasteland. King held an opinion somewhere between the two. Although she accused some French scholars of exaggerating the amount of French influence in Spain, claiming that they could not get ‘the sound of [their] own town belfry out of [their] ears,’ she readily admitted that French masons and sculptors contributed to the appearance of Spanish Romanesque churches.112 She believed that ‘art cannot be imported, only the moulds of it,’ and that foreign characteristics were soon acculturated and turned into something Spanish.113 Although his scholarship was not motivated by overt nationalism as was Mâle’s, Porter’s national identity played a role in forming his views on Romanesque art. Porter, as noted above, likened the pilgrimage to Santiago to a kind of crucible in which artists from all over Europe met and shared ideas.114 His notion of the pilgrimage roads as a melting pot, in which intercultural exchange produced a new amalgamated art, resembles the way America imagined itself during Porter’s lifetime, which roughly coincided with the huge influx of immigrants beginning in the 1880s and lasting through the mid-1920s. The term ‘melting pot,’ used to describe the reconfiguring of the American populace during the great wave of immigration, was originated by a play of the same name written by Israel Zangwill and performed in both New York City and Washington in 1908. It is unclear whether or not Porter saw the play, but its extensive publicity assured his knowledge of it. Mary Berenson, the wife of Porter’s friend, saw the play in Washington seated beside Presi-

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dent Roosevelt and the author. Both the Zangwills and the Porters were friends of the Berensons so it is likely that they were acquainted.115 In The Melting-Pot America is described repeatedly by the protagonist, an idealistic Jewish émigré composer, as ‘God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!’ and ‘where the roaring fires of God are fusing our race with all others.’116 In the afterword of the 1924 edition, Zangwill explained that ‘the process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type as is popularly supposed, but an all-round give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished.’117 Porter projected this peculiarly American sense of nationhood onto the formation of Romanesque sculpture. European nationalism may be absent from his texts but he does not replace it with a neutral internationalism, as is so often suggested. Instead he substitutes a vision of the United States in an act of unconscious nationalism.118 At times Georgiana Goddard King also understands Spain in terms of the United States. For instance, she describes the railroad tracks running through the frontier between France and Spain from Bedous to Jaca as having been laid down like Indian trails, or she compares the Pyrenean pine woods to those in the Adirondacks and the whitewashed halls of an Aragonese spa to nineteenth-century examples in Virginia. She even imagines Santiago de Compostela in terms of an American amusement park, saying: In the great years, and at the height of the season, this church must have been – God forgive me! – rather like Coney Island ... immense crowds kept arriving, and tramping through, like a dozen Cook’s parties in a day, and everything had to be shown to them, and everything explained.119

These however are specific one-to-one comparisons that inform the foreign by illustrating it in terms of the familiar and they do not serve as the basis for any of the paradigms that shape the larger issues of King’s work. Following Georgiana Goddard King, Porter often combines the notions of scholarly investigation and pilgrimage. In Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, he states: The modern pilgrim to Santiago journeys those long, but delicious kilometers, not entirely, nor even chiefly, to admire the miracles of scholarship already performed, nor even in the hope (inevitably present, however fatuous) of himself assisting at others. One feels, as nowhere else, wrapped

Frontiers and Pioneers 31 about by the beauty of the Middle Ages. One is, as perhaps never before, emotionally and intellectually stimulated.120

These statements imply that, for Porter, scholarly production was not the only goal. Experiencing the transcendental and transformative power of the art of the Middle Ages was equal in significance. His desire for this spiritualizing exercise should come as little surprise considering that an epiphanic experience initiated his career as an architectural historian. The powerful appeal of the medieval and Spain was to some extent grounded in the national identity of King and Porter. From earlier generations of Americans they inherited an understanding of Spain as picturesque and as a place where the sublime and the exotic could be experienced in the everyday. The first wave of American intellectual interest in Spanish culture, history, politics, and literature reached its apex in the 1820s and 1830s.121 Americans of this era came to know Spanish culture through travel books such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Outre-Mere (1833–4), Washington Irving’s Legends of the Alhambra (1832), and Caleb Cushing’s Reminiscences of Spain, the Country, Its People, History, and Monuments (1833).122 These established for Americans, albeit mainly those in New England, a paradigm of a romanticized Spain charmingly backward and still slightly tinged by the vestiges of an orientalized past. For instance, in Outre-Mere Longfellow explores the Spanish character, informing his readers that Spaniards are generous, dignified, and religious, but also ignorant, melancholy, slovenly, and superstitious.123 In The Legends of the Alhambra Washington Irving intertwines the last poignant moments of Spain’s Islamic past with colourful folk tales and his observations of contemporary Spain, which he represents as quaint and unmarred by modern notions of progress. These writers establish an epistemological claim for Spain as exotic and charmingly backward but hence a place of uncommon authenticity – a place where ‘real life’ could still be observed.124 Irving, with The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and The Conquest of Granada (1829), and William Prescott with The History of Ferdinand and Isabella (1838), introduced Americans to Spanish history. George Ticknor did the same for Spanish letters with his History of Spanish Literature (1849). Prescott, according to Richard Kagan, established a dominant paradigm, which understood Spain as backward as juxtaposed to a progressive America.125 Columbus, for these nineteenth-century scholars, was the connection that intimately linked the destinies of Spain

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and America. This ostensible connection and his more progressive national image were the factors which gave Prescott the confidence to be the first American scholar to write a new history of a country other than his own and Ticknor to be the first American to write a critical survey of a European literature. Both scholars understood Spain as a once fertile, but now fallow field, abandoned and readily available for ploughing. While their attempts at chronicling Spanish literature and history were scholarly, they were not free from romantic attitudes, especially concerning the Middle Ages, as Kagan has ably demonstrated.126 Coincidentally, like Ticknor and Prescott, these fledgling art historians formulated a new discipline with the raw material provided by the past of Spain, the only European nation with a distinguished artistic heritage still so largely rural and economically underdeveloped that it could still be construed as a frontier. Unlike their compatriots of earlier generations, however, it was northern rather than southern Spain, and the earlier rather than the late Middle Ages that interested Porter and King, although their attitudes retained much in common with the American scholars of the previous century. Consideration of the Islamic presence on the Iberian peninsula barely figures in Porter’s scholarship. The Jews were simply invisible to him. Although he visited southern Spain for several days in 1902 as part of a world tour he made with his brother Louis, he did not return until 1927 after his main work on Spanish medieval sculpture was completed. Although the theme of the melting pot underpins his conception of the formation of Romanesque sculpture, the artistic production of alAndalus was not one of the main ingredients that went into Porter’s crucible. In Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, Porter makes three brief references to Islamic art. In his account of tenth-century sculpture on the Iberian peninsula his attitude toward the Islamic contribution is contradictory. On the one hand, he suggests that the figural sculpture decorating the palaces of the ‘Mohammedans of the South,’ indicates that monumental carving did not disappear completely with the Romans, while on the other hand, he blames the Islamic presence for thwarting the development of a monumental Visigothic sculptural tradition.127 He likewise attributed the scarcity of stone sculpture in Christian Spain during the tenth century, when architecture and manuscript illumination flourished, to the influence of the iconoclastic attitudes of the Muslims and the Carolingians in Catalonia. At this time of high artistic achievement, according to Porter, such an absence can only be due to ‘religious scruple rather than to any inability to execute sculpture.’128 He also gives

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a brief description of Islamic ivory boxes of the eleventh century, noting that they were a form of booty taken by Christians and given to churches but he does not go so far as to claim that they had any artistic influence.129 Porter makes only one reference to Muslims having had a direct influence on Romanesque art in Spain. Citing Mildred Stapely Byne’s Forgotten Shrines of Spain as his source, Porter accounts for the uniqueness of the carvings in the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos by saying that they were executed by Muslim slaves but he takes this observation no further.130 King’s scholarship on the art and architecture of the medieval Iberian peninsula explores a broader time period and a wider range of interests than Porter’s narrow focus on Romanesque sculpture and its sources. Her more panoramic view required that she give some consideration to Islamic and Jewish cultural production if just for the sake of providing context for the Christian buildings to which she devotes the bulk of her attention in all her works. Although King does not use the term convivencia, she acknowledges in Mudéjar, published in 1927, a brief era of peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians on the Iberian peninsula saying, ‘And this Mudéjar art, humble, delicate, and alas! too fugitive, is the flower and the memorial of that long epoch of racial kindliness, with tolerance not only ideal but matter of course.’131 This attitude indicates something of a shift in understanding from her earlier PreRomanesque Churches of Spain, in which King gives a brief account of the complex history of the Iberian peninsula from the Romans to just after the year 1000 as a series of cultural waves. She draws an analogy between the Iberian peninsula and a delta upon which the ‘floods of invasions brought their deposit to overlay the past.’132 Although she notes the successive invasions by Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, and Berbers, King limits her discussion of the monuments to those built by Christians. She explains that Mozarabic architecture ‘originated in the south from contact between Spanish with Arab builders,’133 but that it was modified by the characteristics witnessed in the churches of the Asturias. It is telling that she uses the word ‘Spanish’ to describe the Mozarabic Christians, implying continuity between these people and those of twentieth-century Spain and ‘Arab’ to describe the Muslims, suggesting that their presence was foreign, illegitimate, and that their culture left no legacy to the future. The subject matter of Mudéjar, the symbiotic architectural style that resulted from the coexistence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews on the Iberian peninsula, necessitated that King consider Islamic and Jewish buildings. But by examining this architecture typologically, limiting her

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discussion to formal issues such as materials, building techniques, decorative motifs, and morphology, she virtually ignores examining the meaning of any individual buildings or cultural issues. King speaks of the Mudéjar style in admiring terms, indicating that it lasted for seven hundred years, had no parallel in other regions, and that it extended ‘over nearly the whole of Spain, it penetrated into the sanctuary and the dwelling, it was a part of every man’s daily existence.’134 Yet she minimizes the significance of its Muslim creators by constantly referring to them as ‘craftsmen.’135 The human agents of the style were less interesting to her than the formal appearance of the buildings they produced. Although rigorous in their art historical investigations, neither King nor Porter questioned their presuppositions about the country they visited. The yearning for romance that attracted them to the Iberian peninsula is also what drew them to study the art of the Middle Ages. According to T.J. Jackson Lears, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American enthusiasm for the Middle Ages arose from antimodernist sentiments that encouraged an idealized view of the medieval spirit as childlike in its innocence, vitality, and lack of ethical confusion.136 For the affluent, white, educated class of old-stock eastern elites to which Porter and King belonged, the perceived authenticity and unambivalent faith of the Middle Ages provided a cultivated safe haven from the aggressive, less refined, industrial society emerging around the turn of the century. Although entranced by the Middle Ages, King embraced modern life, literature, and art to a greater degree than Porter. She wrote some of the earliest reviews of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives.137 After learning about modern art from Stein first hand in Paris, she taught cubism to her students the year before the Armory Show introduced America to European avant-garde art in 1913.138 Her writing on Spain expresses no regrets for the arrival of modern conveniences such as the railroad. She was delighted by the 1931 victory of the republican government in Spain.139 Porter on the other hand, was unequivocal about his hatred of modern society, technology, and art. For instance in ‘Parva Componere Magnis’ he rails against the way modern society neutralizes the poetic impulse with forced jocularity and optimism and the mind-numbing quality of modern amusements such as football.140 For Porter, machinery had the most pernicious impact on the destruction of the aesthetic sense of modern society.141 Ironically, he did not hesitate to use two modern tools – the car and the camera – in his research. His negative opinion on

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the art of his own time is summed up in a revealing quip he wrote in a 1918 essay on Giotto, ‘The Middle Ages painted the soul; Michelangelo painted the body; modern art paints the clothes.’142 Following in the tradition of Ruskin’s disciple, Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, many art historians of King’s and Porter’s generation tended to see morality, aesthetics, and religion – whether contemporary or medieval – as inextricably intertwined. Norton, who is considered by some to be the father of American art history, established a discipline in which the distinctions between the spiritual and the scholarly were frequently blurred.143 This amalgamation of truth, beauty, and scientific research appears frequently in the writings of both Porter and King. Porter clearly understood his own lyrical nature when he described himself as a nineteenth-century romantic in a letter to Berenson written in 1929.144 Four years later in June of 1933, just a month before his disappearance, Porter openly expressed his misgivings about the increasingly scientific nature of art history to the connoisseur. Referring to John Walker, who would one day become Director of the National Gallery in Washington, Porter wrote: His mind is sharp and accurate but I have always felt he lacked something on the emotional poetic side. But in that he is only in tune with the modern age. It is no longer the time of Paters and Ruskins, but of Richard Offners and x-ray photographs. I am always wondering what the Offners and x-ray photographs will leave ... At any rate I am frightfully afraid that pedantry carried too far will become boring; and as soon as art is tiresome, its whole purpose of escape from the weariness of civilized life is defeated.145

Porter and King were constantly eager to look over the next hill and around the next mountain both literally and figuratively in terms of the art historical field. Both were moved by a forward momentum to discover unpublished monuments and to break new ground. Metaphors of the pioneer and the frontier surface frequently in contemporary assessments of the careers of King and Porter. Beckwith, for instance, entitled a review of Porter’s books ‘Kingsley Porter: Blazing the Trail in Europe,’ and one of King’s obituaries twice refers to her as a pioneer. While these references are essentially poetic, they point the way toward another motivation behind Porter’s and King’s interest in the art of medieval Spain. King, born in 1871, and Porter, in 1883, experienced one of the most significant shifts in Americans’ understanding of their national identity: the closing of the American frontier. The 1890 census reported that the

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United States no longer possessed a frontier – a western boundary where civilization met the wilderness. At the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the nation’s foremost historians, whose late career overlapped with the beginning of Porter’s at Harvard, addressed the significance of the frontier and its closing in the formation of American culture. He asserted that the most significant factor in the forming of an American national identity was the constant westward movement of the frontier.146 According to Turner, the challenges of life on the untamed frontier forged Europeans into independent, selfreliant Americans whose intellects were characterized by the strength, practicality, restless nervous energy, dominant individualism, buoyancy, and exuberance which comes with freedom.147 With the frontier at home closed, American art historians of Porter’s and King’s generation could have been seeking for one elsewhere. The rugged landscape of the Pyrenees, frequented by American art historians studying medieval Spain during the teens and twenties, was as sparsely populated and physically daunting as any spot in the newly tamed American west. There lay a scholarly field virtually untilled, full of unknown monuments just waiting to be explored. Porter was drawn repeatedly to inaccessible places and what he perceived as the marginal areas of his discipline. For instance, before turning to medieval Spain he was preoccupied with the early Romanesque buildings of northern Italy; afterwards he was lured by the even remoter beauties of the Donegal wilds, where he disappeared without a trace in 1933. He consciously aspired to be a trailblazer. In 1923 he admits to Berenson, ‘The delight of discovery is for me one of the keenest. I fear I find a certain satisfaction in feeling that no one has been before me.’148 The sad dilemma into which such sentiments eventually led him are evident in the draft of a letter written to two of his colleagues in which he expresses his desire to resign his Harvard post, declaring: With the great development of archaeology in the last few years the complexion of things has changed. It is no longer a field for a pioneer, but for co-operative production. The peculiar advantages I once possessed no longer count.149

In his nostalgia for the days when he could move alone and freely into an unpopulated intellectual territory constantly discovering monuments unknown to art historians, Porter echoed a loss felt by many Americans at the closing of the western frontier. Like Turner describing the end of

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the availability of free land in the Wild West, Porter seems to express a conviction that the experience that produced him was no longer available to others. When he could no longer be the first to till the soil he withdrew from the field. If too much emphasis on her personal observations cost King her reputation with future art historians, denying the personal seems to have cost Porter far more. In the last years of the 1920s, when Porter’s attention was shifting from Spain to Ireland, his personal correspondence reveals emotional unrest. He wrote to Berenson in 1928 about the publication of Spanish Romanesque Sculpture: I have been almost having nervous prostration over the publication of my book. Some things are the publisher’s fault, more no doubt are mine, but the matter has gotten so complicated that I have almost gone wild with it. I suppose useless worrying is a symptom of advancing years, and the habit is growing fast with me.150

The same year Porter must have admitted his emotional discomfort to his brother Louis, who wrote to the scholar in November, ‘I am distressed to hear that you have been having fits of depression. I always think of you and Lucy as typical Buddhas. You seem to have reached the goal of Nervanah [sic] and I find it difficult to imagine depression in connection with either of you.’151 By the following year Porter seems to have been in a full-blown emotional crisis, for he tried unsuccessfully to resign his position at Harvard and he complains to his brother of feeling ‘harassed and dissatisfied.’152 One concern may have been Lucy’s inability to travel. She had fallen off a donkey on a trip to Egypt the previous summer and seriously injured her back. Porter wrote to his brother, Louis, saying that he would either have to carry on his research alone, or preferably, shift his work to something he could do that would allow them to remain together.153 Porter’s depression and rising self-doubt seem to have been due to more than Lucy’s injury and the changing fashions of art history. Again, a personal epiphany seems to have interrupted his plans. In 1933 Porter wrote to the English sexologist, Havelock Ellis, whom he had begun to consult by 1931, ‘Comical isn’t it that I who was so proud of my perspicacity, failed to discover the one fact it was essential I should know, although it was written in letters of fire across the sky. As late as 1928 I read [André Gide’s] Si le grain ne meurt wondering what the title could possibly mean.’154 The ‘one fact,’ as Hilary Richardson and Phillis Grosskurth

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have both convincingly demonstrated, was Porter’s homosexuality, which he had not realized until his late forties.155 It is reasonable to speculate that Porter may have been so disturbed by his prolonged lack of selfknowledge that he came to doubt everything personal and professional that he had ever believed. His untimely disappearance in 1933 at the height of his emotional crisis prevents us from knowing whether or not he could have resolved his personal and scholarly doubts and continued his career in art history.156 King and Porter, like pioneers in search of unclaimed land, explored remote sites and took pleasure in the discovery of hitherto unpublished monuments. Ironically, while the appeal of the frontier, as an undeveloped academic field and as a rustic location, may have motivated the topics they chose to examine, the notion of medieval Iberia as a frontier in the sense of a place where a contested border separated people of different cultures, did not inform their scholarship. By the mid-twentieth century, beginning in 1948 with Charles Bishko’s groundbreaking ‘Salvus of Albelda and Frontier Monasticism in Tenth-Century Navarre,’ historians recognized the frontier nature of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain.157 It would take most art historians concerned with medieval Iberia somewhat longer; for some time to come, the pilgrimage roads paradigm established by King and Porter would underpin their studies. Porter and King were quickly followed to the Iberian peninsula by four art historians interested in Romanesque Spain: Walter W.S. Cook; two of Porter’s students, Walter Muir Whitehill, and Kenneth Conant; and Meyer Schapiro, then a graduate student at Columbia University. Some of King’s students, such as Dorothea Shipley, travelled to Spain but they did not pursue research careers in the area of medieval Spanish art.158 Only five years younger than Porter but slower to enter the field, Cook visited Spain for the first time after his graduation from Harvard in 1911. Unlike Porter and King, Cook had graduate training in art history. During his graduate studies at Harvard from 1915 to 1917, Spanish art and archaeology remained the focus of his interest. Studying before Porter’s arrival at Harvard, Cook worked with Chandler Rathfon Post (1881– 1959), who had graduated with a PhD in Romance languages from Harvard in 1909 but had stayed on to teach in the Fine Arts Department and produced a 14-volume work on Spanish painting of all eras.159 An intrepid traveller, Post held a romantic vision of a picturesque Spain that he imparted to his students.160 Like King and Porter, Cook was drawn to remote churches and monasteries where he discovered works of art unknown to professional art

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historians.161 He sought out obscure works of art in remote areas, such as the stucco altar frontals meant to imitate more expensive precious metal that had been ‘buried for centuries in small poverty-stricken parish churches of the Plana de Vich and the valleys of the Pyrenees.’162 He repeatedly combed tiny hamlets in Pyrenean valleys in Aragon and Catalonia looking for frescoes and panel paintings not previously published by art historians. He once told his students that he hoped to die on the road. His wish was fulfilled; he died on the Italian ship Leonardo da Vinci on which he was returning home from Europe in 1962.163 The descriptive nature of Cook’s scholarship eschewed both the personal positioning of King and the synthetic interpretations of Porter. He was trained in a more systematized way according to the ‘factual’ method of his mentor, Post.164 His chief concern, in line with the scholarship of his time, was the production of well-ordered inventories of little-known works upon which to base the evolution of style and iconographic traditions. Cook isolated the works of art he discussed from both the medieval cultural context in which they were created and the contemporary environment in which he discovered them. Decontextualizing the works not only erased the meanings they had during the Middle Ages but, more significantly, allowed him to ignore the importance they still had as religious objects for the people of the villages where he ‘discovered’ them. It also permitted him to reinscribe them with the values determined by the increasingly systematized field of art history.165 The detached factual nature of his scholarship reveals little about his personal attitudes towards his profession, Spain and the Middle Ages, at least at first glance. There are occasional moments when he indicates that his beliefs align with the prevalent romantic view of Spain, such as when he writes that Spain was ‘the land of knight-errantry’ where ‘even the blessed saints seem at times to take on something of a chivalrous quality.’166 The cool scientific nature of Cook’s scholarship, however, reveals something about his attitudes in itself. Once paintings were rendered inert by the erasure of their cultural contexts, they could be easily subjected to Cook’s own cultural values. They could be photographed, catalogued, ordered, and pushed into alignment with a modernist agenda that insisted on the orderly, progressive evolution of European art. Kenneth Conant and Walter Muir Whitehill were the best known among Porter’s students to pursue research in the field of Romanesque Spain. Conant had been an undergraduate Fine Arts major at Harvard before he entered its School of Architecture from which he graduated in 1919 with a Masters in architecture. He met Kingsley Porter for the first

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time in 1920 and immediately gave up architectural practice for architectural history. Although Conant had already visited Spain in 1916, it was undoubtedly not until he met Porter that he considered writing a dissertation on the Romanesque cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.167 It comes as no surprise that Conant’s work reveals many of the same beliefs as Porter’s. For instance, he views the pilgrimage to Santiago as transcending time, claiming in the introduction to The Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, ‘It [the pilgrimage] comes to us eleven centuries old, but with its spiritual quality still young and fresh, sweet with the unquenchable beauty that characterizes all things for which the Middle Ages really cared.’168 But Conant quickly leaves behind poetic musings on the utopian nature of the Middle Ages and moves on to a more systematic analysis of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.169 He follows his professor’s model of constructing chronologies more on the basis of written documents than visual appearances. Like Porter, he is on the watch for French prejudice, pointing out how nationalistic bias taints the opinion of Anthyme Saint-Paul, who claimed that the master of the works at Saint-Sernin, Toulouse, went to Spain and built a duplicate church for Santiago.170 Conant repeatedly champions the ‘Spanishness’ of Santiago and yokes it with the idea of progress. He writes, ‘The handling of the whole project at Santiago is original, confident, and forward-looking, fully abreast of the times in a period of rapid development,’ and ‘The design was the work of a progressive architect, very likely well-traveled, perhaps a Spaniard.’171 Conant dutifully takes the Spain side of the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ controversy, although with some hesitation, when he suggests that although Santiago has some French elements it probably served as the model for the other pilgrimage churches that appear in France.172 Conant’s interest in Spain did not last long. Even before his work on Santiago was finished he moved on to the Burgundian abbey of Cluny, another topic suggested by Porter.173 It was here in Burgundy that Conant would continue another campaign of the chronological battle initiated by Porter against orthodox French archaeologists and eventually establish his reputation. Whitehill’s interest in the Romanesque style began when he took Porter’s Romanesque architecture course as a junior at Harvard in 1925. Subject to Porter’s teachings at an impressionable age, his letters and scholarship exhibit the same idealized attitudes as his mentor. This is particularly apparent in his first impressions of the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos, which he described in a letter to Jane Revere Coolidge, who would eventually become his wife. He describes the cloister as ‘heavenly’

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and he claims ‘the whole place has the air of a wealthy Homeric establishment and there are moments when you are out of modern or mediaeval Spain and back in the age of Greece.’174 For Whitehill, Spain, or at least the monastery at Silos, was Edenic, charmingly rustic, and aligned with the golden age of ancient Greece. When, as a more mature scholar, he published his thoughts about Silos in 1941 in Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, he expressed similar sentiments saying, For thirty years the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos has had a magical attraction for archaeologists ... Setting aside their controversial opinions, all who have seen it agree upon the one vital point – its extreme beauty. For the art of Silos is touched with the early dew of a fresh spring morning.175

Whitehill was being slightly disingenuous in this passage for he was familiar from Porter’s experience with the way nationalism could cloud intellectual vision and create scholarly impasses. He knew full well that everyone did not appreciate the Silos cloister the way he did as he reveals in a 1927 letter written to his mentor: The Peninsular campaign has opened again after a hundred years of peace and the French have invaded Silos. Yesterday fifty of them, M. Pierre Paris, the rector of the University of Toulouse, and the others arrived on a tour of inspection. Their attitude was properly condescending, though – when they reached the library the ten volumes of The Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads were exhibited proudly as one of the chief treasures of the house. M. Paris observed, ‘M. Porter a beaucoup d’argent mais peu d’archéologie,’ at which point Padre Justo [Pérez de Urbel] joined battle in no uncertain terms, and it soon became evident that he had read the work and M. Paris had not.176

Porter’s imprint is plain on Whitehill’s work. He sees the Santiago pilgrimage as ‘an international force,’177 favours the evidence of documents over stylistic evidence for the establishment of dates, and he adopts Porter’s early chronology for Spanish monuments with little question.178 Like Porter, he promotes the initiative and creativity of Spaniards, such as when he discounts the importance of the nationality of the architect of Santiago de Compostela and credits Don Diego Peláez, the Spanish bishop, for making his cathedral ‘a shrine not only of Galicia but of the whole Western world.’179 Still a graduate student researching his dissertation on Moissac at

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Columbia University, Meyer Schapiro, made his first trip to Spain in the summer of 1927. In his master’s thesis on Moissac, Shapiro had subjected the ideas Porter had published about both the cloisters at Moissac and at Silos to rigorous and convincing criticism. With a more adept visual analysis of the Moissac and Silos reliefs, Schapiro makes short work of Porter’s supposition that the Spanish monastery was the source for the French.180 He sides with Porter’s enemy Deschamps on the unreliability of Domingo’s epitaph (1073–6) for establishing a date for Silos, points out contradictions in Porter’s arguments, and exposes the weakness of the senior scholar’s contention that the iconography of the Moissac tympanum is derived from the Christ in Majesty of the Cluny portal. Porter and Schapiro, nevertheless, became firm friends.181 Over ten years later, in 1939, in his seminal ‘From Mozarabic to Romanesque at Silos,’ Schapiro did not just disagree with Porter’s observations and dating but he completely undermined the epistemological values of Porter’s scholarship with his use of methods ultimately derived from Marxist thought as Otto Karl Werckmeister and other scholars have indicated.182 The appearance of the innovative Romanesque style at Silos, Schapiro claimed, was linked to new social conditions in the church and the secular world and the presence of motifs – such as the jongleur – which he read as secular, marked a resistance to the conservative world of established religion. Schapiro’s interest in Spanish Romanesque and medieval art in general was short-lived but extremely influential. Although he would return to medieval art with the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he delivered at Harvard University in 1967, the bulk of his scholarship would be devoted to modern art. The Spanish Civil War (1936–9) all but halted American art historical interest in medieval Spain until the 1970s. When the war began, Porter had been dead for three years, Conant had moved on to study Cluny, and King, already in poor health, turned to Portugal. Whitehill returned from Spain to the United States in early 1936 to sit out the Civil War as an assistant in the Peabody Museum of Salem. Although he had expected his stay in the United States to be brief, he did not return to Spain for another thirty-three years.183 He wrote with unvarnished reportage about the profound impact of the war on the publication of the first volume of his Liber Sancti Jacobi, Codex Calixtinus, which eventually appeared in 1944: On the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 the plates were in Madrid, the text in Nationalist territory, and I in the U.S.A. As the printer got shot and the publisher suppressed, I thought it was unlikely to appear ...184

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Cook continued to pursue research in Spain but spent more time and energy being an administrator, creating New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, established in 1932. Ironically, he unwittingly contributed to the decline in American interest in medieval Spain by hiring German émigrés, such as Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedlaender, Karl Lehmann, and Richard Krautheimer, after the Nuremberg Decrees in 1933 forced Jewish academics from their posts in Germany.185 Long past its formative stage, the art history that the Germans brought with them was uniform in its belief in the existence of objective, scientific methods. Their Old World sophistication, multilingualism, erudition, and confidence in the precision of their methods held an overwhelming appeal for the American art historical community and the German regimented discipline soon supplanted the less professionalized art history of American scholars. The transplanted Germans ignored King’s scholarship. Her facile ability to shift from the present to the past, and from the personal to the objective led at least one later art historian to dismiss her work as ‘stream of consciousness’ scholarship.186 Her personal accounts were not seen as a means to the significant but as unmethodical, unobjective, and therefore invalid and today her work is largely forgotten. Porter’s reputation has fared somewhat better. His scholarship, enmeshed with that of eminent European art historians such as Deschamps and Mâle, was part of the mainstream discourse on the formation of Romanesque sculpture. Recent historiographical studies have assured the prominence of his reputation.187 The battle over the source of the Romanesque style was temporarily quelled by the work of Georges Gaillard, who promoted the idea that Romanesque developed simultaneously on both sides of the Pyrenees.188 But in the 1970s and 1980s a new wave of American, Spanish, and French scholars interested in the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ question readdressed the issues of artistic sources, stylistic affiliations, and chronology based on the pilgrimage roads paradigm that Porter established. In 1969 Thomas Lyman, believing Gaillard too imprecise, tried to establish an exact chronological sequence between four Romanesque churches in Spain and France (Santiago de Compostela; Saint-Sernin, Toulouse; the abbey church of Saint-Sever-sur-l’Adour; and the Augustinian collegiate church of Saint-Gaudens) by tracing workshop movements through close readings of the stylistic features of their carved capitals.189 He was soon joined in the reexamination of the dates and filiations of the churches along the routes to Santiago de Compostela by a number of scholars, among them, Marcel Durliat,190 John

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Williams,191 Serafín Moralejo Álvarez,192 and David Simon.193 Like the first ‘Spain or Toulouse’ scholars, this second generation seldom agree on the chronologies they have tried to establish. Although not blinded by the nationalism of Porter and his contemporaries, their studies, like his, are based on a close examination of sculptural style and documents read mainly for dates in order to trace the movement of workshops and thereby establish a chronology. Their scholarship reflects the prevailing taxonomic divisions established by the émigré scholars that split works of art into separate categories according to medium, religion of the patrons and artists, and modern nation of production. In accordance with the scholarly priorities of their day these scholars had only a passing interest in the greater historical circumstances that produced the artworks they studied. It did not occur to them to consider that the historical conditions in Toulouse in 1100 were considerably different from those in Jaca or León. Notions about convivencia, the frontier, or the reconquest arising from the unique constellation of Muslims, Christians, and Jews living on the Iberian peninsula do not inform their scholarship. Only the work of John Williams, who explained the unusual variations in the sacrifice of Abraham imagery on the Lamb tympanum at San Isidoro in León in terms of the Christian Muslim conflict on the Iberian peninsula provides an exception to this general trend.194 Focused as they were on the art objects themselves, it comes as no surprise that they did not recognize the Romanesque monuments they explored as the manifestation of an insecure Christian frontier culture in the throes of claiming and settling new territory, forging alliances abroad, and defining itself in the shadow of the economically and culturally superior al-Andalus, which was only in the initial phase of its eventual decline. In the last two decades American art historical scholarship dealing with medieval Spain, with its greater interest in contextual issues, has decreased reliance on standard taxonomies; its openness to methods of approach drawn from other fields acknowledges the diversity of the social and political contexts in which Romanesque architecture and its sculptural decoration was produced and experienced. Jerrilynn Dodds’s Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain (1989) provides a seminal example. The majority of essays in the catalogue for the proposed but never realized exhibition, Art of Medieval Spain A.D. 500–1200, edited by Dodds, examine the impact of the interaction between Muslims, Christians, and Jews on artistic production.195 More recent works by American art historians, among them Therese Martin,196 Pamela Patton,197 Julie Harris,198 Cynthia Robinson,199 and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo,200 em-

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phasize the significance of the unique multicultural environment for the art produced in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries on the Iberian peninsula.201 Although newer studies recognize the multicultural nature of medieval Iberia and the impact of cultural exchange on the formation of its art and architecture, few have used a broad concept of the frontier as a theoretical model for understanding the nature of Romanesque architecture and its sculptural decoration.202 In hopes of reaching a more complete understanding of this significant artistic period then, the following chapters in this volume will examine the advent of the Romanesque style in Christian Iberia using a multifaceted definition of the frontier.

2 Victory Proclaimed: The Architectural Patronage of Sancho el Mayor (1004–1035)

The old cathedral of Pampeluna was fair as a moon even among fair churches. It was a hundred years in building and stood for less than twice that time: founded by Sancho el Mayor who was a wise man and a canny.1 The city of Palencia, which belonged to the see of Oviedo, had been deserted from the time of the Moorish invasion until the fourth decade of the eleventh century, when Sancho el Mayor began to rebuild it.2

For many historians of medieval art and architecture the year 1000 is not a year like any other.3 Although they may debate whether or not the year had eschatological significance for medieval Christians, most architectural historians since Robert de Lasteyrie published L’architecture religieuse en France à la époque romane in 1912 have construed the turn of the second Christian millennium as a kind of artistic boundary line.4 Before 1000, Europe is understood as an artistic wilderness and after it, at least according to Henri Focillon, ‘all things are changed, all things improve – first of all religious architecture.’5 Whether understood as actual or the product of a scholarly paradigm, the turning of year 1000 marks the crossing of a significant art historical frontier.6 On the Iberian peninsula decisive political events serendipitously aligned with the passing of the millennium, making it seem as if the future was indeed breaking free from the past. At this decisive moment, the fortunes of the Umayyad caliphate of al-Andalus, which had dominated the peninsula without challenge since the early eighth century, began to diminish while those of the Christians living in the north commenced their ascent. This critical shift in the balance of power had pro-

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found consequences for the architecture built by Christians early in their second millennium. Much evidence suggests that in the time approaching the year 1000 many Christians throughout the medieval West believed they were experiencing the final unravelling of human existence.7 While there might have been terror caused by the expectation of apocalyptic tragedy, there was also the joyous expectation that human suffering would soon end, peace would triumph, and the meek would inherit the earth. For many Christians living in the small mountain realms in the north of the Iberian peninsula devastation and rebirth were not just part of what Richard Landes has called the ‘Janus-faced cosmology of destruction and renewal’ of the millennium.8 For these Christians, death and de– struction took palpable form in the figure of al-Mans. ur, the powerful de facto ruler of al-Andalus, and renewal came with Sancho el Mayor (r. 1004–35), the first Christian monarch to unite the Christian territories of the Iberian peninsula. In the second half of the tenth century the Umayyad caliphate of alAndalus was one of the largest and most powerful realms of the Mediterranean world. Its caliphs ruled most of the Iberian peninsula and parts of North Africa. Cordoba, their capital, rivalled Constantinople in its sophistication and beauty.9 The death of Caliph al-Hakam II (b. 915, r. 961) . – in 976 and the succession of his adolescent son, Hisham, initiated a series of events that would lead to the disintegration of the united Islamic state – on the Iberian peninsula. Young Hisham’s authority was quickly usurped – by his hajib, or chamberlain, Muhammad ibn Abμ Amir (938–1002). Effectively ruling from 981 to 1002, he never called himself caliph yet he – adopted the title al-Mans. ur – the Victorious – an honorific once used by – – Abu Jafar al-Mans. ur, one of the greatest Abbasid caliphs.10 In the last – decades of the tenth century al-Mans. ur conducted a series of devastating raids against the Christians of the north – fifty-two according to Muslim sources.11 He burned Barcelona in 985 and sacked the monastery of San Cugat del Vallés. León, Zamora, Coimbra, and the monasteries of Sahagún and San Pedro de Eslonza received the same treatment in 987. In 989 he destroyed Osma and in 1000 he ravaged Burgos and the sur– rounding lands of Castile. Al-Mans. ur struck a deadlier blow in 997 when he pillaged the site most sacred to Spanish Christians – the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela. Although he left the actual tomb of the saint intact, he destroyed the rest of the church and had its bells carried back to Cordoba where legend has it they were upturned and used as braziers in the Great Mosque.12 In 1002 he burned the monastery of San

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Millán de Cogolla and was in the process of plundering the Rioja when he fell ill and died at Medinaceli.13 – Intimidation more than expansion of territory motivated al-Mans. ur’s 14 campaign against Christians. His raids were quick and deadly but they were not followed by Muslim settlement in the Christian areas he pillaged. He followed the Islamic custom of destroying the churches in the cities he attacked in order to make clear both the military and religious superiority of Islam. Baser motives, however, were also in play. Churches and monasteries were rich in precious objects, coin, livestock, and retainers who could be sold as slaves.15 The raids, which could have been understood as – a jihad, were also a shrewd political tactic that insured al-Mans. ur’s popu16 larity at home in al-Andalus. His victories against the Christians served to distract the Muslims from their own internal divisions. They also justified both his usurpation of power from a caliph too weak to challenge the Christians and the taxation needed to maintain the troops that guaranteed his authority over his own people. – – Al-Mans. ur’s son, Abd al-Malik al-Muzaff . ar, who ruled al-Andalus from 1002 to 1008, followed the policies put in place by his father. He allowed – Hisham to remain as a puppet ruler, and he continued the holy war – against the Christians but with somewhat less success than al-Mans. ur. The fragile system collapsed after Abd al-Malik’s death in 1008 under – the rule of his brother Abd al-Rahman, called Sanchol, or Little Sancho. The period Islamic sources refer to as the fitna, or the tribulation, began.17 Violence and political confusion reigned in al-Andalus until 1031 when attempts to reestablish central authority were finally abandoned and thirty-six small kingdoms called taifas emerged from the chaos. These small powers were incapable of forming a united front against Christian hegemony.18 If the Muslims brought destruction to the Christians, the rise of a strong Christian leader, Sancho Garcés III, born Count of Navarra, delivered revival. Born around 992, Sancho began his rule when still a child in 1004. By the end of his reign in 1035 he exercised authority either directly or indirectly over territory across northern Spain from the lands of León to Ribagorza and from Zamora to Gascony (fig. 2.1). Better known to history as Sancho el Mayor, or Sancho the Great, he rekindled the faith and rebuilt the shattered communities of Christian Spain.19 Sancho extended his dominance from his hereditary territory in Navarra across much of northern Spain. His kingdom was very much a frontier in Frederick Jackson Turner’s sense of the word. It was in large part a no-man’s-land to be settled, with shifting boundaries, few towns,

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and a social structure in the process of alteration owing to the new lands acquired and to immigration. Enemies, both Muslim and Christian, were a threatening presence beyond the ill-defined and porous borders. In the century before Sancho’s reign, the frontier between al-Andalus and the Christian north had been largely a disorganized buffer zone, an area of transition that sometimes beckoned to adventurous settlers but at other times put them to flight.20 Under Sancho the frontier became less of a neutral zone and more of a defined boundary, although still permeable, permitting exchange between Islamic and Christian polities, because he gave structure to the divide by building castles and awarding tracts of frontier land, tenencias, to his magnates over which they ruled with his royal jurisdiction. With the exception of driving the Muslims out of Ribagorza, Sancho extended his realm at the expense of his Christian neighbours. He moved first to the east, exerting his hegemony over Ribagorza around 1018, although not officially claiming control until 1025.21 By the early 1030s Sancho had extended his authority to the north, across the Pyrenees, taking Bayonne and the Basque lands south of the Adour.22 In 1028 after the death of Sancho García, Castile’s last count, Sancho el Mayor claimed that territory by virtue of his marriage to García’s sister, referred to in documents as Munia, Mumadona, or Mayor in 1010.23 This marital alliance allowed Sancho el Mayor to assume the governance of Castile. Subsequently, Sancho gained the support of the aristocratic families in the lands between the Cea and the Pisuerga Rivers, becoming their overlord and using this area as a base of operations against Leonese territory.24 In 1032 he occupied the Leonese cities of Zamora and Astorga. The weak Leonese king Vermudo III continued to rule but under Sancho’s domination. Documents from the early 1030s refer to Sancho el Mayor as reigning in Pamplona, Aragon, Sobrarbe, Ribagorza, Gascony, Castile, and as protector in León and Astorga.25 During the tenth century Navarra had been a lesser power among the Christian kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula. The assertion of Sancho’s hegemony over Castile and then León marked a significant reorientation of power within the Christian territories. Prior to Sancho’s ascendancy, the Asturian-Leonese dynasty had promoted the idea of restoring a united Christian Spain, justifying their claim by asserting that they were heirs of the Visigothic kings who had ruled the peninsula prior to the arrival of the Muslims in 711.26 Sancho inserted his dynasty into this ideological myth that fueled the right to retake the peninsula by usurping Vermudo III’s power and then marrying his son Fernando to Sancha, the

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sister of the legitimate Leonese king. Although Vermudo regained his throne after Sancho’s death, his victory was only fleeting for he was killed by Fernando at the Battle of Tamarón in 1037 thus rupturing permanently the direct line of the dynasty of Asturias-León.27 – To mend the destruction wrought by the raids of al-Mans. ur and to stabilize his frontier kingdom, Sancho embarked upon a campaign of reform and reconstruction. He made his territory less vulnerable to attack by building fortresses. He secured its southern frontier with the Muslims of the Marca Superior by establishing strongholds at Uncastillo, Luesia, Biel, Agüero, Murillo, Cacabiello, Marcuello, Loarre, Buil, Boltaña, Morillo de Monclús, and Abizanda.28 By their very visibility they marked the land as claimed territory. The protection afforded Sancho’s lands by these fortresses provided the security necessary for the creation and revival of monastic institutions.29 He founded new monasteries such as San Juan de Ruesta and repaired those such as San Millán de la Cogolla that had been abandoned or damaged by the Muslim raids. He encouraged monasteries to adopt the Benedictine rule. By altering the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela so that it passed further south through Nájera rather than through Alava and the Asturias, he encouraged the economic development of the territories at the core of his realm. He fostered the start of a money economy by minting coins.30 While repairing the damage left in the wake of Muslim raids, Sancho’s reforms also strengthened his realm in the face of Christian competition for lands now habitable thanks to the break-up of the united caliphate of al-Andalus. The understanding of Sancho el Mayor as a pioneering ‘Europeanizer’ who acted as a receiver of trans-Pyrenean influence tended to shape the way art historical scholarship framed the architecture of Christian Spain just after the year 1000. Whitehill, for instance, claimed that ‘Sancho el Mayor began the internationalization of Spain. He turned the eyes of his people from Córdoba towards France; he introduced the Cluniac order to the peninsula.’31 Georges Gaillard called Sancho ‘le premier des souverains espagnols à orienter sa politiques vers l’Europe.’32 They saw evidence of Sancho’s Europeanizing tendencies in the churches he built, observing that his masons rejected the horseshoe arch, a ubiquitous feature of tenth-century churches built on the Iberian peninsula, replacing it with the more ‘European’ and ‘innovative’ semicircular arch. The semicircular arches and the stone vaults that were used in Sancho’s churches were associated with the later eleventh-century Romanesque style and automatically tagged French by most architectural historians of the early twentieth century.

Architectural Patronage of Sancho el Mayor 51

While newer art historical accounts are more nuanced and without the nationalistic biases of earlier studies they still tend to view Sancho’s architecture, if they mention it at all, as little more than the bellwether of the more stylistically coherent Romanesque architecture that was built later in the century on both sides of the Pyrenees and in Italy.33 Opening the door to foreign influence is viewed as Sancho’s main contribution as a patron. For example, Isidro Bango Torviso, following the esteemed historian José María Lacarra, calls Sancho ‘pionero de la europización’ who ‘va a abrir sus fronteras a lo francés,’34 an opinion with which Joaquín Yarza and John Williams agree.35 Using the language of war, Jerrilynn Dodds puts it even more dramatically, ‘And so it was that Cluniac reform and Romanesque style invaded the monasteries of the Christian north at the hand of Sancho el Mayor (1000–35), the first of a series of monarchs who sought for the northern kingdoms an identity bound to that of Europe.’36 The recent exhibition, entitled Sancho el Mayor y sus herederos: El linaje que europeizó los reinos hispanos, advances the same view of Sancho as the primogenitor who planted the seed of Europeanization that flourished in the next generation.37 Without a doubt Sancho looked north of the Pyrenees to the world beyond his own territory with the idea of aligning his realm with other Christian kingdoms but this was to further, rather than at the expense of, local needs. His architecture provides a parallel. The new forms of Sancho’s buildings may have been imported but they served to emphasize continuity with the Christian past of the Iberian peninsula more than to express his newly forged alliances with the aristocracy of Aquitaine and Gascony or the monks of Cluny. With an overreaching emphasis on Sancho’s significance as a Europeanizer, art historians have focused more on the king’s acceptance of a new architecture that shared characteristics with extra-peninsular buildings than on the reasons for the rejection of older, local architectural traditions. By shunning the models offered by the Islamic or Islamicizing Mozarabic architecture of the Iberian peninsula, Sancho was turning away from a long-standing sophisticated architectual tradition to one in its nascent stages.38 While scholars noticed a change in Sancho’s architecture they did not explore the motivation for this transformation or how this new architecture might have acted as part of a nationalist discourse that looked to both the past and the present to affirm the providential destiny of the future for the frontier Christian kingdom that Sancho had just consolidated. Most accounts link the expansion of the churches at the monasteries of San Juan de la Peña and San Millán de la Cogolla, the new cathedral in

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Palencia of which only the crypt survives, and the initiation of construction at the monastery at Leire to Sancho el Mayor’s patronage.39 Some scholars include the construction of Santa María at the Castle of Loarre as part of Sancho’s construction campaign at that site.40 Although documentary evidence is somewhat contradictory, it is fairly certain that the Navarese monarch also built fortresses at Sos, Lobera, Uncastillo, Cercastiel, Luesia, Agüero, Murillo, Cacabiello, and San Emeterio.41 The architecture of these strongholds defined geography, establishing a boundary line that would endure for the next century. No single coherent formal language unites the monuments attributed to the architectural patronage of Sancho el Mayor but they hold several features in common.42 They are built on a more ambitious scale than previous monuments, they employ vaults and applied wall arches, and they make systematic use of lintels topped by relieving arches over doors. More significant than the common characteristics they display is the one feature that their masons chose to abandon – the horseshoe arch. The most characteristic element of Visigothic, Islamic, and Mozarabic architecture, the horseshoe arch, although varied in the extent of the circumference, was prevalent in most of the significant architecture built on the Iberian peninsula between the seventh and the eleventh centuries. The horseshoe arch brought north to the Christian territories from alAndalus by emigrating monks in the ninth and tenth centuries is the most obvious and wide-spread characteristic of their churches, such as San Miguel de Escalada begun in 913. The renovation of San Millán de la Cogolla de Suso presents the clear rejection of the architecture of the prior generation (fig. 2.2). Located about fifteen kilometres from Nájera (Logroño), San Millán was situated in an unstable border district where political domination shifted for decades between Castile and Navarra.43 The Muslims of the Ebro valley and those of the realm of Zaragoza were also in close proximity, making the monastery’s location even more insecure.44 The incoherent appearance of San Millán’s nave jolts the modern eye. Today’s visitor steps from a modern porch built in the 1930s through a horseshoe-arched portal directly into the nave of the church, which is divided by an arcade into two aisles of similar but unequal width. The three eastern-most arches of the arcade, like those that open onto the square chapels to the east, are horseshoe-shaped while the two westernmost are semicircular (figs 2.3, 2.4). As if to emphasize this readily apparent difference further, a rectangular pier is placed where the horseshoe and the semicircular arches meet. Beyond the pier, the western bays

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of the nave curve to the north, misaligning with the eastern portions of the church so that they can hug the lower part of the hill against which the church is constructed (fig. 2.5). Barrel vaults top this rear portion of the church. A modern wooden roof, presumably replacing a similar original, covers the eastern bays. The easily discernible differences between the eastern and western parts of San Millán indicate that they were built at different times and needless to say, little effort was made to make them harmonize.45 Medieval belief held that the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla was built on the site of the hermitage of Aemilianus, or Millán (d. 574), a shepherd whose piety and healing powers gained him sainthood. Three caves accessible through the north wall of the current church are still believed to have provided a home for the hermit saint. According to Alberto Monreal Jimeno’s extensive study of cave monasteries, these caves are probably enlarged natural hollows that served, most likely beginning in the Visigothic era, as hermits’ cells and oratories, one of which eventually served as the burial place of San Millán.46 The Vita Sancti Aemiliani, written early in the seventh century by San Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza, claims that by his day there was already a coenobitic community at the place where Aemilianus had lived and was buried.47 Pilgrims, too, were visiting the holy site. No substantial buildings or written documents from this period remain,48 but the most recent excavations performed at the site have yielded evidence of Visigothic masonry around the east end of the church and around the opening of the eastern-most cave.49 In the tenth century the eastern portions of the current church were built against the face of the cliff pierced with the anchorites’ caves. Scholars are divided over the precise date for the completion of this portion of San Millán but they generally agree that it was finished during the second half of the tenth century.50 The two west bays of the nave are attributed to the reign of Sancho el Mayor with more confidence. In the cartulary of San Millán two documents dated 1030 (although one may actually be a twelfth-century copy) mention the translation of Aemilianus’s relics and the adoption of the Benedictine rule by the monks of San Millán in that year.51 The completion of the repairs and extension of the older church, scholars agree, facilitated this movement of the saint’s body. The reconstruction of San Millán was necessitated by damage caused – when al-Mans. ur sacked the monastery in 1002. In the twelfth century a monk named Fernando recorded that during the rule of Abbot Ferrucius (993–1014) the church was burnt up to the altars.52 Gómez-Moreno concludes that indeed the Muslims pillaged San Millán on the basis

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of Fernando’s document, the archaeological evidence, and following Dozy’s conviction that San Millán was the ‘al-dayr,’ or large monastery, reported destroyed in the Muslim chronicle written by Ibn al-Jatib.53 Most architectural historians follow his opinion, although a few scholars doubt the actuality of the raid because there is no contemporary written record.54 For instance, the historian Ubieto Arteta questions the assumption that the al-dayr mentioned in Muslim sources was San Millán. He finds it curious that there was no mention of the attack in a donation given to the monastery in 1003 by Count Sancho of Castile or in subsequent documents.55 The survival of many manuscripts produced in San Millán’s scriptorium in the tenth century might support Ubieto Arteta’s scepticism, although the portability of manuscripts makes them relatively easy to protect. On the other hand, the break in the monastery’s diplomatic collection definitely suggests disruption.56 The still visible fire damage in the tenth-century portion of the church likewise gives convincing testimony that the monastery was indeed sacked. Sancho el Mayor’s interest in San Millán, however, went well beyond repairing the monastery’s church. In 1028 he transferred the combined bishoprics of Nájera and Pamplona to Sancho, abbot of the monastery. This consolidation of religious power, subsequent donations, the restoration of the church, and the guarantee of royal protection served to ensure San Millán’s loyalty to Navarre rather than Castile.57 The monastery’s loyalty virtually guaranteed Sancho the allegiance of the whole region as well as the supernatural support of its saint. It provided a secure base and a sure ally in a territory with a history of swaying allegiances. Maintaining consistency and harmony in appearance between the old and new portions of the church was not a priority in the rebuilding of San Millán. Differentiating new fabric from old through the display of unaccustomed forms took precedence. A similar choice to move away from familiar forms to something new took place around the same time and far away in Aragon in the lower church of San Juan de la Peña (fig. 2.6). At this monastery, located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Sancho el Mayor again added two bays to the west end of a Mozarabic church built at the site of an earlier Visigothic shrine. Here, once more, horseshoe arches support the older part of the church while a semicircular arcade characterizes the Navarese king’s new bays. The occurrence of the same disjuncture in two examples separated by so formidable a distance suggests that their shared appearance is the result of choice not chance. Like San Millán de la Cogolla, San Juan de la Peña is built against a rock escarpment. It nestles in a protective recess in the cliff’s high stone

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face. The earliest surviving portion of the monastery is the southeast portion of the lower church that now composes part of the crypt under the later Romanesque building.58 Most scholars date this original church to the tenth century.59 The plan of this small building roughly square in shape is comprised of two aisles divided by an arcade of two bays (fig. 2.7). The aisles, covered by barrel vaults, extend into a natural cave-like hollow in the rock of the escarpment where they end in square apses.60 The arcade arches, apse openings, and the top of a window piercing the wall between the apses are all slightly horseshoe-shaped.61 These horseshoe arches were constructed by a simple method. The masons extended the intradose of the arch beyond semicircular by simply curving the inner face of the tall springers upon which the voussoirs rise. The two western bays added to this church by Sancho el Mayor look noticeably different (fig. 2.8). As at San Millán wider, semicircular arches replace the horseshoe arches of the older church and a massive pier emphasizes the juncture of old and new fabric. Tall, broad transverse ribs springing from this pier create a bold division between the parts. To its west, the floor level of the new bays is about a metre and a half lower than those to the east. Consistency is maintained throughout the church in the height of the vaults and arcades, however, suggesting that when it was desired, uniformity could be achieved. In the lower church of San Juan de la Peña, then, just as in San Millán de la Cogolla, the creation of difference won out over uniformity. San Juan’s foundation legend, like that of San Millán, includes an anchorite living in a cave. According to tradition, in the eighth century a Christian hunter from Zaragoza named Voto was in hot pursuit of a stag when it disappeared over the cliff into which the church is now built. Certain that only spiritual aid could save him and his horse from the same fate, Voto prayed to Saint John the Baptist who interceded and miraculously stopped him from tumbling over the edge. Voto walked down to the base of the cliff were he discovered a spring and a cave with a chapel. In the chapel he found a dead anchorite lying beside a stone inscribed with his name, Juan de Atarés. Voto buried the holy man, went back to Zaragoza, and returned to the cave with his brother Felix. Here, they continued in the saintly, hermetic life of Juan de Atarés. Eventually, others joined them.62 Although the date of the first telling of the story of the miraculous rescue of Voto is unknown, the legend was already prevalent in the Middle Ages. Versions of it appear in both the mid-twelfth-century Libro de San Voto and the fourteenth-century Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña.63

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The later history of the monastic community of San Juan de la Peña likewise offers some parallels to that of San Millán de la Cogolla.64 The primitive enclave was probably harassed if not destroyed during the Muslim raids in 998, 999, and 1006.65 After the collapse of the caliphate, Sancho el Mayor reasserted Christian dominance over the region. He secured the lands from Sos to the Noguera Ribagorza River with a chain of fortresses guarding the frontier with Islam. At San Juan de la Peña, just as at San Millán de la Cogolla, the physical renovation of the church was linked to the spiritual reform of the monastery through the institution of the Benedictine rule. The exact moment this occurred is difficult to pinpoint. Although earlier documents mention royal gifts to a monastery named San Juan, the first written source bearing the actual name San Juan de la Peña dates to 1027. This donation records Sancho el Mayor’s gift of the villa of Lizagurria with all its property and possessions to the monastery.66 A second document written the following year at the monastery of Leire indicates that the monks at San Juan de la Peña had adopted the Benedictine rule.67 These two sources, written around the same time, and the subsequent record of continued donations on the part of the Navarese king suggests that this was the moment when the monastery was revitalized by Sancho el Mayor.68 Both San Millán de la Cogolla and San Juan de la Peña were located at frontier sites where Sancho el Mayor’s claim to the land was tenuous because of rival Christian claims or the threat of Muslim raids. Their high sites allowed them a strategic view of the land below and guaranteed that they could serve as a last bulwark of defence in case of attack. In strictly practical military terms it made sense for the king to rebuild these monasteries and to encourage their communities to lead stable, regular lives. Restored as they were, hard on the heels of the enemy’s destruction, the new bays added to the churches of San Juan de la Peña and San Millán de la Cogolla stood as signs of renewed well-being thanks to the king’s military prowess, sound leadership, and pious generosity. Their newness, made more obvious by their innovative forms, declared a turning point in the affairs of the kingdom. Order was restored, the damage inflicted by the enemy was repaired, and stability was reinstated. Their venerability as holy places connected with miraculous occurrences and Christian holy life before the Muslim presence on the Iberian peninsula rendered San Millán and San Juan as spiritually potent as they were militarily strategic. Their presence staked a claim not just to a new political frontier but to a geography made sacred for Christians in the past by holy events in the same way early Christian churches in the Holy

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Land expressed the Christian possession of the loca sancta of Christ’s life. The physical appearance of both San Millán and San Juan establishes their spiritual antiquity. The changes in their fabric constitute a tangible visual record of their steadfast existence through the passage of time, from the caves associated with pre-Islamic Christian anchorites, through the horseshoe architecture linked with the monks who worshipped at – these sites before al-Mans. ur’s raids around the year 1000, to the repairs and additions that expressed an age of revival under the rule of Sancho el Mayor. Their architectural fabric thus charts a course of survival through perilous times and makes clear that this survival is thanks to God. It is not unreasonable to see the churches themselves as a kind of frontier where old met new and where the past became the present to suggest a providential destiny for the coming years. Built with strikingly different elements, most notably the semicircular arch, Sancho’s additions were literally linked to the old while at the same time declaring the new and pointing the way toward the future. Their construction coincides roughly with the institution of the Benedictine rule at both monasteries at the instigation of Sancho el Mayor and with generous donations on his behalf. Certainly, the main audience for these new structures, the monks who worshipped in them daily, must have associated their new fabric and forms with the new rule and the sense of revival and recovery that came with it. Sancho’s buildings constitute a watershed in the history of the architecture built in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. Art historians have shown a tendency to interpret the crossing of this artistic frontier, so visible in San Juan de la Peña and San Millán de la Cogolla, as the local overcome by the international. Cluniac monks were sometimes deemed the agents mainly responsible for bringing both the new architectural forms and the Benedictine reforms across the Pyrenees into Sancho’s kingdom.69 Although Sancho el Mayor gave donations to the Burgundian abbey, was prayed for by its monks, and exchanged letters with its abbot, Odilo, he did not place any monasteries in his territory under Cluny’s control.70 The actual extent of Cluny’s influence in his realm is still something of a vexed question.71 What is clear, however, is that the Navarese king sought advice about the Benedictine reform and other religious matters from a source a little closer to home than Burgundy.72 In 1023 Sancho el Mayor overlooked his own bishops and wrote to Oliba, bishop of Vic, for advice concerning the consanguinity of a marriage he was planning between his sister Urraca, and Alfonso, son of Vermudo, king of León.73 Oliba, as Bernard Reilly has indicated, was ‘an

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admirer and imitator’ of Cluny, who encouraged their practices in Cataluña.74 Although Sancho proceeded with the wedding against Oliba’s advice, he followed the bishop’s recommendations on how to improve conditions in his realm. Oliba counselled Sancho that if he wished to return his lands to their former prosperity, he must reform the monastic – custom and restore the monasteries attacked by al-Mans. ur and his son:75 We beg you as lord, beseech you as a father, implore you as a son not to turn a deaf ear to our words or to better divine precepts, nor to let prevail the conspiracy of the wicked against the divine laws and statutes of the saints as far as they concern the churches and the reform of the monasteries.76

Oliba apparently referred not only to Sancho’s realm for he also requested funds from the Navarese king for construction underway at the monastery of Ripoll.77 In keeping with Oliba’s advice, Sancho instituted the Benedictine rule at San Juan de la Peña, San Millán de la Cogolla, Irache, Albelda, and Oña.78 He sought to eliminate secular influence in monastic life by affiliating small foundations with larger ones under his own protection. In Pamplona, the Rioja, and Aragon-Ribagorza, the king linked bishoprics to the abbacies of important monasteries. For instance, the bishop of Pamplona served as the abbot of Leire, while the bishop of Nájera and the abbot of San Millán de la Cogolla were one and the same man.79 This system of abbot-bishops deviated from the Cluniac model where abbots were independent of local bishops and reported to the pope directly.80 On the other hand, it bore a great similarity to the Catalan custom manifest in Oliba himself who acted as abbot of both Ripoll and Saint-Michelde-Cuxa and as bishop of Vic. Although Oliba admired Cluniac practices, he clearly did not hesitate to deviate from them if it suited his purposes. Oliba was not the only Catalan cleric to associate with the Navarese king. Sancho was closely connected with Poncio, a monk of Ripoll, who became abbot of San Saturnino de Tavernoles, subsequently bishop of Oviedo, and ultimately bishop of Palencia. Bernardo, another Catalan, followed Poncio as bishop of Palencia.81 Antonio Durán Gudiol sees further proof of close ties between Cataluña and Sancho’s realm in liturgical affinities he discovered in manuscripts in the cathedrals of Vic and Huesca.82 Sancho seems to have looked to Cataluña for more than advice on ecclesiastical matters. In one aspect, Oliba’s renovation of the church at Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa bears a striking similarity to the churches the king

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repaired at San Juan de la Peña and San Millán de la Cogolla. Here too, the earlier portions of the church were distinguished from the latter by the change from horseshoe to semicircular arches (fig. 2.10). The monastery of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa was founded by monks in a valley near Prades after their monastery, Saint-André-d’Exalada, had been destroyed by a flood of the Têt in 878.83 A three-aisle basilica with a large transept and horseshoe arches, built by abbot Garin and consecrated in 975, stood at the site when Oliba became the monastery’s abbot. He modified both ends of this tenth-century church that makes up most of the standing edifice.84 An account left by Oliba’s contemporary García, a monk of Cuxa, describes the abbot’s additions to the older church. Writing around 1040, García states that Abbot Oliba added the subterranean circular chapel dedicated to the Virgin of the Manger to the west of the church.85 Here, an annular vault with a circular apse off the east side encircles a massive central circular pier. Two vaulted chambers, perhaps those referred to by García as the chapels dedicated to Gabriel and Raphael, connect this crypt to a large three-aisled chamber at a slightly higher level running perpendicular to the church. The arcades supporting this chamber’s barrel vaults are wide and semicircular. Above the crypt Oliba constructed a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity. This edifice no longer exists. Oliba extended Garin’s church to the east by adding a new choir including the square ambulatory that still surrounds the older sanctuary. Three semicircular chapels, only one of which survives, once opened off its east side.86 Oliba also raised the height of the nave, placed a baldachin over the altar, and constructed tall bell towers over the ends of the transepts.87 A consecration in 1035 indicates that this work was underway or possibly even finished by this date. Oliba, like Sancho el Mayor at San Juan de la Peña and San Millán de la Cogolla, maintained the greater part of the old church he renovated. In Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, too, the new work is differentiated from the old by a change in the shape of the arches. In addition, the wide, low arches of the arcades and the cruciform piers of the three-aisled chamber at SanMichel-de-Cuxa are similar to those in the last two bays of Sancho’s crypt at San Juan de la Peña. The correspondence between Oliba and Sancho and the similar tack taken in the renovation of their churches suggests a lively exchange of ideas between Navarra and Cataluña. Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, San Juan de la Peña, and San Millán de la Cogolla do not look alike but they express the same message in their renovations. Like many medieval churches

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they share the combination of old fabric with new. Only at a few sites, however, is the suture of old with new, and past with present, made so evident by the obvious change in arch type that occurs in these three monastic churches, located so far apart that their common characteristics cannot be assigned to a common workshop. At the same time the churches renovated by both the Catalan prelate and the Navarese king served as repositories for a distinguished past and a flourishing present in the very stones of their walls. According to medieval tradition, Sancho el Mayor was associated with the construction of a cathedral in Palencia. All that remains of this building, that could have been endowed by Sancho and his wife, is the crypt dedicated to San Antolín, or Saint Antoninus, under the current Gothic cathedral. Here, a low, broad barrel vault supported by four transverse arches springing from just above the floor covers an undivided rectangular space (fig. 2.11). An applied arcade of three blind arches rings the semicircular east end. San Antolín bears little in common visually with the Navarese king’s additions to San Millán de la Cogolla and San Juan de la Peña. Although formal similarity is negligible, a conceptual link between the crypt of San Antolín and Sancho’s other constructions exists. In Palencia, as at the other two sites, new material is linked to old with no attempt to create a unified, stylistically coherent whole. The central arch of San Antolín’s apse arcade opens to allow access to an older Visigothic shrine (fig. 2.12). The original configuration of this subterranean chamber, known as ‘la cueva de San Antolín,’ remains enigmatic.88 Today, the visitor leaves the eleventh-century portion of the crypt and enters a narrower, gloomy space partitioned into three bays of different sizes – perhaps once narthex, nave, and apse – by low broad transverse arches. At the badly preserved east end of this chamber two robust columns, surmounted by capitals and stout impost blocks carved with abstract decoration, support an arcade of three diminutive horseshoe arches.89 The small horseshoe arches prolong the circumference of the circle by only one quarter its radius indicating they are Visigothic rather than later Islamic horseshoe arches.90 The shape of the arches and the two-dimensional, abstract decoration of the capitals, similar to Visigothic sculptural decoration from Cordoba, Mérida, and Toledo, have led most scholars to date this crypt to the seventh century.91 Most likely, it was the lower chamber of a two-storey building that was either razed or fell into neglect after the Muslim invasion and depopulation of Palencia.92 The Visigothic chamber is clearly differentiated from the eleventhcentury portion of the crypt by both its smaller scale and its horseshoe

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arches.93 Again, the venerable is preserved alongside the new, making visible the link between the pre-Islamic Visigothic past and the victorious Christian present thanks to Sancho’s hand. Although there is some disagreement among modern scholars about Sancho el Mayor’s actual role in the construction of the cathedral, he was certainly understood as fully responsible for it in the Middle Ages. For the medieval Navarese, a miraculous event involving hunting, a saint, and a cave – elements all present in the foundation legend of San Juan de la Peña – explained the discovery of the Visigothic shrine of San Antolín and the new construction added to it by Sancho el Mayor. According to medieval tradition, the king chased a wild boar into a cave. When Sancho had the animal cornered, and was about to cast his spear, paralysis froze his arm. Suspecting the intercession of the divine, the monarch prayed for an explanation of his mysterious malady. In answer to his prayer a figure appeared who informed him that he was in a sacred place that should not be profaned by the spilling of blood. The figure revealed that he was Saint Antoninus whose holy remains were present in the cave. Sancho begged the saint for forgiveness and promised to build a church dedicated to him on the site.94 This legend probably existed in the eleventh century before Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada wrote down a version in the thirteenth century but the exact date and place of its origin remain obscure.95 Ximénez de Rada’s legend suggests that medieval Christians believed that Sancho el Mayor was the patron of San Antolín, both the saint and his church in Palencia. The substantiality of their belief is open to question. The documents that are normally used by scholars in an attempt to clarify the foundation of the church of San Antolín are only slightly more reliable than the legend of Sancho’s paralyzed arm.96 Three documents, all problematic, signed with early eleventh-century dates, refer to the restoration of the see of Palencia.97 Peter Linehan and Julio González both claim they were all copied at least a century after the reinstatement of the see of Palencia but that they express some measure of truth.98 False information was interpolated with the original privileges in order to justify the ambitions of the bishop of Palencia, who became locked in rivalry with the bishop of Toledo after that city was retaken from the Muslims. A further motivation for falsification may have been challenges to the legitimacy of Palencia’s holdings made by the bishops of Oviedo and León.99 In the privilege of Vermudo III, dated 17 February 1035, the young king of León gives the city of Palencia to Poncio so that he can reinstate the bishopric.100 Sancho el Mayor is not mentioned. The king also gave

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the bishop a church dedicated to the Saviour, Santa María, and Saint Antoninus. In contradiction to this document the privilege of Sancho el Mayor, dated 21 January 1035, reinstated the see of Palencia.101 It mentions that Palencia had been left in desolation after the Muslim invasions, but divine inspiration and Poncio’s persuasion had encouraged Sancho el Mayor to restore the city’s bishopric, which in ancient times had once been second only to that of Toledo. This royal privilege also grants the rights and properties of the see to Poncio and Bernardo, its first two bishops, and sets the limits of the diocese as extending from where the Cea River runs into the Duero River in the west to the source of the Pisuerga and up to the fortress of Peñafil and beyond up to the Duero River in the east.102 A third document, dated 1059, the privilege of Fernando I, son of Sancho el Mayor and ruler of Castile, repeats some of the information given in Sancho’s privilege. This document credits Sancho with the reinstatement of the see of Palencia and Poncio as its first bishop. It also says that Sancho funded the construction of a church built of stone dedicated to the Saviour, the Virgin, and Saint Antoninus and that he and his wife Doña Mayor gave it many donations. The document also states the limits and holdings of the see of Palencia that were set by Sancho, squelching the claims of the bishops of León and Burgos. Fernando’s document, whether true or false, helped establish the belief that Sancho should be understood as the patron of San Antolín. Although the limits and privileges of the diocese recorded in these documents are suspect, their record of the reinstatement of the diocese at the instigation of Sancho with the help of Poncio, although questionable, was believed in the Middle Ages. Political interests as much as piety probably motivated the restoration of the see and the subsequent construction of the cathedral. There is no clear record of any bishop holding power in Palencia since the late seventh century.103 The see, nevertheless, carried more authority than newly created dioceses because of its previous existence in pre-Islamic times. The reinstatement of the old see and the appointment of a new bishop settled the dispute between the bishops of León and Burgos who both tried to claim properties in the region.104 The renewal of the see of Palencia also ended the competition between Leonese and Castilian laity for tributes from the lands now subject to the bishop, Poncio.105 At Sancho’s request Poncio de Tavernoles oversaw the renewal of the see of Palencia. He had been called from the eastern Pyrenees as a diplomatic envoy, elevated to the bishopric of Oviedo by the Leonese court in 1025, and installed as Palencia’s first bishop in 1033. Being an outsider, Poncio had fewer complicated allegiances to local

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authorities than a churchman born in the immediate region might have had. This and his dependency on Sancho for his position assured his allegiance to the king. Charles Bishko in his account of the diffusion of the cult of San Antolín throughout northern Spain questions the argument that Sancho el Mayor established the cult in Palencia. He indicates that Poncio could be a candidate but Vermudo III, in his brief return to power after Sancho’s death in 1035, is more likely. Bishko suggests that Vermudo accepted the newly established diocese and its Catalan bishop but that he realigned it with León by instigating the cult of San Antolín, which was more popular in the Leonese territory than in Navarra or Castile.106 The cathedral of Palencia, whether actually initiated by Sancho or Vermudo and built in alliance with Poncio, made visible the new bishop’s authority, and by association, the royal authority over the region. The Visigothic portion of the crypt stood as a relic of the see’s venerable origin in pre-Islamic times while the eleventh-century work made clear that the see had been restored. Although new in construction, the eleventhcentury church of San Antolín made reference to the past but to a more recent time than the Visigothic era. The striking similarity between the crypt of San Antolín and the lower level of the Asturian building known today as Santa María del Naranco was first noted by Helmut Schlunk. Built not far from Oviedo as the belvedere of a country residence by the Asturian king, Ramiro I (r. 842–50), Santa María del Naranco is a small two-storey structure, originally secular but converted into a church in the twelfth century.107 As in the crypt of San Antolín, its lower main chamber is covered by a low, stone barrel vault supported by five transverse arches springing from just above floor level (fig. 2.13). This palace on the slopes of Monte Naranco harks back to an even earlier Asturian building, the Cámara Santa in Oviedo. Alfonso II (r. 791–845), who ruled the Asturias prior to Ramiro, constructed this two-storey structure as part of his palatine complex in the heart of the new Asturian capital in the mid-eighth century. The Cámara Santa is not mentioned in the chronicles recording Alfonso’s patronage, but it shares with his other buildings so many similarities in materials and techniques that it can be assigned to his patronage with little doubt.108 The original appearance of Cámara Santa’s upper chapel, dedicated to San Miguel, is obscured by a twelfth-century renovation and an extensive modern restoration executed to repair the severe damage the building suffered during the Spanish Civil War.109 The lower chapel, however, dedicated to the Toledean martyr Santa Leocadia, retains most of its orig-

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inal appearance (fig. 2.14). Although not supported by transverse arches, the low, wide brick barrel vault covering Santa Leocadia recalls those over the crypts of Santa María del Naranco and San Antolín. The two Asturian buildings that share the most in common with the crypt in Palencia are not the most typical. The most frequently employed plans for Asturian churches – single or three-aisled basilicas with square apses and no crypts – and the usual forms, such as columns with carved capitals, were for some reason ignored. According to Helmut Schlunk, early Christian martyria in which the lower level served as the burial chamber for a saint and the upper as a chapel for worship served as the prototype for the two Asturian structures that bear such a strong resemblance to the lower portion of the new cathedral of Palencia.110 Typical examples survive at Pecs in Hungary, San Anastasio at Marusinac near Salona, and more pertinently, on the Iberian peninsula in the fourth-century martyrial church of La Alberca near Murcia.111 The bottom chamber of this small, two-level structure is covered with a low vault and the upper with a wooden roof. Its simple, single aisle, rectangular plan terminates at one end with a semicircular apse. La Alberca or a similar building could have served not only as the model for the Cámara Santa and Santa María del Naranco, Schlunk suggests, but also for the ruined Visigothic church, the remains of which form the eastern portion of the crypt of San Antolín.112 The eleventh-century cathedral of Palencia, then, seems to have been an echo of the very Visigothic church that once stood to its east, of which the crypt still remained as a memory. The new church was modified according to more complete intervening Asturian models that carried the clear signature of royal patronage and authority. Not all the elements, however, of the new cathedral in Palencia were borrowed from the past. Its semicircular east end and splayed windows do not come from the Asturian building tradition. Blind arcades like that ringing the east end of the crypt are present along the lateral walls of Santa María del Naranco and in the central apse of San Julían de los Prados built by Alfonso II and San Salvador de Priesca, consecrated in 921. But in these examples the arcades cover flat, not curved surfaces. Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression created by the crypt of San Antolín is that it imitates Asturian prototypes drawn from Visigothic precedents ultimately based on early Christian models. Vermudo, Poncio, or Sancho, if he initiated the construction of the cathedral at Palencia, would have had reasons for planning a new cathedral on Asturian models. Any one of the three could have chosen

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Asturian forms to evoke the prestige of the churches and the Visigothic associations of the Christian kingdom to emerge after the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula. The bishop, who had authority over the see of Oviedo before coming to Palencia, would have been familiar with Asturian churches. He could have wished to evoke the distinction of the older see with its legitimizing, although actually inauthentic, links to the Visigothic past by imitating its ecclesiastical architecture. Vermudo, the last of the Asturian-Leonese line, could have chosen to build a new church that made allusions to the older monuments of Oviedo to demonstrate the depth of his dynasty’s roots and to follow the paradigm of the artistic patronage of his ancestors as closely as possible. Sancho, if the patron, might have been trying to promote a continuity with the Asturian dynasty, just as the Asturians themselves, as scholars have frequently noted, had attempted to fabricate a sense of unbroken tradition with the earlier Visigothic kings who ruled the Iberian peninsula prior to the arrival of the Muslims.113 All three would have been acutely aware of how the Asturian monarchs had used the construction of churches and palaces to help consolidate and express their secular and spiritual authority with the goal of uniting and securing order among their subjects.114 If this was no longer evident from the buildings themselves by the early eleventh century, the Asturian chronicles that praised both the structures and their royal patrons made it abundantly clear. As architectural patrons, warriors, spiritual leaders, and rulers the Asturians were successful and thus well worthy of emulation. By sponsoring the writing of slanted historical chronicles and through imitation of the Visigothic royal ceremonial and ecclesiastical structures, the Asturian monarchs suggested, although it was not true, that they were descendants of the Visigothic kings. For instance, the Chronicle of Alfonso III puts forward the claim – yet to be confirmed by modern scholars – that Pelayo, the Asturian warlord responsible for the decisive Christian victory over the Muslims at Covadonga in 719, was a descendent of the Visigothic aristocracy.115 The Codex Albeldensis of 881, with an addition of 976, states clearly that Alfonso II instigated the idea that the Asturian kings were the heirs of the Visigoths and that their destiny was to regain their birthright from the Muslims. It records that in his new capital city of Oviedo ‘he [Alfonso II] established the order of the Visigoths as it had been in Toledo in the church and palace alike.’116 Later, Vermudo II (r. 982–99) reigning in León rather than Oviedo, formally confirmed the use of the Visigothic law code and acts of the church councils of Toledo during his rule.117 This contrived continuity with the Visigoths provided the

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Asturian kings with both a dynastic legitimacy and a rationale that justified their claims to the Muslim-held lands.118 More important, it legitimized their claim to sacred authority and thus the right to crush any Christian rivals who might challenge their assertions of power. Sancho’s ancestors in the Jimena dynasty may have had aspirations similar to those of the Asturian kings when it came to linking themselves with the Visigoths. The Liber Iudiciorum, also known as the Lex Visigothorum, section of the Codex of Albeldensis and its copy the Codex Aemilianensis of 976– 92, both close with an illustration that links Visigothic kings and the present rulers in Pamplona.119 In both examples the Visigothic kings Chindaswinth, Recceswinth, and Egica, who created the laws recorded in the document, are represented in the top register while below them stand Sancho II Garcés (r. 970–94), his wife Urraca, and her brother Ramiro de Viguera. According to Ángel Martín Duque these illustrations indirectly and symbolically suggest a restoration of the order of the Visigoths by the Pamplonan kings that elsewhere in the text is attributed to the Asturian king, Alfonso II.120 Both manuscripts also include a brief history of the Jimena dynasty in imitation of the Chronicle of Alfonso III. Sancho el Mayor, putting more faith in action than in manufactured history, literally grafted his family to the more prestigious Asturian family tree by marrying his sister Sancha to Alfonso V, king of León (r. 999– 1027),121 and later his eldest son Fernando to Sancha, the last of the line of direct heirs of the Asturian king Alfonso I (r. 739–57) after her brother Vermudo’s death in 1037. The new cathedral in Palencia follows a similar strategy of grafting new work onto old. A new structure generally following Asturian models was added to the older Visigothic crypt. The common root of both the Visigothic crypt and the new Asturian-looking church in palaeo-Christian models would have created the impression of continuity, constancy, and tradition sustained throughout a chaotic history. Simultaneously, the actual construction of the new church would have stood as a testament to the well-being of the present moment. The appearance of the cathedral of Palencia, then, represented the venerable lineage of the recently revived see and its vitality in the present, with the implication that, come what may, it would survive into the future. While Sancho el Mayor may not actually have been the patron of the cathedral of Palencia, he was firmly linked with its construction by 1059, thanks to Fernando’s assertions and by the circulation of the myth of his fortuitous discovery of San Antolín’s relics. The best-known and most monumental construction associated with

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Sancho el Mayor is the monastery of San Salvador at Leire. Dramatically sited high on a cliff, the monastery creates a point of reference in the vastness of the still rugged landscape of the Errando Mountains, fifty-six kilometres from Pamplona, the center of ancient Navarra (fig. 2.15). The bold but simple exterior of the chevet of San Salvador at Leire, the portion of the church usually associated with Sancho el Mayor, reveals three semicircular apses of equal height constructed with robust golden stones streaked with red, cut more or less precisely, and laid in relatively even courses, uninterrupted by breaks (fig. 2.16). These cyclopean walls are pierced with simple windows lacking the carved capitals, columns, and mouldings that the modern viewer expects to see in the large, vaulted, ashlar churches assigned the art historical label Romanesque. The chevet’s austere exterior does little if anything to prepare the visitor for the appearance of Leire’s troglodytic crypt (fig. 2.17). The three apses of the exterior lead the visitor to expect three aisles on the interior, but surprisingly there are four narrow barrel-vaulted chambers separated by arcades held up by columns or piers. In addition, a single narrow vaulted aisle runs north to south behind the west wall of the main space of the crypt. The crypt’s carved capitals overwhelm the space, not by the finesse of their carving or meaningful subject matter but by their sheer bulk. Extreme contrasts define this space. The barrel vaults are tall and thin, the arcade arches are low and broad; and the columns seem too short and too slim to support their mammoth capitals. The capitals are so huge, the cruciform piers so massive, and the transverse arches so thick and deep, that here in Leire’s crypt the masonry almost equals the space. The chevet of the upper church at Leire is less unusual than the crypt. Both its tall proportions and morphology are more like what we have come to expect in eleventh-century buildings (fig. 2.18). Its three apses, all of virtually equal height, are extended by only two bays with the south wall continuing one bay further still to the west. The foundations of piers found in the central nave during excavations indicate that further construction was intended but not pursued.122 Despite the obvious differences in appearance, nothing indicates that the crypt and the upper church were built at different times. No evident breaks disrupt the homogeneity of the seamless masonry, the piers of the upper church align with those of the crypt, similar flattened arches appear above and below, and the carved capitals of both crypt and church share the same transcendental awkwardness. The stumpy proportions of the crypt that contrast so vividly with the taller configuration of the chevet above may not reflect its original appearance. A restoration in 1867 and

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inconclusive excavations of 1935, cut short by the Spanish Civil War, suggest that the original floor level of the crypt might have been forty centimetres to a metre lower than it is today, making its proportions seem less compressed and top heavy (fig. 2.19).123 Despite their differences, the bulk of the evidence indicates that the crypt and the chevet are the product of the same campaign.124 The rest of San Salvador’s nave dates to the sixteenth century except for the elaborately carved west portals that date to the twelfth century.125 Sancho el Mayor has figured large in older accounts of the history of Leire.126 His donations, interpreted as an indication of his special devotion to the monastery, were represented as exceeding those of all the previous Pamplonan rulers.127 Scholars have understood that Sancho, like – the Pamplonan kings during al-Mans. ur’s raids made between 978 and 1002, maintained Leire as his principle residence, calling the monastery, ‘primum et antiquissimum iusque regium et precordiale tocius regni mei,’ or ‘permanent and ancient capital and heart of his realm.’128 The king favoured the monastery not only by his generous donations, but by subjecting the diocese of Pamplona to the rule of Leire’s abbot, and by introducing the rule of Saint Benedict according to Cluniac custom. Thus, it followed for many scholars, among them Gómez-Moreno, Lacarra and Gudiol, Moral Contreas, and Lojendio, that Sancho el Mayor must have constructed the crypt and chevet of the monastery’s church.129 Recently, more critical approaches to Leire’s documents indicate that earlier scholars were hoodwinked by forgers active at Leire in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Many records of the donations made to the monastery by Sancho early in the eleventh century have proved to be forgeries in order to back up Leire’s claims to property.130 Legitimate documents indicate the king gave only a modest amount to the monastery, mainly in the second half of his rule.131 The assumptions that Sancho introduced Cluniac precepts at the monastery and that the diocese of Pamplona was subject to the abbot of Leire have also proved to be based on documents that were falsified.132 Although the offices of the bishop of Pamplona and the abbot of Leire were held by the same person after 1024, this did not mean that the diocese submitted to the monastery, as a falsified document of 1023 suggests.133 Despite Sancho’s somewhat diminished role in the monastery’s history there are still a number of reasons to believe that he at least instigated the construction of a church at Leire and that his heirs remained closely involved in the project. The sheer number of forgeries dated to Sancho’s rule indicates that the king must have had some actual interest in the

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monastery or the forgers would have had no hope of establishing credibility for the claim of their documents. Although San Salvador’s appearance differs from the other churches restored by the king, the monastery holds much in common with the other sites where he supported building. Like those at San Juan de la Peña, San Millán de la Cogolla, and the cathedral of Palencia, the monastery of Leire was located at a frontier site where there was need for Sancho to consolidate his power. Leire played an essential part in asserting a Christian presence, specifically a Navarese one, in an area that had been devastated and left insecure by the raids of – 134 al-Mans. ur. A new monumental church would certainly have underlined the importance of the monastery and the return of stability and well-being to the region. As at San Millán de la Cogolla, Leire’s abbot was also the region’s bishop. He provided religious support in this frontier area by organizing smaller churches into parishes and by protecting smaller monasteries from the laity.135 Like the other sites where Sancho built, Leire had an old and venerable history. Human remains discovered in caves in the surrounding hills suggest that Leire, like San Millán de la Cogolla and San Juan de la Peña, was once the home of a community of anchorites.136 The first written reference to an actual monastery at the site exists in the form of a letter written by Eulogius of Cordoba who visited the community in the mid-ninth century. His 851 letter to Guilesindo, bishop of Pamplona, represents Leire as well established and endowed with a rich library, implying that it had already been in existence for some time.137 At Leire, as he had at San Juan de la Peña and San Millán de la Cogolla, Sancho probably played some role in instituting the Benedictine rule. According to Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, the king’s name would not have appeared in the falsified 1022 document that supposedly put Leire under Cluniac rule if this were not the case.138 Although the crypt and chevet of San Salvador at Leire are not connected to an anchorite’s cave, their western limits once terminated at an older church with which they might have originally been joined. In the course of the 1935 excavations Francisco Íñiquez Almech discovered the foundations of a small church under the current Gothic nave. He found the profiles of three semicircular apses, the central apse being best defined, and external walls that indicated a rebuilding. All were built of lowquality masonry.139 Íñiquez suggests that there was an early single-aisle church with one apse, the one visited by Eulogius of Córdoba in the ninth century, that was expanded in the tenth century by the gradual addition

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of two apses, two aisles, and additional nave bays.140 This tenth-century church aligns with the crypt and the chevet in terms of width and its eastern-most wall comes into close proximity with the western-most portions of the crypt which was built, according to Íñiquez, as a way of levelling the uneven site to permit the expansion of the older church to the east with a new addition.141 San Salvador at Leire fits the profile of the other sites that received new structures thanks to the Navarese king’s encouragement. It was a venerable foundation located in an area that had been repeatedly ravaged by the Muslims. New construction was connected to old. Like Sancho’s other churches, San Salvador shares similar features with Catalan and Asturian monuments. For example, San Salvador’s dramatic site, tall proportions of the chevet, and the crypt’s monolithic columns supporting large, simply decorated cubic capitals are reminiscent of Saint-Martin at Canigou founded in 1005 by Guifred, count of Conflet and Cerdagne and the older brother of Bishop Oliba142 (fig. 2.20). First consecrated in 1009, this three-aisled church is generally thought to have been completed by the second consecration of 1026.143 The continuous line running from the curve of San Salvador’s apse straight to the flank, Íñiguez indicates, is witnessed also at four eleventh-century Catalan monuments – SaintMichel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Genis de Fontaines, Saint-André-de-Sorède, and San Pere de Roda.144 Two Asturian churches, San Salvador de Valdediós constructed by Alfonso III (866–910) and the mid-eleventh-century San Pedro de Teverga, built only forty kilometres from the royal capital of Oviedo, show features similar to Leire’s church. Luis María de Lojendio has pointed out the similarity between the large, simply carved cubic capitals that frame the central apse at Valdediós and those at Leire.145 Leire’s crypt capitals bear a general similarity to those in the ninth-century Asturian church in their inverted pyramidal shape, oversized proportions, deeply cut concentric grooves, and the way the capital, abacus, and astragal are all carved from the same stone. San Pedro de Teverga shares more in common with San Salvador de Leire.146 Built after the passing of the golden age of the Asturian realm in the mid-eleventh century, San Pedro at Teverga represents the swan song of the Asturian building tradition in its three-aisled nave covered with barrel vaults, its high narrow proportions, and the decoration of its capitals.147 Although Asturian in some characteristics, San Pedro’s ashlar masonry, similar to Leire’s, marks a departure from that building tradition’s use of rubble masonry. Robust monolithic columns related to those at Leire, alternating with piers, sup-

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port the nave arcades in San Pedro instead of the square piers of older Asturian churches (fig. 2.21). Two of San Pedro’s foliate capitals inscribed with deep concentric grooves are almost identical to those in the crypt at Leire (fig. 2.22).148 Narrow corbels with simple decoration support the roofs at both sites.149 Although both churches represent the heritage of Asturian architecture, San Pedro at Teverga is a direct descendent, while San Salvador at Leire is more distantly related through the borrowing of specific characteristics. Written documents offer little reinforcement for the mass of circumstantial evidence that indicates that Sancho el Mayor initiated the construction of San Salvador at Leire. Two documents recording consecrations attended by the royal court and episcopal dignitaries have frequently been used to date the crypt and chevet of San Salvador. The first dates to 1057 and the second to 1098; both indicate that the ceremonies took place in the third week of October around the twenty-third, the feast day of the virgin martyrs Nunila and Alodia, whose remains were brought from Islamic Huesca to the monastery in the second half of the ninth century.150 Scholars have tended to link the finishing of the crypt and chevet to one consecration or the other. Gómez-Moreno, Biurrun, Lacarra and Gudiol Ricart, Gudiol Ricart and Gaya Nuño, Íñiguez, Lojendio, and Moral go early151 whereas Lampérez y Romea, Whitehill, Gaillard, and Tyrrel go late.152 Unfortuanately, both documents are problematic in terms of their legitimacy. The 1057 document was at least ‘retouched’ if not completely authored in the twelfth century.153 The 1098 document was heavily edited in the middle of the twelfth century.154 Nevertheless, both may suggest some points of truth concerning information other than donations and privileges. Although the document of 1057 makes no reference to Sancho el Mayor, it expresses the continued interest of his descendants in the monastery. In it the Navarese king, Sancho Garcés IV el de Peñalén (1054–76), the grandson of Sancho el Mayor, praises his father, García Sánchez III el de Nájera (1035–54), who had wished to see the dedication of this church.155 This clearly expresses the continued interest of Sancho’s heirs in the construction of San Salvador. If Sancho el Mayor did not begin the new church at Leire, his son most likely did, following strategies similar to those of his father. Deciphering the construction of San Salvador’s crypt is a complicated affair. At first glance, its ungainly appearance suggests experimentation and unexpected changes of plans. When Íñiguez excavated the crypt in 1935, he found irregularities that led him to believe that construction

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plans had been changed more than once along the way. For instance, he discovered foundation walls upon which nothing was ever built jutting out from the walls separating the apses. This led him to the unlikely conclusion that the walls separating the apses were originally intended to be extended to produce three separate chambers built only to raise the church above to an appropriate level.156 According to Íñiguez, this plan was abandoned when the walls were at a low level. Rectangular piers with applied columns were intended to replace them.157 This plan was rejected in turn and columns were substituted for the piers. Íñiguez in the course of the excavation also discovered that the columns extended well below the modern floor to rest on different levels. Even the highest was still below the incomplete foundation walls jutting out from between the apses. The complexity and erratic nature of the archaeological evidence in the crypt at Leire makes it difficult to come to any confident conclusions about its construction. The rudimentary appearance of the crypt of San Salvador suggests an archaism that, if not calculated, was at least tolerated after it was built. Like San Juan de la Peña and San Millán de la Cogolla, the church at Leire, too, was built at a site where an earlier church still stood and where anchorites once lived in the caves in the nearby hills. At Leire, no living rock protrudes into the crypt but its architectural features are so massive and elemental that they evoke the chthonic. The Visigothic crypt at San Antolín in Palencia has a similar effect. Being in the crypt at either site is akin to being in the bowels of the earth. The crypt at Leire is not really as haphazard and crude as first glance suggests. There is no denying its awkwardness, but a closer inspection of its layout reveals the sophisticated meshing of a three-aisle with a fouraisle plan to produce sixteen roughly square bays (fig. 2.23). If the three apses had been extended by only three aisles the result would have been a wide central vessel with a vault that would have looked particularly broad and flat in comparison to those over the much narrower side aisles. Leire’s masons seem to have made the best of this bad situation but not without some experimentation. Perhaps lowering the floor level was the first attempt to produce more harmonious proportions in the crypt. This might explain the column bases at different levels that Íñiquez discovered. The current appearance, however, was achieved by dividing the wide central aisle into two with a row of columns. By doing this, the masons produced a more harmonious effect of four aisles roughly equal in width and covered with barrel vaults of the same height. The placement of the crypt’s oversized capitals indicates careful plan-

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ning. The most elaborately carved are clustered around the east and central area of the crypt close to the well-lit apses where they are seen immediately upon entering the crypt’s door placed just west of the north apse. Plainer capitals with little or no carving are placed toward the back of the crypt where it is darker and they are less visible. Although spatially sophisticated and decorated with a calculated arrangement, there are features of Leire’s crypt that are inconsistent in their construction. For instance, some capitals have impost blocks and some do not. In the outermost arcades there is almost always something uncomfortable about the way the transverse arches meet the capitals or imposts on which they fall. Frequently, they are too robust for the surfaces upon which they rest. Sometimes they are simply left to protrude over the edge, occasionally they are chamfered to meet an impost more harmoniously, and in one unique example the rib rests on a corbel coursed into the wall above the impost. These irregularities do not exist in the central arcade or where the transverse arches meet the large cruciform piers separating the second and third bays of the outer arcades. Nor do they exist in the upper church, which lacks the general archaic feel of the crypt. Clearly, chance and calculation worked together to produce the unusual rudimentary appearance of San Salvador’s crypt. Unlike the other three sites discussed in this chapter, the crypt and chevet of San Salvador do not display the passage of history in their fabric. If the tenth-century church still stood to their west this would have been the case. Whether or not this older church had horseshoe arches in elevation remains unknown. Yet one horseshoe is incorporated into the fabric of San Salvador, making a clear reference to the older architecture of the Iberian peninsula. The frame around the window of the central apse of the upper church has a distinct horseshoe shape (fig. 2.24). Although subtle, this horseshoe arch is centrally placed behind and above the main altar where it could not have been missed. Although not historically authentic like the horseshoe arches at San Millán de la Cogolla, San Juan de la Peña, or in the Visigothic portions of San Antolín, this newer copy was still an unmistakable reference to the past. From an economic standpoint Sancho’s building projects are a result of their location in a frontier realm. Their construction coincides roughly with the beginning of the collection of parias from the Muslims of Zaragoza, Lérida, and Denia beginning around 1022.158 Parias, which would buoy up the economy of Christian Spain for at least the next fifty years, were a form of protection money extorted from the Muslims. Despite their military weakness and political crisis, the Muslim taifa king-

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doms still maintained a comfortable economic level. In theory Sancho, the first Christian king to collect parias, promised to provide military services for the Islamic kingdoms in return for payment. But in reality the Muslims were buying independence and peace from the more bellicose Christians.159 In the short run it was easier for them to buy peace than to win it militarily. Ironically, in this way the Muslims of Zaragoza, Lérida, and Denia financed the repair and replacement of the churches de– stroyed by al-Mans. ur and his sons. There is no denying that the churches built and repaired by Sancho el Mayor break with the Christian architecture of the immediately preceding generations in their substitution of the semicircular for the horseshoe arch. Focusing narrowly on this innovative motif alone prevented scholars from seeing that Sancho’s churches as a whole were really a pastiche of old and new. They sought to bring the Navarese king’s buildings into alignment with early eleventh-century architecture beyond the Pyrenees by labelling them ‘Romanesque’ without considering how these buildings were the product of the local needs of a frontier kingdom rather than the provincial by-product of an international aesthetic movement. Sancho’s buildings are a response to a particular moment in time when the very survival of the king’s territory demanded the reconstruction of this religious infrastructure. By repairing and extending venerable holy sites the king linked a somewhat unstable Christian present to the firm foundation of an older Christian past, thus healing and transcending the injuries inflicted by Islamic aggression and other Christian challenges to his rule. This was made all the more poignant by the presence of anchorites’ caves at San Juan de la Peña and San Millán de la Cogolla and the Visigothic crypt at Palencia, or in the case of Leire perhaps through the evocation of the chthonic through the use of primitive forms and a horseshoe arch in the apse. Although Sancho’s actual link with San Antolín is somewhat tenuous and that with Leire improbable, he was associated with their authorship during the Middle Ages. They therefore informed the understanding of the Navarese king’s architecture for the medieval visitor as much as if he had been their actual patron. By juxtaposing new elements with old, Sancho’s buildings linked the vital new order of Navarra with the venerable past, thus creating a longer, deeper sense of history.

3 Piety in Action: Royal Women and the Advent of Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

For in truth the far-sighted and eminently rational woman, of dominant temper and executive ability, is a constant figure in the history and literature of Spain, to be traced from the queens, Doña Urraca and Blanche of Castile, through the saints, Terese Cepeda y Ahumada and Sor María de Agreda, down to the heroines of Pérez Galdós – Leré, and Electra, and Victoria who was called La Loca de la Casa.1 There is little Romanesque about the chalice which Santo Domingo (1041– 1073) gave to the abbey of Silos. On the other hand, that given by Urraca to San Isidoro of León before 1101 has strong Romanesque feeling, especially in its sculptured head highly significant for the history of plastic art in the second half of the XI century.2

With the death of Sancho el Mayor and the ensuing competition by his sons for territory and power, Christian unity on the Iberian peninsula disintegrated. Now, like Islamic Spain after the fall of the caliphate, the Christian north was broken into a patchwork of small realms with loosely defined boundaries (fig. 3.1). Until the end of the eleventh century when the Christians began to make a concerted effort to conquer the Islamic portion of the peninsula, these small Christian kingdoms competed with each other, as well as with the Muslim taifas, for dominance. A frontier ethos was prevalent throughout the Iberian peninsula in both Christian and Muslim territories. Rural populations pushed into unclaimed or weakly defended land redefining borders, alliances were based on the expediency of the moment, identities were ambivalent, and social structures were at least pliable if not fluid.

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Within the small kingdoms of Navarre, León-Castile, and Aragon, royal women held a surprising amount of power and were more likely to be active in the rule of the kingdom than their counterparts in the rest of Europe. According to the historian Bernard Reilly, the royal family was the core around which the emerging Christian realms took shape.3 The constant drive by these small kingdoms for territorial expansion, Theresa Earenfight notes, gave rise to a pragmatic model of monarchy that allowed royal women to participate in the affairs of the realm and to inherit land.4 The constant movement of a king throughout his territory increased his reliance on both the male and female members of the dynasty to administer his affairs in his absence. Although the king remained primary, the rest of the royal family, men and women, functioned as a corporate unit making up the bulk of the king’s court. This corporate model of rule permitted power sharing particularly with royal women who could step into service in the event of a monarch’s minority, illness, or death.5 Royal mothers with under-aged sons could rule as regents, effectively holding a son’s power in trust until he was old enough to wield it.6 For instance, Urraca, the sister of Sancho el Mayor, and widow of Alfonso V of León (r. 999–1028), governed for her son Vermudo III, who acceded to the throne at age nine. Some of the power of royal women stemmed from their ability to figure in men’s social mobility within the aristocratic hierarchy of Christian Spain’s fledgling kingdoms. For instance, married royal women had the right to leave their patrimony in the form of a perpetual trust, or mayorazgo, to their second-born sons, thus raising their economic status.7 Royal women could transmit the rights of their fathers to their sons when no other male relative existed.8 The frontier nature of the Christian kingdoms worked in favour of the rights of common women as well as those born into the royal families. For instance, they could under some circumstances inherit, manage, and transmit property. In Aragon, the 1077 Fuero of Jaca, a legal charter granted the city by the king, stipulates that women without sons, whether royal or not, could dispose of their lands as they saw fit.9 Heath Dillard’s groundbreaking study on women’s status in frontier towns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries establishes that urban women could have considerable property rights thanks to the need to repopulate the frontier.10 A widow, for instance, could keep the property she held before her marriage and was entitled to a proportion of the couple’s wealth at the time of her husband’s death.11 Typically, daughters and sons inherited equally in frontier towns in order to encourage women to remain in

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their home towns even after marriage to an outsider. Fictional representations suggest that women knew they had rights and social standing.12 According to Louise Mirrer, the exaggerated portrayals of overly bold women whose independent actions cause the demise of men and bring havoc on society, which are a standard representation in Spanish oral and written traditions from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, present a negative stereotype grounded in a reality that permitted female independence.13 The women in the family of Sancho el Mayor – his wife Doña Mayor, his daughter-in-law Sancha, married to Fernando, king of León-Castile (r. 1037–65), and his granddaughters the infantas of León-Castile and Aragon – were influential at court and throughout their respective realms14 (fig. 3.2). As in most European kingdoms, marriage, motherhood, and kinship were essential to the well-being of the royal family, and therein lay some of the power of these royal women.15 But some of them used more active measures to gain power from their brothers. The infanta Urraca (1034–1101), for instance, seems to have played a role in the assassination of her brother Sancho II, king of León-Castile (r. 1065–72) in 1072. Sancha (1045–97), sister of Sancho Ramírez, king of Aragon (r. 1063–94), had her younger brother García removed from the bishopric of Pamplona in 1082 and took over its administrative duties in his place.16 The most powerful of the women who descended from Sancho was his great-granddaughter, Queen Urraca, who ruled León-Castile with all the authority of a male monarch after the death of her father in 1109 until her death in 1126.17 Early Spanish historical chronicles, Lucy Pick notes, represent royal women, such as the infanta Urraca, as wielding their power openly in the public sphere alongside royal men, not privately as is often assumed. She observes that the daughters, sisters, and aunts of kings have a more prominent place in the chronicles than the wives and mothers, indicating that women had significant functions other than bearing children within the royal family.18 Performing pious acts, such as donating gifts to churches or procuring relics, and praying for the living and the dead were among their important roles. The infantaticum, infantado, or infantazgo, an institution unique to the Christian frontier kingdoms between the tenth and twelfth centuries, allowed royal women more political clout and wealth than those living in territories outside the Iberian peninsula. Unmarried infantas, or princesses, dedicated to God although not strictly nuns, held and managed large tracts of monastic lands.19 Although the women were managers

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rather than actual owners, they still controlled the infantado and its income during their lives.20 Perhaps this was a way for Christian kings and noblemen to assure that their daughters would never be forced to wed a Muslim husband as was Teresa. After her father’s death, according to the chronicle written by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, her brother Alfonso V, king of León (r. 999–1028) married her against her will and her religious beliefs to a Muslim king of Toledo.21 The infantado allowed Christian princesses independence and wealth that could be translated into political power. Their dedication to God gave them an aura of sanctity and their material resources permitted them to perform the pious acts, such as donations to churches, that were an important part of their duties within the royal family. The institution seems to have begun in the tenth century. In 978 the count of Castile, García Fernández (d. 995) established a monastery dedicated to saints Cosmas and Damian in Covarrubias for his daughter. Although she probably never became a nun, she administered the monastic domain as if she were its abbess.22 The same seems to have been true for Elvira, whose father, Ramiro II, king of León (r. 931–50), built a monastery, San Salvador de Palaz del Rey, for her within the walls of León according to the Chronicle of Sampiro.23 Antonio Viñayo González suggests that this was the beginning of the Leonese infantado.24 This infantado was held by Sancha before and perhaps even during her marriage to Fernando I, king of León-Castile (r. 1037–65). He continued this institution by leaving his unmarried daughters, the infantas Urraca and Elvira, all the monasteries in his realm so that they would not be forced to marry.25 Both women remained single and Urraca, as mentioned above, became deeply involved in the competition for power among her brothers. In part this was thanks to the independence provided by the infantado. In the kingdom of Aragon, where the royal family stemmed from Sancho el Mayor’s illegitimate son Ramiro I (r. 1035–64), Sancho’s granddaughters, Sancha, Urraca, and Teresa, played an influential role in the affairs of the realm.26 Here too, royal women seem to have held and administered monastic property, although the lack of evidence makes it hard to know how widespread the practice was. Sancha was given the monastery of Santa Cecila at Aibar, the Villa Miranda, and the estate of San Pelayo de Atés by her grandmother on the condition that they would be passed on to the sisters of Santa María at Santa Cruz de la Serós at the death of the younger woman.27 Widow of Count Ermengol III of Urgel, Sancha was among the most powerful members of the royal Aragonese court during the kingship of her brother Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064–94).

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She judged cases along with the king and queen and signed documents with both Sancho Ramírez and his heir, Pedro I (r. 1094–1100). For instance, she witnessed the will of Count Sancho Galíndez in 1080.28 She administered the diocese of Pamplona, as mentioned above, a number of secular properties, and the monasteries of San Pedro in Siresa and Santa Cruz de la Serós, endowing the latter with considerable donations.29 Most historians agree that she played a crucial role in the consolidation of the realm of Aragon.30 It would not be true to say that royal women were on an equal footing with royal men, but they were not penniless or powerless in mid-eleventhcentury Christian Spain. The structure of royal families in which siblings, except for the oldest male, held a potential for power regardless of gender favoured the active participation of women in the affairs of the kingdom. Land-holding, legal, and religious institutions afforded aristocratic women the wealth, independence, and status to be patrons of the arts. Their involvement in maintaining the welfare of their realms frequently took the form of prayer; money, property, or costly objects donated to religious institutions; and the construction of churches. Through these virtuous actions they made their piety evident and hoped to ensure the divine blessing of their kingdom.31 Over seventy years ago both the Spanish scholar, Manuel GómezMoreno, and the French art historian, Georges Gaillard – both key participants in the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ quarrel – noted in passing that a preponderant number of the earliest Romanesque churches in the kingdoms of Christian Iberia were built thanks to the patronage of royal women.32 They diminished the significance of this enthusiastic female patronage by couching it in terms that made it look auxiliary to male patronage or as simply the chance result of extenuating circumstances. For instance, Gómez-Moreno writes that from the early eleventh century on, the Spanish artistic impulse was linked to the king, Sancho el Mayor, and to his descendants, who all received ‘inspiration from their wives and sisters.’33 Documents, he tells the reader, reveal that the proponents of the Romanesque style were Sancho el Mayor’s wife, Doña Mayor; Sancha, her daughter-in-law married to Fernando I, king of León-Castile; and this couple’s daughter, Urraca, sister and influential advisor to the next king of León-Castile, Alfonso VI. In addition, he mentions Estefanía, Placencia, and Felicia, the queens of Navarre, and Ermesendis and Guisla, the countesses of Cataluña.34 While his statement gives some credit to these aristocratic women, Gómez-Moreno undercuts the importance of their patronage by failing to mention the specific churches built thanks to

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their largesse and by suggesting that their main role was the passive one of muse – givers of inspiration – rather than the active one of patron. Gaillard mentions the same countesses, princesses, and queens, but in several instances he links their names with the buildings financed by their donations.35 For example, he credits Doña Mayor with the foundation of San Martín at Frómista. But like Gómez-Moreno, he minimizes the personal initiative and responsibility of these women by suggesting that their husbands and fathers were so pre-occupied fighting the Muslims that by default they left the less crucial chore of caring for religious foundations to the women.36 Writing in an age before women demanded the serious consideration of their contribution to history and culture, Gaillard and Gómez-Moreno chose not to explore the matter further. In accordance with the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ debate established by Porter and Mâle, their main scholarly concern was establishing a precise chronology that charted the stylistic development of the architectural sculpture displayed in the churches along the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela. They arrived at their chronologies through painstaking comparative visual analyses underpinned by an unquestioning belief in art’s evolution towards naturalistic representation and faith in the factuality of the medieval written evidence they consulted for dates. Their minutely detailed studies were rigorous, scientific, and disinterested on the surface, but their main goal – to find the site of extraordinary creativity where the pilgrimage roads’ style of Romanesque began – was still rooted in national pride. Based loosely on a philological model, their method was to isolate the carved capitals they studied and to present them as visual data that could be marshalled into a rational order that transcended the ambiguity, obscurity, and confusion of the historical context, and especially the contingencies of gender. Contextual issues, such as patronage, were less significant. Worthy art was understood as having been made for its own sake and thus transcended the banal realities of its own time. The two unenthusiastic accounts of women’s patronage authored by Gaillard and Gómez-Moreno did little to stimulate further study of the impact of female patronage on the advent of the Romanesque style in Christian Iberia. Georgiana Goddard King, for reasons explained in chapter 1, provided an exception. Throughout The Way of Saint James she mentions the contribution made by queens and princesses to the construction of buildings along the pilgrimage roads. For instance, she points out that Doña Mayor or possibly her daughter-in-law Doña Este-

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fanía, the wife and queen of García Sánchez el de Nájera, built the bridge at Puenta la Reina.37 She also links Doña Mayor with the construction of San Martín at Frómista38 Repeatedly, she stresses the important role played by royal women in both the history and cultural life of medieval Spain, but her work had little impact on the field. Until the last two decades of the twentieth century most of the scholarship addressing the first appearance of Romanesque architecture and sculpture on the Iberian peninsula, as discussed in chapter 1, fell into alignment with the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ paradigm. The important role played by women patrons in the advent of Romanesque architecture in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain was sidelined by this chronological debate. The scholarship addressing the Doña Sancha sarcophagus, a pivotal monument for understanding the development of Romanesque sculpture in Spain’s Christian kingdoms, typifies the process that occurred (fig. 3.3). The central portion of the front face of the Doña Sancha sarcophagus is filled by two angels carrying aloft a naked figure, representing the soul, surrounded by a mandorla. Three clerics march under an arch, to the left of the central scene, while a woman flanked by two female attendants sits enthroned under an arch on the right. The back of the sarcophagus shows two warriors in combat and a figure, perhaps Samson, grasping the jaws of a lion. Once located in the Romanesque church of Santa Cruz de la Serós, it was moved to its current location in the Benedictine convent in Jaca in 1622, well after the nuns themselves had abandoned the medieval site in 1555. The first written record of the sarcophagus associates it with Sancha, daughter of Ramiro I of Aragon.39 When the sarcophagus was placed in the Benedictine convent in the seventeenth century, a plaque was installed over it saying that it contained the bones of Sancha and her two sisters, Teresa and Urraca. The imagery on the stone sarcophagus seems to point in the direction of this Aragonese princess and her sisters. The woman seated in rigid frontality on a throne flanked by two slightly smaller standing women who look out from the composition less directly and with less authority is most often identified as Sancha. The two standing women are assumed to be her two sisters. When the sarcophagus was opened in 1993 the coffin within was found to be divided into three partitions each containing the bones of a single person. This, too, suggests that perhaps the traditional account should not be readily dismissed. Although it had been discussed earlier by Spanish scholars, the Doña Sancha sarcophagus entered the canon of international art history in

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1924 when Porter used it as the lynch pin to hold in place the dating of a ‘hitherto unrecognized school of Romanesque art’ in Aragon.40 He accepted the tradition that connects the sarcophagus with Doña Sancha and identified the enthroned woman as the princess flanked by her sisters. But it was mainly her death, which he assumed occurred around 1096 when her name is last mentioned in documents, that had significance for Porter. After the discovery of a document mentioning Sancha’s name dated to August 1097, Porter assumed that date as a terminus post quem for the creation of the sarcophagus.41 He believed that her death gave him a fixed point in time, allowing him to posit the sarcophagus as a Romanesque monument securely dated to the last years of the eleventh century. He went on to connect it to similar sculpture in Aragon and Italy to build a chronology based on formal development. This permitted him once again to challenge the French view that ‘Toulouse was the cradle of Romanesque sculpture’ and to conclude that ‘stone sculpture existed in Aragon earlier than Languedoc.’42 Porter’s use of the tomb to fix a date around which to base a chronology is followed by Hermann Beenken and Géza de Francovich, although the monuments they compare to the sarcophagus and its place in their chronologies vary somewhat.43 Not surprisingly, Porter’s dating of the sarcophagus was challenged by French scholars, who wanted to push its date into the twelfth century. For instance, Gaillard, in his Les débuts de la sculpture romane espagnole, compared the sarcophagus to similar sculpture in Aragon, but rather than seeing the tomb at the beginning of this series of related carvings, he assumed it came at the end in the mid-twelfth century.44 This, of course, would mean that the Spanish monument was made much later than the first monumental sculpture in the south of France. It also severed any direct link between the carved sarcophagus and Sancha, who by the midtwelfth century was long dead, removing any possibility of her having played a role in the creation of the work.45 More recently, with the shift in scholarly priorities stimulated by feminism and critical theory, scholars have turned their attention to the patronage of royal women in the Christian kingdoms of medieval Spain. Susan Caldwell, Therese Martin, Rose Walker, and John Williams have all investigated the artistic patronage of the royal women of León-Castile during the eleventh and twelfth centuries during the early period of the Romanesque style in that region. Caldwell spearheaded this interest in the mid-1980s when she explored the gifts that the infanta Urraca (d. 1101) gave to San Isidoro in León. While subsequent authors contest Caldwell’s dating of the construction campaigns of San Isidoro, they pur-

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sued areas of research, such as the infantado and artistic patronage, or Queen Sancha’s dynastic ambitions and the construction of a family mausoleum, which she pioneered.46 Williams examines how the establishment of San Isidoro as a dynastic centre ‘owed a particular debt to female members of the Leonese royal family,’ indicating Queen Sancha’s initiative in the construction of a dynastic burial place, her donation with her husband Fernando of luxury objects for San Isidoro, and the contributions to that church’s construction made by the infanta Urraca and Queen Urraca (r. 1109–26).47 In Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain, a thorough study of San Isidoro’s archaeology, documents, and historiography, Martin redates the bulk of the church’s construction to the reign of Queen Urraca. She interprets the church as a public show of power meant to strengthen Urraca’s somewhat tenuous position as a queen ruling in her own right and she contextualizes the queen’s patronage in terms of that of her female ancestors and contemporary queens in other realms.48 Walker analyses the infantado, royal Leonese-Castilian and Aragonese women’s power and artistic patronage, and the role royal women may have played in liturgical reform.49 In a focused study on the Panteón de los Reyes at San Isidoro she examines how the infanta Urraca promoted the decoration of a liturgical space that would promote the importance of her infantado in the face of the Cluniacs, whose power was steadily increasing in the northern Iberian peninsula.50 While these scholars may not reach consensus about the dates and who built which portions of San Isidoro, they all agree that the royal women of León-Castile were largely responsible for the construction and decoration of this Romanesque monument. The connection between women patrons and the Romanesque buildings other than San Isidoro built in León-Castile remains problematic. If these earlier churches are grouped and examined on the basis of shared visual characteristics and their documented links with aristocratic women, a new picture of both the advent of the style and the motives for royal women’s patronage begins to emerge. The patronage of these churches may be motivated by and reflect a woman ruler’s political motives as Martin suggests, but they also represent female devotion translated into stone. These churches, in which the supernal and the earthly were believed to meet, were simultaneously active spiritual exercise and its tangible representation made in hope of winning God’s approbation. Divine support was crucial in these small kingdoms struggling for superiority against a pagan enemy. Royal female patronage of religious buildings

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and luxury arts, like the military actions of their male relatives, was intended to ensure the success and continuing existence of their realms in the face of competition for territory. Two early Romanesque churches built in the vicinity of Palencia and a third, located not very far away in León, are linked by the similar appearance of their capitals and because the impetus and funds for their construction came from royal or aristocratic women. Written evidence commemorates the role of a Countess Elvira in the construction of the now sadly dilapidated monastery of San Salvador at Nogal de las Huertas, once also known as San Salvador de Nucares (fig. 3.4). Elvira Sánchez or Sáchiz was the widow of Fernando Díaz and probably the daughter of Count Sancho of Castile. She bore three children but only a daughter, Tota, survived at the time of her husband’s death.51 In 1066 she served as witness to the will of Sancho el Mayor’s widow, Doña Mayor. Elvira, as a widow with no male heir, had the right to dispose of her material goods and property as she saw fit. She chose to found the monastery of San Salvador on land she held on the banks of the Carrión River. Eventually, this property passed into the patrimony of Costanza, wife of Alfonso VI, and upon her death the king gave it to the Cluniac monastery of Sahagún in 1093.52 Two inscriptions carved in eleventh-century letters on plaques set into newer walls connect Countess Elvira with San Salvador.53 When transcribed these inscriptions read: ‘+In nomine d(omi)ni nos(tr)i Ih(es)u xpi Ob (h)onore s(an)c(t)i salvatoris yelvira sanses hoc fecit in era m(i)l(le)sima centessima prima regnante rex Ferdinando in Leg(i)one et in Castella’ (fig. 3.5) and ‘+In nomine domini n(o)s(tr)i Ih(es)u xpi Ob (h)onorem s(anc)ti salvatoris yelvira sanses hoc fecit.’54 Without a doubt, the goal of these plaques was to establish publicly for all to see that the countess founded the church of San Salvador and that she did so in Era 1101 following the Mozarabic calendar, or in 1063 AD according to the Gregorian. Literally written in stone, these plaques composed a record of Elvira’s patronage that was meant to persist through time. Made for a more select audience, the legal record of the countess’s affiliation with the monastery of San Salvador begins a little earlier. A document originally in the archive of Sahagún, dated 25 January 1059, states that the countess received a donation that included the estate of Robladillo from Munio Vallatiz and his wife, Arvidio, to be given to the monastery of San Salvador.55 A second original but damaged document records a large donation made by Countess Elvira to San Salvador.56 Undated but probably written between 1057 and 1060, the document states

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that she endowed San Salvador in honour of her daughter, Tota. Fernando and Sancha, the monarchs of León-Castile, the bishops of Palencia, León, and Astorga, and various nobles witnessed the donation. At the same time, the countess charged that the abbot-elect should build the monastery and a hospice for the poor. The monastery was to observe the Benedictine rule. The ruined church of San Salvador indicates at least two campaigns. The nave with its portal framed by a pointed arch is clearly later than the first bay of the nave and the square apse to the east.57 The Gothic nave could have been completed for a consecration that took place in 1166, although the rebuilding could have taken place as late as the early thirteenth century.58 The semicircular arches of the apse and the most eastern bay of the nave indicate an earlier date. The semicircular barrel vault, ashlar masonry, and especially, the carved capitals supporting the triumphal arch demonstrate that the masons of this portion of San Salvador were trained in Romanesque building practices. Elegant rinceau decoration covers both of the carved capitals supporting San Salvador’s triumphal arch (fig. 3.6 and fig. 3.7). Pitons, reminiscent of those on capitals at Jaca Cathedral and with less frequency at San Martín, Frómista, sprout from their corners. Gracefully rendered volutes separated by floral consoles indicate the antique inspiration of these capitals, albeit far removed. Small male figures brandishing knives stand at the centre of each of the exposed faces of the capital on the north side of the triumphal arch, differentiating it from the capital on the south side, which is just decorated with rinceau. Scholars have frequently indicated the striking similarity between the capitals at Nogal and those at San Martín, Frómista, located only twenty kilometres away.59 One of the capitals of San Martín’s north apse, for example, shows rinceau decoration and long thin volutes almost identical with those in San Salvador (fig. 3.8). As at Nogal, the documents indicate a royal woman was involved in the monastery’s construction. After the death of her husband in 1035, Doña Mayor, the widowed queen of Sancho el Mayor of Navarre, retired to Castile and made the monastery at Frómista her home. Her signature as witness on documents written at the courts of her sons García, king of Pamplona, and Fernando, king of León-Castile, indicate that she did not withdraw completely from the world.60 Her will of 13 June 1066, witnessed among others by Doña Elvira, countess of Nogar, and the bishops Bernardo of Palencia and Jimeno of Burgos, leaves substantial holdings, livestock, and income to the monastery at Frómista.61 She refers to herself as a woman in the service of Christ

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or ‘Christi ancilla.’ The will includes the phrase ‘in hoc monasterio Sancti Martini, quem pro amore Dei et sanctorum eius et purificatione peccatorum meorum edificare cepi in Fromesta.’62 Although the will does not specify exactly which part of the monastery is under construction, it does not seem entirely unreasonable to assume it could be the foundation’s church. As with San Salvador at Nogal de las Huertas, San Martín seems to have passed into the hands of its founder’s female descendants. Eventually, it came into the possession of Queen Urraca, great-granddaughter of Doña Mayor. Her will indicates that she gave the monastery and all the goods left to it by her ancestor to San Zoilo in Carrión de los Condes.63 San Martín then became a dependency of the Cluniac monastery.64 The church at Frómista, dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours, typifies late eleventh- and early twelfth-century churches built in Christian Spain (fig. 3.9). Today the restored church stands alone, but it was once the centre of a thriving monastic complex.65 Compared to the pilgrimage church of Santiago de Compostela begun at a slightly later date, San Martín seems diminutive, but its scale characterizes more accurately the size of most Spanish churches built during this period. Its smaller scale ensures the easy visibility of the church’s carved capitals. They top the columns flanking San Martín’s windows and doors, and the half columns applied to the piers that support the nave arcades and the transverse ribs that reinforce the barrel vaults of the nave and side aisles (fig. 3.10). Although there is no clerestory, the large windows in San Martín’s side walls, three apses, and the drum of the dome over the crossing provide ample light in the church’s interior. The church’s unified fabric indicates that it was built in one campaign of short duration. Considering the similarity of their sculpture, the close relationship between their patrons, Elvira and Doña Mayor, their physical proximity, the closeness of the foundation dates – 1063 and 1066 – according to the written sources, and the lack of evidence suggesting a motive for falsifying the documents, it seems reasonable to conclude that San Salvador and San Martín were conceived codependently and initiated in the 1060s. Whitehill, Gómez-Moreno, and García Guinea reached this very conclusion.66 Other scholars, however, find reason to differ, usually on the basis of challenging the validity of the information given in the written evidence. Serafín Moralejo, for example, discounts the legitimacy of the inscriptions at Nogal because the plaques are located in portions of the church clearly built after the 1063 date one of them mentions.67 Marcel Durliat also doubts the information written on the plaques because of

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their multiplicity. He suggests that they came from and refer to monastic buildings other than the church.68 Both Moralejo and Durliat likewise disregard the evidence of Doña Mayor’s will because it makes no specific reference to the church of San Martín but only to the monastery.69 Once these churches are assigned a later date – Moralejo suggests the last decade of the eleventh century and Durliat 1110 – their patronage can no longer be linked with Countess Elvira and Doña Mayor.70 In this there is something of a disconnect between medieval record keepers and modern scholars. Medieval accounts attest to the pious generosity of Elvira and Doña Mayor to monastic foundations where there are early examples of churches built in the Romanesque style. Modern scholars, on the other hand, detach the buildings from this medieval testimony based on their interpretation of the orderly stylistic development of Romanesque. As noted above, however, both Nogal and Frómista remained in female hands until the turn of the century so even if Elvira and Doña Mayor did not construct the churches as the medieval records indicate, it is likely that one of their female descendents did. If San Salvador and San Martín date to the 1060s, then they would be the earliest extant instances of the Romanesque style in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain along with the Panteón de los Reyes abutting the church of San Isidoro, and Jaca Cathedral. The Panteón differs somewhat in appearance from San Salvador and San Martín (fig. 3.11). It is a more heavily proportioned building with a roughly square plan divided into three aisles of two bays each by robust columns topped with large carved capitals. Like Nogal and Frómista, the Panteón is modest in scale but rich in decoration. Along with the carved capitals, a later painted Christ cycle decorates the flattened groin vaults covering the structure. In contrast with Nogal and Frómista, the royal Panteón’s site was not new. It adjoined the site of at least two earlier monuments, a modest church de luto et latere constructed by Alfonso V (r. 999–1028) to – 71 replace an earlier building destroyed by al-Mans. ur. The Panteón’s function as a dynastic burial place rather than a theatre for the liturgy differentiated it from other churches.72 Although different in function and design, the royal Panteón, like San Salvador and San Martín, is an early example of the Romanesque style. It too, came into existence thanks to a royal woman. Scholars have frequently noted that women played a key role in the construction of the Panteón de los Reyes, although which woman was actually responsible for the construction is a matter of some debate. According to the Historia Silense, Fernando I (r. 1035–65), who ruled Castile

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by right of descent from his mother Doña Mayor and León thanks to his marriage to Sancha, declared first that he would be buried in Oña and then in San Pedro de Arlanza, both in Castile.73 His desires were redirected by his wife, Sancha, the daughter of Alfonso V and the last living member of the Leonese royal line that stretched back to the Asturian kings. Through his marriage to Sancha in 1032, the Castilian monarch grafted his descendants onto the more prestigious Asturian family tree, which claimed by tradition the right to rule the whole Iberian peninsula. By killing Sancha’s brother Vermudo III in 1037 at the battle of Tamarón, Fernando became the king of León and was assured that his offspring would have no competition for the crown from outside the immediate family. Sancha convinced Fernando that he should be buried with her more distinguished ancestors in León. The Historia Silense states that the queen ‘exerted all her influence to bring it about that both she and her husband should lie alongside’ her father and her brother after death.74 Fernando acceded to her petition and ‘masons were commissioned, who strenuously devoted themselves to such a worthy task.’75 The consecration of this new church dedicated to San Isidoro of Seville occurred on 21 December 1063. Although they do not doubt the authenticity of the account given in the Historia Silense, scholars dispute whether or not the building constructed thanks to Sancha’s entreaty is the Panteón. Caldwell, noting the focus on royal burial in the account in the Historia Silense and following the dates given in an older body of art historical literature that includes Whitehill, Gómez-Moreno, and Gaillard, asserts that Fernando and Sancha built the dynastic mausoleum thanks to the queen’s insistence and that it was dedicated in 1063.76 Sancha, according to Caldwell, had the religious, monetary, and dynastic authority to propose this building project thanks to her Leonese patrimony, her management of the infantado, and her religious training.77 Her motivation was to give physicality to the strength of the Leonese dynasty which was commemorated in the Panteón by the bodies of her ancestors and ‘regenerated’ through the addition of her Castilian husband, Fernando, and her children who would come to be buried there.78 Caldwell gives Sancha credit for the new visual language witnessed in both the Panteón de los Reyes and the liturgical objects donated to it, such as the ivory cross now in the archaeological museum in Madrid, saying that the queen recast peninsular traditions in an innovative international style.

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Williams, on the basis of his understanding of the development of the Romanesque style, claims that Fernando and Sancha could not have built the dynastic burial place because of the ‘precocity’ of its appearance. The church attributed to them by the Historia Silense, he would have, was a small three-aisle building demolished when the current church was built, although its foundations and fragments remain. The infanta Urraca, their daughter, whose epitaph of 1101 records she ampliauit ecclesiam istam, seems a more suitable patron to Williams.79 Walker and Martin follow Williams in attributing the construction of the Panteón to Urraca in the 1080s.80 Walker indicates that Urraca constructed the dynastic burial place as a centre of liturgical intercession, in hopes of retaining the power of her infantado, which was threatened by the growing strength of Cluniac monks on the Iberian peninsula.81 Martin, while accepting Urraca as the patron, suggests that the edifice now identified as the Panteón de los Reyes only became a dynastic burial place in the twelfth century and that it was originally used as a passage from San Isidoro to the royal palace.82 Whether attributed to Urraca and dated c. 1080 or to her mother Sancha and dated before 1063, the medieval written sources make it clear that Leonese royal women provided the impetus for the construction of the Panteón de los Reyes at San Isidoro in León. Even if constructed in the 1080s, it would have marked an early example of the Romanesque style on the Iberian peninsula. The medieval written records, much to the frustration of art historians, are vague when it comes to noting precise dates of church construction. Instead, they mention the names of specific royal women, all related, in connection with sites where early Romanesque buildings were constructed. Clearly, it was of the utmost importance to the authors of these documents, inscriptions, and plaques to promote the impression that Doña Mayor, Elvira, Sancha, and Urraca were pious, generous, and responsible for the construction of religious structures that surpassed those of the previous generation in scale, complexity of decoration, skilled workmanship, and the impression of permanence. Although modern scholars put the impetus for the appearance of the Romanesque into the hands of sculptors and masons who travelled along the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, eleventh-century documents mention only the patrons. It seems likely that medieval viewers too, like the medieval record makers, would have understood these early Romanesque churches as the result of the agency of royal women. Creating this record

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of patronage was important because it provided evidence of the religious devotion that negotiated the royal family’s, and by extension their kingdom’s, relationship to the divine. In the kingdom of Aragon, women of the royal family are again associated with early Romanesque churches in the region. When Sancho el Mayor’s illegitimate son, Ramiro I (d. 1063), came to the throne in 1035, the territory was little more than sparsely populated, mountainous frontier defended from the Muslims by a series of fortresses. According to Durán Gudiol, the Aragonese realm with its difficult terrain was better prepared for passive resistance against the Muslims than for the more sophisticated politics of the ‘Reconquest.’83 It lacked the urban centres, tight ecclesiastical organization, and the legal traditions of León and Castile. Documentary evidence, because of these conditions, is slimmer here. In Aragon although there is no documented tradition of the infantado, it is clear that royal women held and managed property. Documents mention little about Ermesinda and Inés, the two wives of Ramiro I, son of Sancho el Mayor. This situation changes with his granddaughters Sancha and Urraca, mentioned in relation to the sarcophagus discussed above.84 According to documents, these daughters of Ramiro I financed the construction of two of the earliest and most significant Romanesque churches in this region. The only document referring to the funding of Jaca Cathedral, dedicated to San Pedro, that is not considered a forgery is the will of Ramiro I’s daughter Urraca.85 Her undated will mentions that her brother Sancho Ramírez rules in Aragon; therefore, it must have been written during his reign between 1063 and 1094. Antonio Ubieto Arteta dates the original will to 1077/8.86 The existing twelfth-century copy includes a donation ‘ad labore de Sancti Petri de Iacha.’87 The phrase indicates that the church was already under construction, perhaps implying that Urraca did not initiate San Pedro. Her contributions, however, must have been essential to its construction. Both the architecture and the sculpture of Jaca Cathedral bear a striking similarity to San Martín in Frómista, which was financed by Urraca’s grandmother, Doña Mayor. Both churches are built according to a threeaisle-basilica plan with similar dimensions. The structure of their east ends with three apses, non-projecting transepts, and domed crossings are particularly alike. The sameness of their carved capitals, as Moralejo has demonstrated, indicates that the same sculptors worked at both sites.88 The marked similarity of the two churches, however, may not be noticed

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at first glance today because San Pedro’s central apse was substantially lengthened when it was rebuilt in the eighteenth century and its sixteenth-century rib vaults create a very different impression than the barrel vault covering San Martín’s nave.89 The dating of Jaca Cathedral is an even more contentious issue than the dating of San Martín. Three falsified documents once presumed to date to 1063 were used to date the cathedral’s construction to the reign of Ramiro I.90 The so-called actas of the pseudocouncil of Jaca tell how Ramiro I called a synod of bishops in 1063 to discuss moving the seat of the bishop of Aragon from Muslim-dominated Huesca temporarily to Jaca.91 The document includes numerous donations to the new see. In the past, some scholars assumed that while they were there, the bishops of Auch, Urgell, Bigorre, Oloron, Calahorra, Leire, Jaca, Zaragoza, and Roda, and the abbots of San Juan de la Peña, San Andrés de Fanlo, and San Victorián de Sobrarbe consecrated San Pedro.92 In the second document, traditionally rather than actually dated to 1063, Ramiro I made donations toward the construction of the cathedral, including the tolls paid to travel the road from Jaca to the Somport pass.93 This source describes the church as under construction, having a large portal that was to be surmounted by a bell tower with eight bells, and having three naves, which the king intended to have covered with stone vaults that would extend to the altars located in the east end.94 In a third document dated to 1063, the Aragonese king donates thirteen churches in the surrounding territory to the cathedral of Jaca.95 Disputes over rights and property among the bishops of Jaca and Huesca and the monks of San Juan de la Peña motivated the fabrication of these forgeries well after 1063; thus, any claims they make about donations may be completely false. The description of San Pedro mid-way in its construction, recorded in the undated donation, nevertheless seems to have some basis in fact. It reveals that the church was being built at both the east and west ends but not yet vaulted. Íñiguez argued that such a specific observation must have been based on the actual state of the cathedral in 1063 and thus for him this indicated that the document is not false.96 While the document is without doubt a forgery, it may include an accurate picture of Jaca Cathedral’s construction but the description it gives is impossible to date. Urraca, along with her two sisters, Teresa and the better-known Sancha, is also associated with the construction of the female monastery of Santa María in the village of Santa Cruz de la Serós located about fifteen kilometres from Jaca. Urraca, who never married, seems to have spent

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much of her life there where her two widowed sisters eventually joined her.97 Teresa, the oldest and least well documented of Ramiro’s daughters, appears to have been married to Guillaume, count of Provence. When he died in 1070 she returned to Aragon and entered Santa María, but there is no record of any donations she might have made to the monastery. Sancha used the female foundation as a home after the death of her husband Count Ermengol III of Urgell, in 1065. None of the sisters was ever abbess of the monastery and Sancha, as mentioned above, remained involved in the secular affairs of the court. Santa Cruz de la Serós loosely followed the model of a family monastery where related women contributed to the establishment and subsequently to the property of a monastic foundation.98 The family monastery, supported financially from the outside by patrons and ruled from within by members of the same family, allowed the property of widows and unmarried women to remain in the family. Although they did not found the monastery, both Urraca and Sancha, who had no male heirs, left it sizable legacies. The church of Santa María, built with ashlar masonry and decorated with sculpted capitals and complex mouldings, is another of the earliest Romanesque buildings in Aragon (fig. 3.12). It is a small church built according to a Latin cross plan with a single, barrel-vaulted nave that ends in a semicircular apse. A high tower topped with a dome on squinches rises from the south transept arm creating an unusual massing that probably seemed more harmonious when balanced by the monastery’s other buildings, which no longer stand. The church’s tympanum, carved with a chrismon flanked by two lions, is strongly reminiscent of that at Jaca Cathedral, an issue that will be discussed at length in chapter 5. The most intriguing feature of the church is a curious room above the crossing. This octagonal chamber, covered by a peculiar ribbed domical vault, can be reached only by entering a small door situated high on the south wall of the nave and climbing a steep stairway located in the thickness of the wall. The first unequivocal written reference to Santa María is a document of 1070 in which Sancha, mother of Ramiro I, gives to her granddaughter Sancha a number of her possessions on the condition they pass to the nuns of Santa María upon the younger woman’s death.99 This document suggests that the monastery had been in existence long enough to have an administrative hierarchy and a church, because it was signed ‘in atrio Sancte Marie, ante abbatisee domne Mennose.’100 The women of this religious community did not have to wait for the younger Sancha’s death to

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experience her generosity. She made a number of donations throughout her life.101 Her sister Urraca also left a generous legacy to Santa María although her will does not specify to what ends it should be used.102 Sancha’s will of 1095 is more explicit. In it she states, percipio ego sancia de omnibus rebus sive substanciis meis quaque inventa fuerint post meum discessum sit in fabrica aeclesiae sanctae Mariae ob redemptione peccatorum meorum.103

Clearly, she wants her donation to go toward the construction of Santa María. Considering the continuous record of donations to the female monastery on the part of royal Aragonese women it seems likely that they initiated and financed the construction of the Romanesque church of Santa María. Felicia of Roucy, the sister-in-law of Sancha, Urraca, and Teresa, also contributed to the beginnings of Romanesque art at Santa Cruz de la Serós. She gave the female community an evangelary now lost. A plaque inscribed with her name, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has been presumed to be its cover (fig. 3.13).104 The plaque shows a crucifixion scene with Mary and John and personifications of the sun and moon flanking Christ on the cross. The figures, carved from ivory in a Romanesque style, are attached to a silver ground worked with pseudofiligree and studded with glass gems. Aragonese royal women, like their cousins in León-Castille, were patrons of both architecture and the luxury arts created in the Romanesque style. The similarities between San Pedro at Jaca and San Martín at Frómista and the ivory Christ on Felicia’s plaque and the cross donated to San Isidoro by Fernando and Sancha suggest both that their taste was as refined as their cousins’ taste and that their patronage occurred around the same time. No written evidence records the role played by any of the royal women patrons of early Romanesque buildings in Aragon and León-Castile in influencing the appearance of the buildings and objects for which they paid. There are only the monuments and objects themselves, all similar in appearance, financed by royal female patrons, and created around the same time according to the written sources. To some degree, the picture of enthusiastic female patronage of the earliest Romanesque buildings on the Iberian peninsula is skewed by the accidents of survival of both documents and buildings. This incomplete evidence likewise undermines the putatively scientific chronologies, based on the orderly evolution of style, set down by the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ scholars and their more

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recent proponents. A number of churches built in the second half of the eleventh century, for example San Millán de la Cogolla de Yuso, founded and built below San Millán de la Cogolla de Suso by García Sánchez el de Nájera, king of Navarre (r. 1035–54),105 or Santo Domingo de Silos, built thanks to male patronage, no longer exist or have been so substantially changed that their original appearance is difficult to reconstruct.106 Other early Romanesque buildings were financed by couples, such as the cathedral of Astorga built by Alfonso VI and his wife Constance, or Santa María at Igúacel in Aragon, built by Count Sancho Galíndez and his wife, Urraca, who were eminent members of the court of the Aragonese king, Sancho Ramírez (r. 1063–94). The incomplete picture of early Romanesque architecture in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain indicates, nevertheless, that female patrons played a substantial role as agents of the new style. Contrary to the suggestion made by Gómez-Moreno outlined above, the artistic impulse of these royal women shows no direct link to the architecture of Sancho el Mayor. Although Sancho founded the dynasties that came to rule in both León-Castile and in Aragon, his churches fathered no progeny among the buildings funded by his female relatives. The newer churches constructed at Frómista, León, Nogal de las Huertas, Jaca, and Santa Cruz de la Serós had a different appearance from those financed by Sancho. They represent substantial change not evolution. They are larger, more ornately decorated, and do not include selfconsciously used remnants of earlier edifices. With the exception of the royal Panteón in León, they rose up from new sites without a venerable, spiritually charged history. Figural and historiated capitals appear with regularity in the royal women’s churches, whereas they were all but absent in the Navarese king’s. The new churches made no reference to the architecture built by the monarchs of the Asturian kingdom, the small but eminent realm that was the heartland of Christian Spain from the eighth to the early ninth centuries. By the time the women financed their churches, that once-prominent kingdom had been absorbed into LeónCastile and lost its power as an independent political entity. The linkage of past to present in the very fabric of the building witnessed so often in Sancho el Mayor’s churches is absent from those associated with his female descendants. Literally and symbolically Sancho el Mayor’s churches connect the past to the present by embodying venerable holy sites, incorporating the remnants of older edifices, and quoting the architecture of the Asturians. In so doing they repudiate the humiliation of the Muslim raids of days just past and affirm the restoration of

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order in the current moment. They legitimize in their walls the king’s claim to local power by picturing a historical bond with both the first Christians and the first successful reconquest rulers on the Iberian peninsula. By the last half of the eleventh century when the women’s churches were built there was no longer a need to justify claims to Muslim lands by dynastic links to the Visigoths. Sancho’s is an architecture that was a response to both the practical and ideological need to immediately consolidate power in the wake of recent destruction. The visual language of the women’s churches works differently. Their elaborate tympana, carved capitals, complex mouldings, ashlar masonry, semicircular arches, and barrel vaults made them part of a pan-European cultural matrix: the Romanesque. Within their immediate context the churches are innovative and modern; they pay no homage to the earlier artistic traditions of Christian Iberia. Yet they too allude to the past, but to a different bygone time than the churches of the Navarese king. They reference an architecture of the past but one of greater monumentality and broader repute than that of the Asturians. This architecture is, of course, that of the Romans as has long been recognized. The towns where these women lived, León (Legio), Jaca (Iaca), Palencia (Pallantia) near Nogal, and Frómista, were originally Roman settlements where even today the remnants of the antique habitation are still visible. The semicircular arches, barrel vaults, basilica plans, curving apses, and acanthus capitals of these churches ultimately derive from the Romans. Antique sculpture provided the model for the muscular nudes, imago clipeata, toga-inspired drapery, monsters – such as griffins, harpies, and sirens – and decorative motifs – such as framed palmettes and grape vines – that are carved on the capitals of these churches. One sculptor who worked at Frómista so admired Roman art that he copied the central portion of a Hadriatic Oresteia sarcophagus once preserved in Santa María de Husillos, only twenty-five kilometres from Frómista.107 Moralejo determined that the front face of the capital in San Martín depicts the moment when Orestes is about to slay his treasonous mother, Clytemnestra. Harpies brandishing snakes who will harry the matricide after his crime wait on the short sides of the capital. Likewise at Frómista Aesop served as a source for a capital that shows his fable of the fox and the raven.108 Moralejo found echoes of the style of the Husillos sarcophagus in Romanesque sculpture throughout northern Spain at Jaca Cathedral, Santiago de Compostela, San Isidoro, León, and San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre.109 Sonia Simon, too, discovered the source for the iconography of a capital once in the cloister at Jaca in Roman sar-

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cophagi.110 Early Christian sarcophagi also influenced the sculptors who worked at the earliest Romanesque churches in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. The chrismons of San Martín, Jaca Cathedral, and the Doña Sancha sarcophagus, for example, derive ultimately from early Christian sarcophagi.111 Williams noted the impact of fourth-century early Christian sarcophagi on the iconography of the ‘Offering of Abraham’ capital in the royal Panteón in León.112 Admiration for the Romans is witnessed in the reuse and imitation of their luxury objects in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. Take, for example, the two sardonyx vessels of Roman manufacture put together to form the chalice donated by Urraca to San Isidoro, León, in 1063.113 Near the lip of this chalice is a white, paste-glass male head that reproduces an antique cameo.114 This imitation cameo, according to Caldwell, indicates a respect for tradition.115 But it is not simply any timehonoured precedent that is esteemed by this copy; it is explicitly Roman. The burial of royalty in reused Roman sarcophagi, for example Ramiro II, el Monje king of Aragon (r. 1134–7), further indicates the high regard for Roman antiquity on the part of the rulers of Christian Spain.116 This reuse of Roman sarcophagi, Moralejo suggests, represents the desire to revive a better and a more legitimate past in the face of the threatening Islamic presence.117 Antique literature was used to aggrandize the heroic qualities of Sancho II of Castile (r. 1065–72) by placing him in the ranks of the legendary heroes of the Iliad. The epitaph on his tomb in the monastery of Oña compares his appearance to that of Paris and his courage to Hector’s.118 Both writer and readers must have had some knowledge of ancient literature to understand the comparisons. The Romanesque churches evoked not simply a distinguished local realm like Sancho’s churches, but the common Roman heritage the Iberian peninsula shared with the rest of Christendom. The royal church builders of the next generation turned their attention from the frontier with Islam to the frontiers with the rest of Europe. If the presence of the Muslims made Spain different, its Roman and early Christian heritage made it the same as the Christian world beyond the Pyrenees. Where Sancho’s concerns were rooted in the local, those of his descendants extended beyond the Iberian peninsula. Romanesque provided a visual language that could be understood at home and in the Christian world outside their immediate realms. Certainly, the Romanesque churches built by royal Spanish women were understood as expressing esteem for the Roman and early Christian past. The very act of architectural patronage by these Christian women differentiated them from their Islamic

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counterparts who were not significant patrons of the arts at this time. It did, however, align them with the female patrons of the late Roman and early Christian world such as Helena, Galla Placidia, Anicia Julia, or Aelia Flaccilla, the Hispano-Roman aristocrat who married the emperor of the Eastern Empire, Theodosius (r. 379–95). In her funeral speech Gregory of Nyssa noted among her virtues her wifely love, ability to persuade her husband to show clemency, piety, humility, generosity, and devotion to relics.119 Günter Bandmann points out that a sense of historical distance was never present in the Middle Ages and people perceived that they were part of a continuum stretching back in time to the Roman Empire.120 He indicates that the power of rulers, such as the royal families of the kingdoms of Christian Iberia, was grounded and legitimized in the past through ties to the imperium romanum. Medieval rulers fashioned themselves in the mould of the Roman Empire, for according to the history created by patristic writers, such as Jerome, Orosius, and Origen, Rome would be the last empire on earth. When it fell, according to this tradition of history, Judgment Day would follow quickly. The power of medieval kings and emperors could only be understood as the extension of Roman power because only the kingdom of God would exist after Rome’s demise. The royal women of the Christian kingdoms would have understood themselves as contiguous with the female patrons of the past. Their Romanizing churches gave an architectural expression to this continuity with the Romans, a continuity that had been temporarily repressed by the Islamic presence but which was now renewed and reasserted. Written sources, such as the wills of Doña Sancha and Doña Mayor, say that royal women left donations to churches for the good of their souls or so that their sins, or those of their parents, would be forgiven. The inscriptions at Nogal state that the church was built to honour the Saviour. The representation of piety was surely a significant motive behind their generosity. No doubt religious devotion explains the presence of the biblical imagery decorating some of the capitals of their new buildings although Christian subjects are notably few at Frómista (five out of twenty-six) and absent at Nogal. The public display of piety would have been a significant factor in the lives of royal women. In the Espéculo, the first legal code compiled by Alfonso X around 1255, slightly before his better-known Siete Partidas, one section addresses the obligations and duties of the queen. Piety, it states, was one means of protecting a queen from the threat of adultery that would dishonour the king, endanger the purity of the bloodlines, and threaten the kingdom. Ensuring the legiti-

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macy of heirs was a significant factor in the lives of royal women in medieval Spain.121 According to Theresa Vann, ostentatious exhibits of piety, such as contributing a large donation to the construction of a church, were one way for royal women to protect themselves from accusations of adultery.122 The same held true for unmarried royal women who wished to avoid being faulted for licentious conduct. A large church financed by a female donor would have commemorated her virtue in a particularly visible and permanent way. Although Alfonso’s law code was written about two hundred years later than the buildings and female patrons under consideration here, it is not unreasonable to assume it reflects earlier traditions. A section of the earlier Historia Silense describing the infanta Urraca, daughter of Fernando and Sancha, refers to her ‘wisdom and goodness’ and her artistic patronage in the same passage: Spurning carnal ties and the perishable garments of a husband, outwardly in secular guise but inwardly under monastic discipline, she clove to Christ as her true spouse, and throughout the term of her life she persisted in her cherished practice of embellishing holy altars and priestly vestments with gold and silver and precious stones.123

Urraca’s actual virtue may not have stood up to close scrutiny considering that other sources imply she was instrumental in murdering one brother and had an incestuous relationship with the other. Her artistic patronage recorded in the Silense, however, as a mark of virtue makes her appear as an example of moral excellence. The infanta Urraca’s niece, Queen Urraca (1109–16), on the contrary, suffered a maligned reputation because of malevolent accounts that frequently represented her not as a patron, but as the despoiler of church treasuries. Martin points out how politically motivated and sexist posthumous accounts of the queen’s life created an untrue and degrading image of the queen.124 She recounts how Giraldo, one of the authors of the Historia Compostellana, accused the queen of destroying churches and how Lucas de Tuy charged Urraca and her husband Alfonso el Batallador with plundering the treasury of San Isidoro. She notes how these two accounts served to inspire more exaggerated stories of the queen as a pillager of churches throughout the Middle Ages. Although untrue, these narratives served to create a representation of the queen as a moral reprobate as surely as those of her aunt’s patronage expressed her virtue. I would like to suggest that there was more at work in the patronage of

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royal women than the promotion of a political ideology, continuity with a past grandiose age, or the creation of a virtuous personal reputation expressed in the authoritative public medium of grandiose, elaborately decorated architecture. The early Romanesque churches understood in their own era, if not in the modern, as the products of the generosity of the royal women of León-Castile and Aragon did not just represent the moral virtues of their patrons but piety in action. Writing about representations of gender in early chronicles authored in Christian Spain, Lucy Pick suggests that ‘divine power can be harnessed by the [royal] family through its patronage of religious institutions and especially through the religious lives of its daughters.’125 The chronicles written in the Asturian kingdoms and in León-Castile record women’s prayers and pious acts as parallel to the stories of men’s feats in battle. Women’s prayers, Pick notes, helped to guarantee the royal family’s success in the world, a success that was understood in terms of military victory over the Muslims, while their piety in service of their family’s dead was believed to increase the odds of salvation after life.126 Like all medieval churches, the Romanesque buildings constructed thanks to, or at least associated with, the patronage of the royal women of Aragon and León-Castile were understood as both being and displaying a connection between the heavenly and the terrestrial. Maintaining linkage between the divine and the earthly, if the medieval chronicles written between the ninth and the twelfth centuries are trustworthy, was part of the responsibility of royal women. By building churches and donating luxury objects to them, these women were fulfilling their duty to their families and thereby contributing to advancing the cause of their kingdom as surely as did their male relatives in their battles against their rivals. While Sancho el Mayor’s churches gained their spiritual potency in part from the anchorites’ caves or ancient shrines to which they were attached, the newer Romanesque structures of the royal women had to rely on their appearance to express their spiritual potentiality. They were large, skilfully built, and decorated with carved sculpture that expressed messages of Christian belief. Their vaults, ashlar masonry, and arcades, evoking the architecture of the most powerful empire ever known, was made all the more meaningful because its features were becoming the dominant architectural language of contemporary Christendom. The grandiose portals of these Romanesque churches, distinguished by the complex visual messages of their carved tympana and capitals, made it clear that these were gateways to a threshold between the earthly and the divine. The royal women’s churches built around the same time with a

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similar appearance would have expressed these meanings more powerfully as a group than if each were taken by itself. With the expansion of Christian territory on the Iberian peninsula the power of women showed a tendency to decline. Women lost the right to inherit and authority over their children who were minors.127 Female commoners in frontier towns also lost many of their privileges that were tied to the need to repopulate new territory.128 The institution of the infantado weakened in the twelfth century as the strength of male religious orders, such as the Cluniacs, increased. In León, for instance, Sancha, sister of the Alfonso VII (r. 1126–57) held the infantado and headed the female community at the monastery of San Isidoro. Her installation of Augustinian canons at San Isidoro in 1148 ended the existence of the double monastery at León. The canons received San Isidoro and the income and possessions that once belonged to the nuns in residence there.129 On her death in 1159 some of Sancha’s property was given to new, international religious orders such as the Hospitallers and Cistercians while some returned to the crown, weakening the infantado further.130 The artistic patronage by royal women of innovative architecture and luxury arts would shift away from local institutions intimately linked to the traditions of their families to those like the Cistercians that were professional and international in scope.

4 Shaping the Christian Presence in Aragon: The Frontier Fortress-Monasteries of King Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064–1094)

The Castle of Loarre, whether from the point of view of architecture or of sculpture, must be reckoned among the most accomplished examples of Romanesque art in Europe.1 When I got there [Loarre] I saw why you wanted me to go last year – it swept me completely off my feet, as I hadn’t any idea from the photographs how awfully good it was. It is as perfect in its way as the cloister here [Silos] – and taken alone would justify the century well enough.2

The Castle of Loarre in the province of Aragon is among the most celebrated of Spain’s renowned castles (fig. 4.1).3 At this stronghold during the last quarter of the eleventh century the Aragonese king, Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064–94), constructed a monumental Romanesque church dedicated to Saint Peter. San Pedro is boldly differentiated from the military portions of the castle by its ashlar masonry, dome, applied columns, ornately carved capitals, and portal relief. Viewed from the south, the church completely dominates the castle. Its abundant sculpture, finely worked masonry, and the imposing profile of its dome against the sky would have conveyed at a single glance to the medieval, as clearly as to the modern, viewer San Pedro’s importance. Two factors have traditionally made San Pedro a noteworthy monument for art historians. First, it plays a substantial role in the first years of Romanesque architecture in Spain because it is an early example of the style. Second, its capitals share features with those of so many churches in southern France and northern Spain that San Pedro serves single-handedly as a sampler for the sculpture of the pilgrimage roads. Most scholars analysing the monument have followed the trail blazed by Porter and

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Mâle. Under the sway of the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ paradigm, more often than not, they have given the church’s capitals a cursory examination and dismissed them as the swan song of a sculptural style developed first at Saint-Sernin in Toulouse.4 During the eleventh century, however, the importance of the Castle of Loarre was grounded in more than San Pedro’s formal innovations. Aragonese fortifications built where Christian met Islamic territory, whether complex fortress-monasteries such as Loarre or simple, single towers, such as Abizanda, served to define and protect the frontier zone not only between two kingdoms but between two cultures. Loarre, for instance, marked a Christian claim to the land between the two Muslim outposts of Bolea and Ayerbe. With its church built in the Romanesque style in combination with its fortified towers and walls, the castle monumentalized the legitimacy of the Christian hegemony over the neighbouring Muslim towns, such as Huesca. Its audience was not limited, however, to Muslims. This, and the other fortifications, stood to remind the free Christian warriors inhabiting the frontier zones who had the ultimate jurisdiction over the land they temporarily held in trust. While these Christian fortifications were military strongholds, observation posts, boundary markers, and administrative centres, they were also sites where cultural difference was made evident through architecture. The taifa of Zaragoza, under the leadership of al-Muqtadir (1046–82), was the Aragonese king’s principle opponent. Where Aragon was rural, the taifa was urban. Its cultured cities, Tudela, Ejea, Huesca, Barbastero, and Zaragoza, were distributed across most of the basin of the Ebro River and joined by a system of roads. Commerce, rather than agriculture, served as the basis for the taifa’s economy. Land was valuable for what it could produce but it lacked the intrinsic worth that it held for the Christians.5 Collective identity rested more on the population than in geography. This meant the Muslims were less invested than the Christians in establishing a clearly defined territorial border. Christians in eleventh-century Aragon understood the meaning of a frontier in terms of a zone where the king’s territory met that of a rival. The embattled nature of the kingdom seems to have given rise to the use of the term itself. Philippe Sénac demonstrates that the term frontera appears for the first time in the medieval West in three mid-eleventh-century documents signed by the father of Sancho Ramírez, Ramiro I, who ruled Aragon from 1035 to 1063.6 In earlier documents written around the year 1000 the term extrematura was usually used to refer to a borderland.7 Frontera is used for the very first time in Ramiro’s will of 1059 to

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refer to the place where Christian lands met Islamic territory. The three documents produced during his reign in which frontera appears indicate that the term was understood as a spatial zone, rather than a line, at the edge of the king’s realm. This place was also perceived as a cultural divide between Islam and the king’s territory and as a military zone of combat, fortified with castles, where men were free warriors.8 According to Sénac’s analysis, the word designates not just a geographical place but also ‘un comportement, une mentalité’ – a way of behaving and thinking in a dangerous pioneer land.9 In Aragon in the second half of the eleventh century more than the old geopolitical boundaries were being redefined.10 In 1076 Sancho Ramírez annexed the eastern portion of Navarra when the Navarese king Sancho IV el de Peñalén (r. 1054–76) was murdered. This expanded his territory and won him the title of king of Navarra that carried along with it a lucrative tribute payment from Zaragoza. From this point on, Sancho Ramírez led his realm into new territory in the areas of economics, culture, and religion. The king with the help of his sisters, Sancha, Teresa, and Urraca, also redefined architecture. During the last quarter of the century the appearance of the religious architecture in this realm changed abruptly. Monumental churches built of refined ashlar masonry, covered with vaults and domes, and decorated with carved sculpture and complex mouldings, appeared where previously stood modest rustic chapels. Local building traditions were all but abandoned in favour of the Romanesque. The two churches located in the Castle of Loarre serve well to show the dramatic change that took place in Aragon’s ecclesiastic architecture between the beginning and the end of the eleventh century. Santa María (fig. 4.2), the smaller and earlier church on the castle’s upper level, typifies an older style, while San Pedro exemplifies the new (fig. 4.3). Without question, Santa María is a far less imposing edifice: its scale is smaller, its masonry more roughly hewn, and it exhibits no decoration except for the row of horizontally placed stones that curve around the upper border of its arched entrance. Nothing about the chapel’s exterior makes clear its ecclesiastical function. Neither masonry nor decoration differentiates it from the castle’s military buildings. Clearly, its builders felt no need to enhance its practical functionalism with an architectural style that would create a strong visual impact. In contrast, San Pedro is built in a self-conscious, rhetorical style. Its exterior boldly declares the church’s religious purpose even from a distance. Its curved apse contrasts sharply with the rectilinear and planar

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forms of the castle’s defensive walls and towers. The octagonal drum rising up over the nave indicates the dome beneath, a form more commonly associated with churches than with fortifications. The church’s ample fenestration, finely dressed ashlar masonry, and rich sculptural decoration indicate that San Pedro’s function was not just one of practical military defence. The elaborate decoration of the church’s south portal makes this clearer still. Here, San Pedro’s sculptors carved a complete decorative program comprising a relief and capitals. The badly damaged relief, displaying the Last Judgment, makes visible a central Christian belief. The interiors of Santa María and San Pedro exhibit equally marked contrasts. A low barrel vault covers Santa María’s narrow, single-aisled nave that ends in a shallow semicircular apse. Although five double splayed windows light this interior, it remains dim because of the extreme narrowness of the actual openings imbedded deeply within the thickness of the walls. While it too has only one aisle, San Pedro’s nave could not differ more fully from Santa María’s (fig. 4.4). It is tall and full of light at most times of the day. In contrast to the simple, constricted, tube-like interior of Santa María, San Pedro is spatially complex. Its high central bay rises upward to a height that equals the length of the nave. Piggybacked squinches, the lower deep and conical, the upper broad and fanlike, hold aloft the perfectly hemispherical dome that caps this space. Wide transverse arches decorated with mouldings, springing from complex supports, set off the bay’s lower limits. A lower barrel vault over the west bay and a conch covering the apse add to the spatial variety of the nave. As on the exterior, San Pedro’s nave is rich with sculpture where Santa María’s has no decoration whatsoever. An applied arcade of semicircular arches supported on large carved capitals rings San Pedro’s apse. Each window of the newer church is framed by columns topped by sculpted capitals supporting a semicircular arch composed of complex mouldings. To summarize, San Pedro and Santa María are on different sides of the artistic boundary that was crossed by the masons who built churches at the impetus of the Aragonese royal family during the course of the eleventh century. Santa María is a small, unimposing church depending completely on the skill of the masons for its construction. San Pedro, on the other hand, is monumental and showy. The creativity of the sculptor was added to that of the mason to produce its lavish decoration. Its spatial and decorative complexity suggest that considerations more profound than practical influenced San Pedro’s design and appearance.

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The differences between San Pedro and Santa María exemplify the decisive nature of the transformation that took place in Aragonese architecture during the course of the eleventh century. It would be inaccurate, however, to claim either church as the prototype for its particular period. In the first half of the eleventh century, when Santa María was built, variety rather than any predictable norm characterizes the churches of Aragon. This diversity, along with deficient scholarly attention, equivocal dating, and the large percentage of lost monuments known only from documents, makes it challenging to form a comprehensive picture of Aragon’s architecture in the early eleventh century.11 Some monuments exist only as isolated examples sharing nothing but the most casual similarity with other buildings. Take, for example, the church of San Bartolomé at Muro de Roda, dated about 1040–50.12 San Bartolomé’s peculiar masonry, combining disparate sizes of stones laid both horizontally and vertically, and its strangely proportioned doors with their oversized voussoirs are not duplicated in other monuments in the region. The church’s individuality might simply be explained by the disappearance of similar contemporary monuments but the unpretentious quality of this modest church suggests another possibility. It was probably the work of local masons who built simply to satisfy the needs of their own community and went no further. Designs and building techniques were thus not disseminated outside this one locale. The majority of existing eleventh-century Aragonese churches, however, are not isolated examples like San Bartolomé. Generally speaking, they can be divided on the basis of their appearance into three different categories: churches constructed according to local tradition with no relationship to churches outside the region, buildings constructed in a style that Josep Puig i Cadafalch first called ‘le premier art roman’ or First Romanesque, and the so-called Serrablo churches found only along the shores of the Gállego River.13 Santos Juan y Pablo at Tella and San Aventín at Bonansa represent the only two survivors of an indigenous building tradition that once existed throughout the eastern Pyrenees of Aragon according to Juan Francisco Esteban Lorente.14 These small, single-aisled churches, constructed by local masons out of large, crudely worked masonry, are roughly contemporary, dated by documents to around 1020.15 Their most distinctive characteristic is the slight horseshoe shape of their apse interiors, which is not reflected on their semicircular exteriors.16 Churches constructed by Lombard masons or local masons working according to the Catalo-Lombard tradition compose the largest group of

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Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

early eleventh-century Aragonese monuments. These monuments are constructed with small brick-sized stones, covered with groin vaults or barrel vaults, and decorated on the exterior with Lombard bands and corbel tables.17 Santa María at Obarra, built during the first third of the eleventh century, provides a typical example (fig. 4.5). The majority of churches with these characteristics, not surprisingly, stand in Ribagorza, the portion of Aragon which borders on Cataluña, where First Romanesque architecture was pervasive throughout the eleventh century. Documents may indicate that Lombard masons first arrived in Aragon during the first third of the eleventh century but their workshop practices continued to be followed until the middle of the twelfth century.18 The later monuments employ the vocabulary of First Romanesque architecture, including Lombard bands and corbel tables, but their stones are larger, their arches are constructed with voussoirs not rectangular stones, and their corbel tables are constructed with less precision than in true Catalo-Lombard buildings. A number of these late examples are clustered in the area around Jaca. Most are small parish churches or monasteries such as Santos Julián y Basilisa, Bagüés, built late in the eleventh century, or the church at Binacua, dated to the twelfth century. Closely related in form to First Romanesque architecture are the twenty-five or so churches named for their region, the Serrablo. They are distributed mainly along the eastern flood plain of the Gállego River from high in the Pyrenees, where most are concentrated, to the lower, southern regions of the Guarga and Basa Rivers. The most complete examples are the churches at Gavín, Oliván, Lárrede, Busa, Satué, Lasieso, Ordovés, Susín, Ysún, Larrosa, Rasal, Lerés, Nasarre, and Otal. These churches are all small in scale and built with brick-sized stones cut from the local limestone. Frequently they include towers. Some, such as San Pedro at Lárrede (fig. 4.6), combine horseshoe and semicircular arches.19 Most exhibit apses ringed with applied arcades similar in general aesthetic effect to the Lombard bands and corbel tables of First Romanesque. All the Serrablo churches display a frieze of vertically set cylindrical stones ringing the top of the apses. These stone friezes, known as baquetones, appear to be unique to this region.20 The Romanesque architecture of San Pedro at Loarre does not depend on any of these earlier building traditions. Nothing in their appearance prefigures San Pedro’s ashlar masonry, high vaulted spaces, complex mouldings, abundant sculptural decoration, or monumental massing. San Pedro exhibits such a complete break with these older

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architectural traditions that its architectural features must have been imported from outside the region. Mâle’s assertion, that ‘civilization came into Spain along the Way of Saint James,’ stood for generations as the most common explanation of the means by which Romanesque architecture arrived in Aragon.21 His account and those of his followers disregarded some crucial factors. First, the earliest Romanesque churches north and south of the Pyrenees and in Italy are insecurely dated, so the confidence of these scholars in southern France as the earliest and only source of the style may be misplaced. It is clear from the stylistic similarities shared by the sculpture in churches on both sides of the Pyrenees that a lively exchange took place, facilitated by movement of carvers from one site to the next, but the idea that the pilgrimage to Santiago was the only generative force behind the advent of Romanesque in northern Spain is too limited. More recent scholarship has abandoned the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ model and its preoccupation with the source of the Romanesque style. Scholars, although still concerned with stylistic change, now tend to focus more on individual monuments, their uses, and meanings within local historical or stylistic contexts.22 Local forces played a significant role in the creation of Romanesque architecture in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. This was indeed the case in late eleventh-century Aragon. San Pedro’s more ostentatious Romanesque style, so completely different from the region’s earlier architecture, resulted from new needs and attitudes about architecture. These stemmed from the ambitions of the small frontier kingdom’s first legitimate king, Sancho Ramírez, and those of his family. A number of other local styles were available to the king, but the buildings he and his sisters financed exhibited something new. When Sancho Ramírez acceded to the throne of Aragon in 1064 his kingdom was primarily a land of shepherds and farmers. On the whole it was more of a frontier, in the sense of an underdeveloped wilderness, than León-Castile or Cataluña. Aragon was more sparsely populated and lacked the urban centres, monastic foundations, and stable ecclesiastical organization of the other regions. Sancho’s father, Ramiro I (1035–64), an illegitimate son of Sancho el Mayor, had forged the realm from a small county he had inherited from his father, both expanding its territory and asserting its independence. After the suspicious death of his half-brother, Gonzalo, Ramiro annexed Sobrarbe and Ribagorza to his domain. He expanded his realm further by taking land along the borders of taifas of Zaragoza

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Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain

and Lérida.23 By this means, he was able to give his son a territory substantially larger than he had inherited from his father. Along with the kingdom, Sancho Ramírez inherited the expansionist policy of Ramiro I. With aggressive military campaigns and a good deal of luck, Sancho Ramírez almost doubled the size of his realm during his lifetime. Like his father, he extended his territories at the expense of both his Muslim and Christian neighbours. As mentioned above, he incorporated part of Navarre into Aragon after the assassination of its king, Sancho García IV, in 1076. With a series of incursions into Islamic territory beginning in the 1070s, the Aragonese king tipped in his favour an uneasy balance of power with the Muslims that had existed since the days of his grandfather, Sancho el Mayor. Sancho Ramírez slowly pushed his way down the rivers of his kingdom, the Ebro, the Gállego, the Flumen, and the Cinca, taking one small stronghold after another, gradually moving towards the important Muslim cities of Tudela, Zaragosa, Huesca, Barbastro, and Lérida.24 Alquézar fell to his forces in the mid-1060s, followed by Bolea, Graus, and Ayerbe in 1083, Secastilla and Naval in 1084, Tudela in 1087, Monzón in 1089, Castellar in 1091, and in 1092, Albalate, Zaidín, and Luna.25 Sancho Ramírez died in 1094 while laying siege to Huesca. Sénac convincingly demonstrates, drawing on the crusading language that appears first in documents around 1067, that this concerted effort to take Islamic territory was the result of an ‘ideology of war’ developed in the last thirty years of the eleventh century thanks to influence exerted on the Aragonese king by the pope. Moreover he indicates that these victories were perceived as the work of divine providence.26 Along with shifting the political equilibrium, the king’s military victories changed the nature of the frontier by eliminating the no-man’s-land between Muslim and Christian settlements. As land passed increasingly into Aragonese hands, the buffer zone separating Muslims and Christians shrank, in some places leaving rival communities almost face to face. It was in these newly won territories that the king constructed a number of towers and the fortress-monasteries of Loarre, Alquézar, and Montearagón. To aid in the consolidation and expansion of his frontiers, Sancho Ramírez procured alliances outside of Aragon. He strengthened the alliance forged by his father with the counts of Urgell, whose territory lay to the east of Aragon, to insure an ally against the taifa of Lérida. Early in the 1060s Sancho Ramírez married Isabel, sister of Ermengol III, the count of Urgell. The count had already married the king’s sister Sancha.27 After Isabel’s death, the Aragonese monarch strengthened his ties

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to French nobility by marrying Felicia, daughter of the count of Roucy, around 1070.28 She counted among her relatives the powerful nobility of Champagne, Picardy, Burgundy, and the Ile-de-France. The king himself was already well connected in southern France because his maternal uncles were the counts of Bigorre, Foix, and Carcassonne.29 Sancho Ramírez did not limit his alliances with realms beyond the Pyrenees to just France. In 1068 he made a pilgrimage to Rome solidifying his connection with the papacy.30 Hugo Cándido, the papal legate of Alexander II (1061–73) sent to the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula in 1065, could have convinced him to make the trip.31 After Alexander’s death, Sancho Ramírez continued to seek advice from his successors, Gregory VII (1073–85) and Urban II (1088–99). The Aragonese king formally legalized his ties with Rome in 1089 by making his realm a feudal dependency of the Holy See, paying a tribute of 500 mancusos yearly to the pope.32 During his reign Sancho Ramírez reformed and revitalized the monastic and ecclesiastic organization of his kingdom, bringing it into line with Rome. He became the first Spanish monarch to substitute the Roman rite for the traditional Visigothic or Toledan liturgy, most likely at Alexander II’s suggestion. The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña states that the monks of San Juan began to worship according to the Roman rite for the first time during the second week of Lent on 22 March 1071.33 The king and court were on hand to witness the liturgical reform. Sancho Ramírez tried to strengthen the monasteries and make them independent of episcopal jurisdiction by incorporating small foundations into larger monasteries.34 For example in 1082 he gave the monastery of San Salvador at Agüero to San Pedro at Siresa, which had the status of a royal chapel.35 This linking of small to large foundations also guaranteed that his liturgical reforms would be spread throughout the realm. To encourage commerce and immigration, the king created more clearly defined economic, legal, and social structures by minting coins, instituting a consistent system of weights and measures, and by granting fueros, or charters of codified laws and privileges, to towns. At Jaca the king produced a city almost overnight by simply declaring it so, and granting it a fuero, around 1077.36 Jaca, situated on the road that led to the Somport pass and France, became the commercial centre and political heart of the realm. The new city attracted settlers from the region and also from France, especially Toulouse and Gascony, who set up trade within the atmosphere of freedom insured by the fuero.37 Domingo

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Buesa Conde suggests that by the end of Sancho Ramírez’s reign the population of the city was just under one thousand and about 70 per cent of its inhabitants were foreign.38 These reforms helped Sancho Ramírez accomplish three things in a practical sense. First, they consolidated his personal power; second, they turned his kingdom from a rural backwater into a telling force in the politics of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain; and third, they transformed Aragon’s isolation into internationalization by redefining its cultural identity through institutions and customs shared with Christians beyond the Pyrenees. The king’s new order demanded a new architecture, and that architecture is what is now designated Romanesque. Church building fell in line with the other strategies in the king’s program of improvement. With his architecture, just as with the liturgy, he abandoned the long-favoured customs of the Iberian peninsula in favour of something new that linked him with Christians beyond the Pyrenees and with those of the past. The king’s reforms were not made with just earthly matters in mind. His monastic and liturgical reforms, his alliance with the papacy, and his church building were made in hopes of winning supernatural support. Aided by the church, Sancho Ramírez became the earthly agent of divine power, liberating the land from the domination of the Muslims. His military successes were seen as a sign of God’s approbation that ultimately served to legitimate the king’s power.39 San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre was not the only Romanesque church constructed thanks to the king’s largesse. In Aragon all the earliest examples of churches built in the Romanesque style, except one, were initiated by the wealth of the king or his sisters. These included the churches at the castles of Montearagón40 and Alquézar41 and Loarre. Although little remains of the Church of Jesus of Nazarus at Montearagón or Santa María at Alquézar, their vestiges and written descriptions indicate that they employed the Romanesque style.42 At San Juan de la Peña, Aragon’s most venerable monastery, the king added three new apses to the pre-existing church that his grandfather, Sancho el Mayor, had repaired and extended (fig. 4.7). Apses too, unfortunately, are the only surviving remnant of a church the king constructed at Ujué (fig. 4.8).43 The previous chapter discussed how the king’s sisters, Sancha and Urraca, in part financed the construction of a new cathedral at Jaca and a Romanesque church dedicated to Santa María for the female monastery at Santa Cruz de la Serós. They were clearly as involved as their older brother in the funding of churches built in the Romanesque style.

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The small church of Santa María at Iguácel is the only Romanesque church constructed during the reign of Sancho Ramírez that was not financed by a member of the royal family (fig. 4.9). Nevertheless, it had a strong royal connection. The church’s inscription makes clear that it was constructed by the Aragonese monarch’s childhood tutor Count Sancho Galíndez and his wife on land donated by the monarch.44 Royalty and the Romanesque style were thus linked in late eleventhcentury Aragon, because the king, his sisters, or his intimate associates were responsible for all the first examples. Although an issue of great importance to modern scholars, the regional origin of the churches’ masons and sculptors, in other words the source of their style, would have been of little consequence to most local medieval viewers. For them, the appearance of a building would have been identified with a patron rather than with the workshop that built it, if what is recorded in medieval documents is a true reflection of reality. The royal buildings broke with those previously built in the region. Their scale was larger, their masonry more uniform, their planning more elaborate, and their decoration more abundant. They were imposing and ornate. Portals were no longer mere openings in walls but areas of display for Christian belief conveyed by sculpted tympana, capitals, and inscriptions in Latin, the sacred language of the liturgy performed within. The favoured design for portals was the salient block type witnessed at Jaca, Loarre, and Iguácel. The high drums and pyramidal roofs of domes replaced the lower simple horizontal rooflines of the earlier monuments. Church interiors, low and dark according to the old norm, were now high and amply lit, making their carved decoration visible. Applied arcades supported by sculpted capitals and columns drew attention to their apses and altars, which formerly lacked this architectonic decoration. Under the more intense scrutiny of a modern scientific gaze the visual coherence of these earliest Aragonese Romanesque churches breaks down. The diversity of their details reveals something about the order in which they were constructed. At times their differences take the form of variations on a common theme. For example, the complex mouldings composed of billets, chamfers, arrises, and different sized tori that enhance the arched openings of all the churches use the same basic elements but their arrangement varies from site to site. Compare, for instance, the moulding over the west portal of Santa María at Iguácel to those above the apse openings at San Juan de la Peña. At Iguácel a row of voussoirs surmounted by stones carved with enframed palmettes, an arris,

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a large torus, a small torus, a chamfer, plain stones, and a billet moulding form the compound arch moulding. Over the apse openings at San Juan de la Peña the mouldings employ most of the same elements – voussoirs, a small torus, a large torus, an arris and billets – but their organization differs. Although the mouldings at these two sites share features, their dissimilar order indicates they were cut with different templates. In turn this suggests that masons from two different workshops, albeit using similar designs and techniques, seem to have constructed these two churches.45 Their relative sameness, nevertheless, indicates that they are the products of the same general taste and workshop practices. The mouldings over the doors and windows at Jaca Cathedral and San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre suggest a different story. Enframed palmettes, an arris, a small torus, a large torus, another small torus, a second arris, voussoirs, and billets create the arched top of Jaca’s south portal.46 Over the south portal at Loarre the same profile appears but without the enframed palmettes. In both doorways the moulding’s middle stone, composed of a large torus flanked on either side by a small torus and an arris, is so similar it must have been cut with the same template, suggesting that the same masons worked at both churches. Moreover, five masons’ marks identify stones in both churches as having most likely been cut by the same men.47 The churches’ capitals exhibit the same subject matter, such as Daniel and Habakkuk, and closely related compositions and decorative motifs.48 Some capitals are so similar in appearance that they seem to have been carved by the same hand.49 This intimate artistic relationship between the churches at Loarre and Jaca signifies a contemporary, or nearly contemporary, construction by the same workshop of masons and sculptors. The strong stylistic and compositional similarities between the Loarre capitals and those in the apses of San Juan de la Peña again indicate a roughly contemporaneous construction.50 David Simon has pointed out the compositional similarity between a small unhappy figure carrying a bucket in one hand and a round loaf of bread in the other on the fragment of a capital at San Juan de la Peña (fig. 4.10) and Habakkuk on a capital in San Pedro at Loarre (fig. 4.11).51 Like the Loarre capital, that at San Juan probably once depicted Daniel in the Lions’ Den. The prominent eyes, frowning mouths, and balloon-like heads of the figures on both capitals suggest that they could have been carved, if not by the same hand, by members of the same workshop. Another capital at San Juan de la Peña links this site to both Santa María at Iguácel and Santa María at Ujué (fig. 4.12). It is covered by eight-

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petalled rosettes encircled by vines. A similar motif, rendered in a less consistent, two dimensional way, decorates an impost, an exterior capital, and covers most of a double capital in the central apse at Ujué (fig. 4.13). A small human figure, crudely carved, fills one of the corners of the capital. Sculptors carved the same motif on two capitals at Iguácel (fig. 4.14). While these capitals are generally similar in appearance there is no question of them having been carved by the same hand. They are, nevertheless, so closely related that they reflect a similar aesthetic preference. The more complex version of the rosette motif at San Juan seems to have served as the model for the more simplified versions at the other two sites, suggesting that San Juan was in progress before them. The capitals in the apses at Santa María, Ujué, show little in common with the other Aragonese royal churches except Iguácel. The sculpture of these two churches shares a simplicity of composition, crudeness of technique, and a preference for tall flat volutes occupying a large portion of the basket not witnessed in the other Aragonese churches.52 In addition to the rosette capitals described above, two capitals at Ujué show similar compositions to one at Iguácel.53 In the same way that Ujué reveals simplified versions of Iguácel capitals, Iguácel reveals an abbreviated form of a capital in Jaca Cathedral. A capital on the interior of the Iguácel apse shows two naked figures struggling in foliage (fig. 4.15). It is a simplified version of a capital on Jaca’s west wall that includes a well-proportioned nude on each corner (fig. 4.16). In the Iguácel example the vine pattern is simplified, the nudes have grown oversized heads, and the two birds marking the centre of Jaca’s composition have been replaced by a single pine cone. Most likely, the more complex capital served as a model for the simpler one, indicating that the smaller church was commenced after the cathedral was underway.54 Six capitals in the cloister of Santa María in the fortress of Alquézar still present in the later cloister bear no relationship whatsoever to the sculpture in the other royal Aragonese churches.55 Although primitive in execution, their biblical subject matter is easily read, unlike most of the sculpture in the other churches. The scenes depicted include the Creation, the Fall, Noah’s ark, and the Sacrifice of Abraham from the Old Testament, and from the New Testament, the Dance of Salome combined with the Beheading of John the Baptist (fig. 4.17). Except for the Sacrifice of Abraham witnessed at Jaca, none of these subjects exists in the other Aragonese churches. The figures on these capitals are depicted in such a schematized way with so little volume that at times they appear

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to be merging with the background. Clearly, the sculptor at Alquézar stems from a very different tradition, although still Romanesque, from those who worked in the other churches. This should not be surprising as this monument is located far to the east of the others, which are clustered around Jaca. The similarities and differences in the sculptural details and mouldings of the Aragonese royal churches indicate that Jaca, Loarre, and the apses at San Juan de la Peña were constructed around the same time, perhaps simultaneously. Iguácel, Santa Cruz de la Serós, and Ujué share similarities with the other three buildings suggesting that they too were built around the same time. Their sculpture, which clearly copies that at the other sites, indicates that they were probably built at a slightly later date. Written evidence backs up what the physical characteristics of the churches suggest. The contention that Jaca, San Juan de la Peña, and Loarre were all under construction at the same time is borne out by an examination of the documents. As mentioned in the previous chapter, scholars once dated Jaca Cathedral to 1063 based on documents that were later proven to be false by Ubieto Arteta.56 He indicates that 1077, the earliest date mentioned for the presence of a bishop in Jaca, and the 1096 reconquest of Huesca, the traditional seat of the see, set the main parameters for construction.57 Arguing on stylistic grounds, Moralejo prefers a slightly later dating, claiming that the work was begun before 1094, the date of a donation ‘ad laborem’ by Doña Urraca, but continued into the twelfth century.58 Written sources establish approximately the same dates for San Pedro at Loarre. The terminus post quem is generally assumed to be 1071, the date of the document indicating Sancho Ramírez established Augustinian canons at the site,59 and the terminus ante quem is circa 1095, a date mentioned in the inscription on the church’s right door jamb.60 Documents referring to the San Juan de la Peña apses likewise suggest the same time frame. The apses are commonly held to predate a consecration that took place in February 1094.61 With the other churches the situation presented by written sources does not work so neatly. For example, the inscription over the portal of Santa María at Iguácel gives 1072 as the date of construction. The second will of Count Sancho Galíndez, dated to 1080, substantiates this date by mentioning that he and his wife rebuilt the church of Santa María for the good of their souls.62 Again, the documents date the church to the same general era as the others, but they suggest that it came before the construction of Jaca Cathedral while the visual evidence suggests that it

1.1. Georgiana Goddard King (Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library)

1.2. Pyrenean Village, from King, The Way of Saint James, 1:149

1.3. A Pilgrim in Santiago, from King, The Way of Saint James, 2:483

1.4. Arthur Kingsley Porter, courtesy of the Harvard University Archives, call # HUG 1706.125p.

2.1. Iberian peninsula, c. 1035

2.2. San Millán de Cogolla, exterior view

2.3. San Millán de Cogolla, nave looking east

2.4. San Millán de Cogolla, nave looking west

2.5. San Millán de Cogolla, plan (after José Esteban Uranga Galdiano and Francisco Íñiguez Almech

2.6. San Juan de la Peña, lower church

2.7. San Juan de la Peña, lower church, plan (after Uranga Galdiano and Íñiguez Almech)

2.8. San Juan de la Peña, Mozarabic arches

2.9. San Juan de la Peña, lower church, Sancho el Mayor’s extension

2.10. San Michel de Cuxa, interior

2.11. Cathedral, Palencia, crypt of San Antolín

2.12. Cathedral, Palencia, crypt of San Antolín, Visigothic portion

2.13. Santa María del Naranco, crypt

2.14. Oviedo, Cámara Santa, crypt of Santa Leocadia

2.15. San Salvador de Leire, exterior view

2.16. San Salvador de Leire, exterior, east end apses

2.17. San Salvador de Leire, crypt

2.18. San Salvador de Leire, interior, nave looking east

2.19. San Salvador de Leire, photo of excavation, from Príncipe de Viana, vol. 5, fig. 18

2.20. Saint-Martin-du-Canigou, nave

2.21. San Pedro, Teverga, nave looking east

2.22. San Pedro, Teverga, capital

2.23. San Salvador de Leire, plan of crypt (after Íñiguez Almech)

2.24. San Salvador de Leire, window

3.1. Map of Spain, c.1065

3.2. Genealogical chart of the kings and queens of the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula

3.3. Doña Sancha Sarcophagus, front face

3.4. San Salvador de Nogal de las Huertas, view of ruins

3.5. San Salvador de Nogal de las Huertas, plaque

3.6. San Salvador de Nogal de las Huertas, rinceau capital

3.7. San Salvador de Nogal de las Huertas, figure capital

3.8. San Martín, Frómista, rinceau capital

3.9. San Martín, Frómista, exterior

3.10. San Martín, Frómista, nave looking east

3.11. León, San Isidoro, Panteón de los Reyes

3.12. Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós

3.13. Book cover (?) from Santa Cruz de la Serós (Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917)

4.1. Castle of Loarre

4.2. Santa María, Castle of Loarre, exterior

4.3. San Pedro, Castle of Loarre, exterior

4.4. San Pedro, Castle of Loarre, interior

4.5. Santa María, Obarra, exterior

4.6. San Pedro, Lárrede, exterior

4.7. San Juan de la Peña, Romanesque apses

4.8. Santa María, Ujué, apses

4.9. Santa María, Iguácel, façade

4.10. San Juan de la Peña, Daniel and Habakkuk capital

4.11. San Pedro, Castle of Loarre, Daniel and Habakkuk, side face Daniel in the Lions’ Den capital

4.12. San Juan de la Peña, capital with rosettes

4.13. Santa María, Ujué, capital with rosettes

4.14. Santa María, Iguácel, capital with rosettes

4.15. Santa María, Iguácel, capital with figure in vines

4.16. Jaca Cathedral, capital with figure in vines

4.17. Santa María, Alquézar, Sacrifice of Abraham capital

4.18. Aljafería, Zaragoza, exterior

4.19. Aljafería, Zaragoza, courtyard

4.20. San Pedro, Lasieso, exterior

4.21. Jaca Cathedral, south porch, Sacrifice of Abraham capital

4.22. Castle of Loarre

4.23. Castle of Loarre, entrance, relief

4.24. Castle of Loarre, entrance, capital

4.25. Church of Santos Emeterio y Celendonio, Samitier, exterior

5.1. Jaca Cathedral, tympanum

5.2. San Caprasio, Santa Cruz de la Serós, west portal

5.3. Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós, west portal

5.4. Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós, tympanum

5.5. Chrismon, Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós (tympanum detail with pax artificially enhanced)

5.6. San Juan de la Peña, Mozarabic portal

5.7. Santa María, Iguácel, west façade, inscription

5.8. Church, Navasa, tympanum

5.9. Church, Binacua, tympanum

5.10. San Martín, Uncastillo, tympanum (Durliat, La sculpture romane, fig. 228, p. 247)

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was built afterwards.63 Historical circumstances indicate that Santa María at Ujué cannot have been begun before 1076, the date when the town received privileges from Sancho Ramírez for helping him enter Pamplona to take its crown.64 A donation by the king to the church of Santiago de Funes, dated 13 January 1089, mentions that Sancho Ramírez constructed Santa María at Ujué.66 The church must have been constructed between those two dates. As discussed in the previous chapter Doña Sancha, in her will of 1095, left a generous legacy ‘in fabrica aeclesiae sanctae Mariae’ at Santa Cruz de la Serós.66 This indicates that this church must have been under construction at this time. Documents indicate that the no longer extant church of Jesus of Nazareth at Montearagón and the church of Santa María at Alquézar were also constructed between the 1070s and the 1090s. In 1074, Sancho Ramírez established canons at Alquézar and a document dated 1083 mentions construction at the site although it does not specify the church.67 A document of 1085 indicates that it was read in the portal of the church but no written evidence mentions a consecration until 1099.68 A donation was made by the king to the church of Jesus of Nazareth at Montearagón in 1086 suggesting that it might have been under construction.69 The church was not consecrated, however, until 1099.70 The written documents back up the relationships between the Aragonese royal churches suggested by the visual evidence of their fabric. Both sources indicate that the first Romanesque churches in Aragon were constructed about the same time, between 1070 and about 1100, roughly the period when Sancho Ramírez was king. The construction of eight churches in a span of about thirty years indicates that something of a building boom took place during the king’s reign. Churches must have risen throughout the realm almost simultaneously, paid for by the abundant tribute money extorted from the Muslims and the steadily growing tolls charged to merchants at the mountain passes beyond Jaca and Pamplona.71 Although they differed in detail, the appearance of these churches was generally the same, especially when placed against the backdrop of the architecture that came before. The new churches at Jaca, San Juan de la Peña, Loarre, Ujué, Montearagón, Alquézar, and Santa Cruz de la Serós must have been immediately recognized as more monumental, ornate, and expensive than the older architecture of the region. Their self-conscious innovation expressed unequivocally in the durable language of stone Sancho Ramírez’s policy of improvement and expansion. Contrary to the expectations raised by much of the art historical literature touting the pilgrimage to Santiago as

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the only explanation for the appearance of Romanesque architecture in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain, Jaca Cathedral is the only Aragonese Romanesque church actually located on the pilgrimage road. On the other hand, the new Romanesque churches appeared first at sites where Sancho Ramírez had made decisive changes in the status quo. They served to commemorate these modifications but additionally to make visible the king’s authority in the face of any resistance. At these sites dynastic will was transformed into stone. For instance, the erection of San Pedro, the cathedral of Jaca, coincides with a moment of crucial change in the region. For the first time in 1077, Jaca became a bishop’s seat. Until then, the centre of the diocese of Aragon had been officially located in Huesca, about a hundred kilometres away in Muslim-held territory. In reality, Huesca was the seat in name only; the bishop of Aragon actually resided at the monastery of San Adrian de Sasave, located safely within the Christian zone not far from Jaca. Episcopal seats, such as Huesca, founded in Visigothic times, were customarily maintained in name even if they were conquered by the Muslims.72 When the sees were reincorporated into Christian territory the bishops normally moved back to their historical seats. In 1077 this norm was abandoned when the bishop of Aragon changed location and title. Although no evidence suggests the territory of his see was altered, documents no longer mention a bishop of Aragon. Instead they speak of a bishop of Jaca. That Sancho Ramírez had some hand in the affair seems likely; his brother, García, became the first bishop to hold the new position. While it was actually the pope who appointed bishops, it must have suited the king’s purposes well to have a bishop’s seat in the newly founded city where he minted his coins, kept the official weights and measures, and to which he had just granted a fuero. The construction of a cathedral in Jaca would have added spiritual significance to a city already graced with such royal prestige. In addition, a large church would lend the impression of permanence to a bishop’s seat whose status would be jeopardized the moment Huesca, the traditional episcopal centre, was recaptured from the Muslims.73 A significant event also took place at San Juan de la Peña around the time its new apses were constructed. During Lent of 1071 the Latin mass was performed here for the first time in the Christian kingdoms of medieval Spain. Sancho Ramírez, who had insisted that the traditional Visigothic or Toledan rite be abandoned, was present on the occasion to see his wishes enacted.74 While the king might have renovated the church’s east end simply to commemorate this important change in the monas-

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tery’s ritual, the new apses would have served also to remind any recalcitrant monk of the royal imperative behind the adoption of the new rite. Documents mention resistance to the Latin mass on the part of other churchmen, such as Abbot Banzo of Fanlo and the bishops of both Aragon and Roda, but no written evidence exists to suggest the monks of San Juan fought the change.75 Evidence of the monastery’s pride in its Mozarabic heritage, however, exists in close proximity to the king’s new apses. Preserved just to their right, built into a later wall, is the horseshoe-shaped portal from the monastery’s earlier Mozarabic church. At three frontier fortifications, Alquézar, Montearagón, and Loarre, the king again built churches to mark and solidify change. These monuments made visible a change in the ownership of the land, for these churches were built in territory recently won back from the Muslims. Markers of the king’s appropriation of the land, these buildings were meant to indicate to the enemy, Christian or Muslim, that such changes were going to continue to occur.76 Today, little exists of either Santa María at Alquézar or the church of Jesus of Nazareth at Montearagón but their vestiges and written descriptions establish that they were large, vaulted buildings, built of ashlar and decorated with carved sculpture. San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre, still virtually intact, gives an impression of what these two may have been like. It is strongly differentiated from the military portions of the castle by its finer masonry, dome, applied columns, and sculptural decoration – the very elements used today to designate it Romanesque. Its royal status is clearly reflected in the richness of its carved capitals, the precision of its masonry, and the complicated engineering of its dome held aloft over the nave by double squinches. At Loarre and Montearagón the churches were highly visible. They were not built safely within the nucleus of their castles but actually formed part of the defensive walls. At Alquézar, if the current sixteenthcentury church stands on the site of the medieval church, this likewise would have been the case. Distinguished from the military portions of their sites by their more complex Romanesque style, these churches made visible the Christian ownership of both the fortification and the surrounding land. In combination with their adjoining fortresses, the churches proclaimed that two types of force stood behind Sancho Ramírez’s claim to both the land and parias. The stout walls of the castles presented Sancho Ramírez’s military prowess while the churches testified to the belief that this physical strength was backed by God’s sanction.

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The Aljafería, al-Muqtadir’s fortified suburban palace at Zaragoza, built during the mid-eleventh century, presents a different configuration (fig. 4.18).77 Viewed from a distance its formidable walls punctuated with stout semicircular towers create the impression of an impregnable fortress with a strictly military purpose. The inner courtyard behind the walls was calculated to produce a different effect (fig. 4.19). Hidden behind the robust walls, this garden, with its reflecting pool surrounded by delicate intersecting polylobed arcades, was meant to evoke a utopian paradise.78 It frequently served as a setting for the majlis al-uns, the sophisticated entertainments of the taifa sovereign and his inner circle of courtiers. Its ornate decorations along with the poetry read before them were meant to transport the highly refined courtiers to a blissful realm beyond the earthly imperfection of the world outside the walls.79 Like the Castle of Loarre, the Aljafería included a place of worship, a small octagonal mosque. In contrast to the church of San Pedro it is not visible from outside the palace. Its purpose, nevertheless, seems to some extent to have been much the same. The mosque, located well within the walls, is situated adjacent to the area considered to be al-Muqtadir’s audience hall, emphasizing the association of his rule with Islam.80 The mosque’s decoration draws from the ornamentation in the maqsura and mihrab of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, implying a connection with the Umayyad caliphs. This message, however, was only directed to those within the walls, not those without. The mosque’s small scale meant it was for the private use of the king, his family, and inner circle. Like the paradisical courtyard, it was meant to underscore the king’s individual prestige before an elite audience of insiders.81 The Christian king’s architecture was aimed at a broader audience and conveyed its message in a more obvious way. On a material level, the churches expressed Sancho Ramírez’s wealth, power, and connection to the divine. The funds which paid for the churches, derived mainly from parias and tolls gathered at mountain passes, were directly linked to the king’s military power and his God-given right to possess the land. Medieval Christian law considered monarchy a divine institution proceeding directly from God.82 The churches, built by Sancho Ramírez at sites where his authority might have been challenged, stood as reminders of his divinely sanctioned right to rule. There was some call for Sancho Ramírez to legitimize his divine connection because his father, Ramiro I, had been only an illegitimate son of Sancho el Mayor. Although he acted as king, Ramiro I never actually claimed the title, signing his documents only as ‘Ego Ranimirus Sancioni

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regis filius.’83 Although he built towers and bridges, no churches exist that were the result of his patronage. Sancho Ramírez, unlike his father, clearly announced his kingship and its divine sanction by signing all his documents ‘dei gratia rex.’84 The churches he built visually presented the divine blessing of his royal authority as clearly as those words on his documents. They proclaimed his personal power and his position as the protector of his land against the Muslims and rival Christian monarchs by making visible the divine sanction of his rule.85 Within the context of late eleventh-century Aragon, Romanesque architecture represented more than the king’s personal power. It presented an innovative visual language that helped both to define and express the new beliefs, values, and mores of this frontier society moving from insecurity to stability, from parochialism to a broader perspective, and from potentiality to accomplishment.86 Moreover, the construction of the new churches coincided with a shift to a burgeoning crusading mentality that understood the Muslims as a threat to Christianity that must be destroyed.87 It follows then that the new churches must have expressed the well-being of the territory in the face of the Muslim menace. As indicated in earlier chapters, royal church building often carried with it a more complex meaning than the simple construction of a place of worship in the Christian kingdoms of Reconquest Spain. Often the destruction and rebuilding of churches was closely linked with defeat and success in war. Despoiling churches was a common tactic used by the Muslims to demoralize further vanquished Christians, as when al– Mans. ur carried the bells of the razed cathedral of Santiago de Compostela back to Cordoba. Sancho el Mayor, the grandfather of Sancho Ramírez, repaired churches, such as San Millán de la Cogolla, which had been damaged by the Muslims. As chapter 2 has shown these repaired churches, constructed as they were in the wake of the enemy’s destruction, stood as reminders of the realm’s stability thanks to the king’s sound leadership, and more important, they declared the preordained right of the Christians to the Iberian peninsula. This was the tradition of architectural patronage that Sancho Ramírez inherited from his grandfather.88 It was intimately associated with victory in battle, restoration, improvement, and the divine sanction of Christians to assert their domination over the Muslims. Like the churches of Sancho el Mayor, those built by Sancho Ramírez looked different from those constructed before his reign. While Sancho el Mayor’s churches broke with the earlier building traditions of the Iberian peninsula by

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abandoning the horseshoe arch, they were not united by the use of a single formal language like those of his grandson Sancho Ramírez. The Navarese monarch’s buildings could look as different as the lower church at San Juan de la Peña, with its narrow barrel-vaulted spaces divided by an arcade, and the crypt of San Antolín in Palencia, an uninterrupted space covered by a low broad barrel vault on transverse arches. Although not identical, Sancho Ramírez’s churches shared formal features – the domes, ashlar masonry, barrel vaults, complex mouldings, capitals carved with similar subjects, columns, and imposing scale – which created an appearance similar enough that even the most unsophisticated viewer could see them as related, especially in comparison to the smaller, more modest churches constructed earlier or concomitantly by less significant patrons.89 The churches of Sancho Ramírez communicated the same associations of well-being as those of his grandfather but with greater clarity and stronger personal association because of their uniform style. Each one would have called to mind the others, producing a collective identity, and thus expressing their message in a more familiar, totally unambiguous, and instantaneously recognizable way. The divergent appearance of churches built by other Aragonese patrons contemporary with Sancho Ramírez suggests that the king’s use of the Romanesque style in royal buildings resulted from choice not chance. For instance, the church of San Pedro at Lasieso (fig. 4.20), built between 1070 and 1080 by the king’s illegitimate brother of the same name, Count Sancho Ramírez, looks completely different.90 The church is a small single-aisled structure with an adjoining chapel surmounted by a tower. Its small, roughly worked stones, tower with narrow geminated windows, and bands of horizontally placed stones relate this church to the local tradition of building witnessed in churches built along the shores of the Gállego River. Sancho Ramírez clearly had options. He could have selected one of these simpler styles, but he chose the more imposing Romanesque. The royal churches were surely recognized immediately as something new and better – something more monumental, ornate, and expensive. Within the framework of the Reconquest, the wealth exhibited by Sancho Ramírez’s churches was connected with victory and Christian military superiority over the Muslim taifas of Tudela and Zaragoza, for the king extracted a large portion of his income directly from these cities. By threat of war and promises of protection, he extorted substantial tribute monies from these Muslim cities.91 These parias were a regular feature of the Iberian economy from the

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early 1040s until the end of the century.92 Although they had lost their military edge over the Christians, the Islamic taifa kingdoms, such as alMuqtadir’s Zaragoza, continued to prosper economically and culturally until the arrival of the Almoravids from north Africa at the end of the eleventh century.93 It was preferable to pay the Christians to maintain peace than to fight in battles themselves. Although nothing is known of the exact sums paid to Sancho Ramírez by his taifa neighbors, al-Muqtadir of Zaragoza paid Sancho García IV 12,000 mancusos yearly, after a treaty established in 1069.94 It is assumed that this amount came to Sancho Ramírez after García’s death when he became king of Navarra in 1076.95 He would eventually impose tribute payments on the regions around Huesca, Ejea, and Pradilla. In 1058 Fernando had begun to collect 5,000 dinars a year from al-Muzaffar to maintain a truce after he had attacked Badajoz.96 The ruler of Seville offered to pay Fernando’s son Alfonso VI 50,000 dinars a year to leave him in peace and to attack Granada instead.97 The donations made by Spanish kings help to assess the actual value of these amounts in the Christian lands beyond the Pyrenees. Fernando I donated 1000 mancusos yearly to the Burgundian monastery of Cluny. His son Alfonso VI increased this amount to 2,000 gold pieces a year, helping to finance the construction of the monumental church of Cluny III. Sancho Ramírez made a gift of 500 mancusos each year to the pope. Although Gaillard suggested that the war with the Muslims produced in Spain ‘un climat peu propice à la vie artistique,’ just the opposite seems to have been the case.98 The parias financed development of Romanesque architecture both on the peninsula and beyond the Pyrenees.99 Large buildings make their appearance in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain just when Sancho el Mayor and Ramón Berenguer I of Cataluña begin the collection of parias.100 It is not by chance that Sancho Ramírez began his church building when he began to collect parias from the taifa of Zaragoza. These circumstances created a climate in which military valour, defeat of the enemy, wealth, royal church building, and divine sanction were entwined. Eleventh-century documents and inscriptions record the names of patrons rather than masons and sculptors, suggesting that the role of financier was considered more worthy than that of labourer. But they say nothing about the part a patron might have played in the conception of the building he or she funded. No written evidence exists to explain what role Sancho Ramírez might have played in determining the look of the buildings financed by his largesse. No data exist other than the

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churches themselves and a general sense of the architecture with which the king was familiar. Sancho Ramírez’s knowledge of architecture was not restricted to the monuments of the Iberian peninsula. In 1068 he made a pilgrimage via southern France to Rome. This trip assured that he was an informed patron. No written evidence survives to indicate precisely which monuments might have impressed the king either in Rome or en route. But the imagination of an ambitious monarch such as Sancho Ramírez most likely would have been stimulated by the imposing monuments erected by the great pagan empire builders and by the first Christian emperor, Constantine. The accounts of other medieval pilgrims indicate something of what the Aragonese king might have noticed in Rome.101 Sigeric, the archbishop of Canterbury, travelled to Rome in 990 to receive his pallium from John XV (985–96). His account lists twenty-three churches including S. Lorenzo fuori le mura, S. Paolo fuori le mura, Santa Sabina, Santa Croce, Santa Maria Maggiore, and San Pietro in Vincoli.102 He makes no mention of pagan monuments. Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish rabbi who visited the Italian city in 1160, mentions both Christian and pagan monuments in his account. The ‘wonderful structures in the city, different from any others in the world,’ which he admires include St. Peter’s and the Colosseum.103 He also notes the city’s monumental statuary, especially the mounted figure of Constantine the Great.104 Master Gregorius, who visited Rome in the twelfth or thirteenth century, records his impressions of the city in his Narracio de Mirabilibus Urbis Romae.105 His interest in the buildings and sculpture of pagan Rome overwhelms all others.106 He is impressed by the monumental scale, skilful construction, rich materials, and inscriptions, the palaces of Augustus and Diocletian, and the theatre in Heraklea. His attention is also drawn to triumphal arches and to the marble and bronze statues placed throughout the city. The Mirabilia Urbis Romae, a twelfth-century pilgrim’s guide to the city, also describes the monuments available for the Aragonese king to see when he conferred with Pope Alexander II in 1068. Its author, like Gregorius, emphasizes the monuments of ancient Rome. He provides comprehensive lists of triumphal arches, baths, palaces, and theatres before places of martyrdom and churches. His stated goal is to ‘bring back to the human memory how great was their [pagan temples and palaces] beauty in gold, silver brass, ivory and precious stones.’107 The Colosseum and the Pantheon engage his attention as much as the three churches Constantine built in Rome.

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There is little doubt that Sancho Ramírez saw and admired the monumental architecture of ancient Rome. The burial of his son, Ramiro el Monje, in a reused Roman sarcophagus carved in the second century exemplifies the medieval Aragonese veneration of antique culture. The important status of the sarcophagus, now embedded in the wall of San Pedro el Viejo in Huesca, is indicated both by its preservation over the centuries and by its use to hold the royal remains. Given this admiration for antiquity, it comes as no surprise that antique features are an important component in the visual language of royal Aragonese churches. Roman models had a decisive impact on the formation of both the style and motifs witnessed in the sculpture of Jaca Cathedral as Moralejo has demonstrated.108 Jaca’s well-modelled nudes, such as Isaac on the Sacrifice of Abraham capital (fig. 4.21), like those at Frómista, were ultimately based on the Husillos sarcophagus.109 This and other sarcophagi, such as that in Huesca, clearly served as models for the well-muscled bodies, curly hair, looping drapery, and poses of the figures executed by the Romanesque sculptors of Aragon, particularly at Loarre and Jaca. Stylistically, the modelled surface of the capitals in the Aragonese churches also suggests antique prototypes. They are no longer worked in the rigid planes seen in the capitals of earlier monuments such as the Panteón de los reyes at San Isidoro, León.110 The narrative mode of presentation witnessed in many of the capitals in Jaca Cathedral might also stem from ancient sources. The intense eye contact of the figures and their lively interactive gestures find strong parallels in the abbreviated narrative scenes of early Christian sarcophagi, such as that of Junius Bassus. The imago clipeata (Jaca, Loarre), nude torch bearers (Jaca, Loarre), nudes crowned with laurel wreaths (Iguácel), nude putti on lions (Loarre), as well as monsters, such as sirens (Loarre), harpies (Loarre), and griffins (Loarre, Santa Cruz de la Serós, Jaca), which appear throughout the Aragonese churches, are all ultimately derived from antique sources. The paucity of New Testament images in the repertoire of the Aragonese sculptors suggests a dependence on lost early Christian sarcophagi produced or imported into the region. The few clearly identifiable biblical scenes, such as Daniel in the Lions’ Den (Jaca, Loarre, Santa Cruz de la Serós, Iguácel, San Juan de la Peña) and the Sacrifice of Abraham (Jaca), were among the most popular for early Christian carvers.111 The new eleventh-century churches constructed in the Romanesque style that appeared throughout the Christian kingdoms of northern

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Spain referenced the common Roman roots of Spanish and trans-Pyrenean Christians, as opposed to the Arab and Berber heritage of the Muslims. Like his pilgrimage to Rome, alliances with other Christians, and insistence on the Roman rite, Sancho Ramírez’s Romanesque churches represent the monarch’s goal to bring his realm into line with the rest of Christendom. Although the first-hand experience of Rome could have inspired the king to choose a more imposing architecture, the heritage of Aragon could have made him susceptible to such influence. Zaragoza (Caesaraugusta), Huesca (Osca), and Jaca (Iaca) had all been Roman settlements and it seems likely that more vestiges of their civilization would have existed in the eleventh century than today. The visual language of the new Aragonese churches ultimately derived from Roman buildings and, shared with the churches in the realms of Sancho Ramírez’s allies, expressed a collective Christian identity that was reinforced by common antecedents. The Roman references indicated that the Aragonese had a common background with other Christians and also that they, like the Romans, were preordained for greatness. The Romanizing features of Aragonese churches, however, went beyond an aesthetic or historical appreciation of the past or the creation of a bond with Christians beyond the Pyrenees. Although less literal than the continuity created in the actual fabric of Sancho el Mayor’s additions to preexisting churches, the Romanizing features of his grandson’s buildings made visible the continuum with the Roman Empire. According to Bandmann, in theocratic states like Aragon that were grounded in the belief that they were an extension of the Roman Empire spinning out Christian history until the apocalypse and the arrival of the New Jerusalem, no sense of distinction from the past was understood.112 The use of Roman motifs and quotations of their architectural forms would have been viewed as a perpetuation of time-honoured practices rather than the rebirth of a forsaken tradition. To use W.S. Heckscher’s words, ‘to the mediaeval mind, the cult of the Antique meant not so much a revival of a thing which had died as the removal of obstructions which impaired the maintenance of things extant.’113 While a time may have occurred in which conditions and finances prevented the construction of monumental buildings in Aragon, when increased resources made building possible again there would have been no doubt about the appropriate appearance for an architecture that expressed the divinely given right to rule. The expression of a united and confident Christian posture preordained to triumph was most imperative in the frontier zone where land

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ownership was contested between Christians and Muslims. The Aragonese frontier with Muslim taifas differed from that of León-Castile because there was little no-man’s-land to act as a buffer zone between the Christian and Muslim centres. The Islamic settlements of Tudela, Ejea, Huesca, and Barbastro were all within easy reach of Aragonese territory.114 Sometimes the enemy communities were so close together they were actually in visual contact. For instance, the Muslim settlement of Bolea could easily be seen from Loarre only fifteen kilometres away, and Huesca is clearly visible from Montearagón only five kilometres away. The Romanesque churches that Sancho Ramírez built for the Augustinian canons he installed at the frontier strongholds of Montearagón, Alquézar, and Loarre proclaimed the Christian ownership of the fortress and the surrounding land. In addition to staking this territorial claim, these churches, distinguished from the military portions of their sites by their more ornate Romanesque style, served to maintain the cultural and religious integrity of the Christians by reminding them visually that their lives were defined by beliefs and customs distinct from those of the Muslims. Maintaining a clear image of themselves as distinct from the Muslims was especially important at this turning point in the Reconquest when the Aragonese were beginning to have the upper hand but were not yet completely sure of their ability to dominate the Muslims. In the insecure lands along the border, where fear of the Muslims would have been greatest, the highly visible Romanesque churches with their distinctive silhouettes profiled against the sky expressed confidence in the face of uncertainty. They would have stood as a reminder of the divine approbation of the Christian cause. The enduring quality inherent in their massiveness, their domes evoking the heavens by duplicating their shape and suggesting the divine origin of the authority of those associated with it,115 and the subjects of their sculpture, which made clear the righteous would be saved, must have compelled faith and courage in the Christians. Like standards carried into battle, they served to unite and rally the Christians against the enemy. The belief that God protected the king and his realm from the enemy is most clearly expressed by the disposition and decoration of San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre. Contrary to what might be expected, the church is vulnerably placed on the lowest, most accessible part of the rocky outcrop forming the castle’s site. The other side of the site is considerably safer, protected by a sheer drop of many feet (fig. 4.22). In terms of strategic placement the builders of San Pedro seem to have sacrificed practical defendability for visual impact. San Pedro’s position, however, was

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dictated not by practical military tactics but rather by the needs of psychological, or perhaps more precisely, spiritual warfare. It is possible that San Pedro was intentionally erected on the weakest part of the site because here it could provide the most protection, a protection afforded not by the stoutness of its walls but more by the power inherent in its ecclesiastic function expressed clearly by its form and decoration. Even from a distance San Pedro is recognizable as a church. Its curved apse articulated with applied columns and billet mouldings contrasts sharply with the rectilinear and planar forms of the defensive walls and towers of the castle. The octagonal drum rising up over the nave indicates the dome beneath, a form more commonly associated with churches than fortifications. The ample fenestration and rich decoration imply that the function of this structure was more than one of practical defence. The Aragonese presence at Loarre made so emphatic by San Pedro was aimed at a broad audience. The fortress dominated the plain of Somontanos that was crossed by trade routes leading from the Muslim towns of Huesca to Ayerbe and from the rest of the Iberian peninsula to Jaca, the Somport pass, and France. Church and castle were visible to those who traversed these roads. Located on the south side of the site, San Pedro is visible from Bolea, the closest Islamic settlement, located about fifteen kilometres away. Because of its placement San Pedro functions as an imposing entrance to the castle. The portal in its south flank is the only means of penetrating its interior. In terms of practical defence, the narrowness of the portal and the slope of the stairs in the passageway under the church would slow any intruders. This would be the case no matter what type of edifice topped the entrance way. But at Loarre the builders chose to surmount the entrance tunnel with a church that was clearly recognizable as such from the exterior. In an age when weapons were blessed before battles, relics were carried forth like amulets into the fray, and the pope promised absolution to Christian warriors, the presence of this sacred space must have been perceived by Christians as radiant with the invincible strength of the divine. For Christ’s allies within the castle, San Pedro must have been perceived as charged with prohibitive power, debarring entrance not merely through physical strength but also by the power of the spirit, in the name of the Christian God and his earthly agent, Sancho Ramírez. The relief above the only portal to the castle was meant to communicate in very concrete terms the belief that God visits his wrath freely upon his enemies (fig. 4.23). Only the bottom half of the frieze remains

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today. It once depicted an enthroned Christ surrounded by an almondshaped mandorla flanked by two evangelist symbols and angels holding scrolls. On the scroll of the angel on Christ’s right the words ‘Gabriel fortitudo dei’ are still legible. The outer plaques of the relief depict groups of small naked figures behind a wavy band. The tiny figures clutch its upper edge; some lean forward as if towed along, while others strain backwards as if resisting its force. Porter identified the relief as a Last Judgment, suggesting that the small figures at its edges were those condemned to suffer the tortures of the damned.116 At first glance he may seem wrong as the damned usually only appear on Christ’s left. Luis de la Figuera y Lezcano, the church’s first restorer, however, placed the plaque in its current position on Christ’s right after having found it in some debris alongside the church.117 Possibly both plaques were once on Christ’s left and on his right two more, now lost, showed the saved.118 The Last Judgment pictures the omnipotent spiritual forces protecting those within the castle. When whole, the relief would have conveyed the absolute power of the enthroned God through his centrality, frontality, and overwhelming scale, and through the presence of the supernatural beasts and protective angels who accompanied him. Obviously he dominates the existence of the diminutive, naked figures at the edges of the relief. The capital on the left side of the portal, placed lower and closer to eye level, depicts in a more prosaic way the immediate consequences of entering the castle uninvited (fig. 4.24). It provides a clear visual example of the victor and the vanquished that draws from ancient sources. The capital shows a large figure with a raised sword about to slay a smaller, unarmed, naked figure that he firmly clasps. The right arm of the victim dangles in limp passivity emphasizing his helplessness. This capital, together with the relief, showed that the enemies of the king should fear for both body and soul, for those who were captured were not just slain but damned forever. Beyond the portal, the disposition of the architectural forms was calculated to evoke the actual feeling of divine presence. Entering the castle requires passing through the tunnel running under and upward towards the sacred space of San Pedro where the relics of San Demetrius, who had miraculously defended Thessoloniki from pagan attacks, were housed. The passage is somewhat dark, especially right after entering before the eyes have time to adjust from the bright Spanish sunlight to the decreased luminosity of the interior. Although not claustrophobic, it is contained and restricting. There are no windows. The only doorway,

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that leading into the crypt, allows access only to an even darker space where it is impossible to see in the daytime without the aid of a light. Straight ahead, at the top of the stairs, no immediate exit to the exterior is apparent, only a blank wall. There is little choice of passage here; the visitor must mount the stairs approaching ever closer to the sacred space or turn and exit. The builders of Loarre made the sacred nature of this space above the tunnel obvious even at a distance by building San Pedro in a definite ecclesiastical style. Closer to the entrance of the castle, the grave consequences of violating this space were concretely visualized for the visitor in the portal relief illustrating the Last Judgment and the portal capital showing the moment just before the slaughter of a captured enemy. These images must have been intended to plant fear in the mind of the imaginary hostile visitor, which would intensify beyond the threshold even though the images were no longer visible. The designers of the castle could even have hoped that the tunnel would be experienced not merely as a neutral connecting passage leading from the outside in, but as a highly evocative space charged with power to call forth intense emotions already suggested by the external decoration of San Pedro. The builders must have thought that hostile intruders would be disquieted by the image of the invincible God who protected the castle, and that their anxiety would increase to dread as they mounted the stairs, imagining their doom, climbing ever closer to the church, the locus of God’s spiritual power. The builders of the castle might even have hoped that the image of the Last Judgment had an apotropaic power, warding off their foes before they could enter the castle. Their belief in God’s actual presence in the church and his special protection would in any case have been a comfort, inspiring confidence and courage and spurring them on to valorous action. Written evidence suggests that buildings were conceived as having such evocative power in eleventh-century Aragon. In a document of 1067 Sancho Ramírez cedes property to Abbot Banzo as thanks for constructing a military tower near Alquézar. The document describes the purpose of the tower as ‘ad examplamentum de christianos et malum de mauros,’ or roughly, ‘to exhort the Christians and to confound the Muslims.’119 At Castellar, only twenty-one kilometres from Zaragoza, the king built a fortress described in a document ‘ad destrucionem sarracenorum et dilatacionem christianorum,’ or roughtly ‘[to further] the destruction of the Muslims and the empowerment of the Christians.’120 If a simple tower

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could be intended to have such a powerful affect, what then might be the expectations for an imposing church? The Castle of Loarre is not the only site where church architecture is used as a spiritual tactic of secular warfare to add divine protection to that provided by sturdy stone walls. A number of eleventh- and twelfth-century Aragonese fortresses have churches built into their precinct walls, such as those at Fantova, Montearagón, Muro de Roda, and Ayerbe. Their builders may have hoped these churches would act like palladia protecting those within from the enemy. Two examples, however, provide close parallels to Loarre’s more complex use of sacred space as a psychological weapon. At Samitier, above the canal of Berdún, access to a mid-eleventhcentury tower is completely blocked by the presence of a church (fig. 4.25).121 Like San Pedro at Loarre, this small church dedicated to two Spanish military martyrs, Saints Emeterio and Celendonio, acts as a monumental gateway to the tower perched at the very end of a precipice jutting out into space.122 The sides of this precipice drop with dizzying sharpness, preventing approach from any other direction except that of the church. The only way to gain access to the tower is to enter the portal in the south flank of the church, pass through its nave, and exit through a door on the north side. At Sos del Rey Catolico, the mid-twelfth-century church of San Esteban is built above a passage similar to that running beneath San Pedro. As at Loarre, a doorway opening off this tunnel provides access to a crypt. San Esteban is built on the low point of a high site that was once fortified, according to documents. A single tower still stands further up the hill behind the church. Although the remains of the fortress are too scant to be absolutely sure, it seems likely that here, as at Loarre, the passage beneath the church provided the main access to the rest of the site. The positioning of the churches at these two other sites, one earlier and one later than the Castle of Loarre, reinforces the idea that the strategic placement of San Pedro did not just occur by chance. The castle was meant to convey that the military strength evident in its walls and towers was backed up by the invincible strength of the divine, symbolically and actually believed to be present in the church. Like relics carried into battle the church was intended to inspire courage in the Christians and to protect them from the Muslim foe. All was not left to God, however, when it came to ensuring the safety of the inhabitants of Loarre. A pragmatic military feature was incorporated into the design of San Pedro. A semicircular rampart around the

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top of its apse provided both a vantage point and a high, last retreat in case of attack. The rampart, hidden at some point by reconstruction, was rediscovered by the castle’s second restorer, Manuel Chamoso Lamas.123 The windows of San Pedro’s crypt, located close to ground level, from a distance seem wide and accessible because of the arches and columns that frame them. Closer inspection, however, reveals that they are merely slits akin to those in the castle’s defensive towers. Another less visible feature of the church was derived from the frontier placement and military function of the castle-monastery complex. In the course of replacing San Pedro’s floor during the third restoration, workers discovered a barrel-vaulted, windowless room located underneath the north side of the middle bay. The original opening to this chamber no longer exists and it can only be seen today through a hole punched through the north wall of a small room situated across the monumental stairway from San Pedro’s crypt. Probably once accessible through an opening in the nave, this chamber would have served as a cistern providing water in the event of a prolonged siege. The inclusion of these military features in a church, especially in one so consciously designed to make clear its ecclesiastic function by its forms and decoration, shows the pervasive influence of the proximity of the enemy on the minds of the eleventh-century Aragonese. San Pedro, with its combined military and ecclesiastic features, expresses the tacit contract between God and the king by symbolically conveying the divine mandate behind its patron’s military strength and causes. The sure success implied by this visualization of divine approbation must have been a reassurance to the Christians at Loarre, who lived in constant visual contact with the Muslims. It was meant to rally the king’s warriors and debilitate his enemies. In addition, it represented the divine blessing of the king’s religious and military command more publicly than did the words ‘dei gratia rex’ on his documents. San Pedro, then, stood like a giant seal set in the frontier zone staking the Aragonese royal claim to ownership. San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre, Jaca Cathedral, and the east end of San Juan de la Peña were the first monuments constructed during a late eleventh-century building boom in Aragon that occurred thanks to the patronage of the royal family, most notably by the king, Sancho Ramírez. On a political level, these churches were meant to legitimize their patron’s authority at sites where the king had instituted changes that brought his realm in line with practices and habits in the Christian territories beyond the Pyrenees. The new churches stood to remind the Ara-

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gonese Christians that they held different beliefs and came from different roots than the nearby Muslims. The churches built at fortresses in the frontier zone were especially cogent reminders of this. Here, where the dynastic will to conquer was transformed into actual territory, Sancho Ramírez’s fortress-monasteries expressed the message that both his right to rule the land and Christian victory were assured by divine providence.

5 The Frontier of Eternity: Church Portal Decoration in Romanesque Aragon

Whatever the ultimate origins of the tympanum of Jaca, the significant fact is its existence. It may indeed well be the oldest sculptured tympanum of Europe.1 It is clumsily executed and is nothing more than a debased copy of the Jaca tympanum by a sculptor who neither understood the symbolism nor could reproduce the forms of his original.2

For the inhabitants of the late eleventh-century frontier kingdom of Aragon the tympanum of Jaca Cathedral must have been an awe-inspiring sight (fig. 5.1). Placed above their heads over the main portal of San Pedro, the new cathedral, this relief sculpture and the carved capitals below would have been the first monumental stone images that many of them had ever seen. For the largely illiterate population, the tympanum with its Latin inscriptions likely provided their first sight of written language as well. Literally, most people would never have seen anything like the two majestic profile lions, bodies tensed, tails switching, and forepaws lifted, symmetrically placed, creating a dramatic sense of power held in check by the large spoked wheel that separated them and filled the centre of the relief. It is easy to imagine an occasion on which a priest would have explained to a crowd of illiterate viewers that the spokes of the wheel were really the Greek letters chi and rho and that these letters together with the sigma below were an abbreviation for XPistuS, Christ’s name in Greek. The small letters – an alpha and an omega – dangling from the ends of the cross bar of the wheel, he would have explained, evoked Christ’s words, ‘I am the alpha and the omega; the beginning

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and the end,’ from John’s vision of the end of time recorded in the Apocalypse.3 He might have continued by reading the inscriptions that explained the lions, the other small figures, and how the meaning of the tympanum made clear that salvation through Christ was the only means to life in this world and the next. With the Jaca tympanum and those carved concomitantly or slightly later, the frontier kingdom of Aragon crossed the divide from being a culture where the production of pictorial images was rare and unprogrammed to one where they were self-consciously deployed in service of those with power. With the advent of carved Romanesque tympana, the process of entering a church became more complicated than a simple passage from outside to inside. Carved images, inscriptions, and often both, placed around the portal, mediated entrance to the sacred space, complicating the liminal aspect of the threshold while they likewise established the portal as a location in its own right. The portals of two Aragonese churches, San Caprasio (fig. 5.2) constructed between 1020 and 1030 and Santa María (fig. 5.3) underway by 1095, standing almost side by side in the tiny Pyrenean village of Santa Cruz de la Serós, not far from Jaca, bear witness to the striking change that took place.4 With only the practical function of entrance in mind, the masons of San Caprasio built a simple opening composed of a monolithic lintel topped by a relieving arch. In contrast the public west portal of the church dedicated to Santa María, the only surviving building from the monastery once inhabited by the sisters of Sancho Ramírez, is constructed in a self-conscious rhetorical style using both an inscription and carved images to convey meaning. Even from a distance, before the specificity of the images can be discerned or the words read, the enframing mouldings and columns focus attention on the portal and signal the visitor that entrance into the church is a more significant experience than entering any ordinary building. The tympanum above Santa María’s door, strikingly similar to that at Jaca Cathedral, depicts two lions, carved in fairly high relief, plastically but abstractly rendered, flanking a chrismon encircled by a frame with an inscription that continues across the bottom edge of the tympanum (fig. 5.4). Ecclesiastical space in the eleventh century was understood not just as a physical place framed by stone and mortar but as a site, after being transformed by the ritual of consecration, charged with numinous and allegorical meaning. On a mystical level, it was the temple of Solomon, the body of Christ, the community of the faithful, and the Heavenly Jerusalem.5 For the medieval worshipper entering a church was not just

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going from outside to inside, but a matter of leaving the secular world and actually entering the spiritual realm of God.6 The new and impressive format of elaborately carved portals like those of Santa María and Jaca Cathedral must have enhanced the spiritual wonder of this process through their complex and novel display of images. Artistic change was just one of the significant shifts that took place in Aragon in the second half of the eleventh century. Inspired by a more militant ideology of war beginning in the mid-1070s, as indicated in the last chapter, Aragon’s king, Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064–94), stepped up aggression against the taifa of Zaragoza, expanding his territory and his wealth with parias extorted from these Muslims. In addition, encouraged by closer ties with the papacy, the monarch brought his kingdom into line with the religious practices of the rest of Christendom by regulating religious life and most significantly, by substituting the Roman for the traditional Mozarabic rite in 1071. Outsiders – drawn by the prospect of booty or the remission of sins for fighting the Muslims, by the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela or the prosperity and freedom offered by Jaca – came to the kingdom, swelling the population and bringing new customs with them from beyond the Pyrenees. Jaca, located at the strategic juncture of the roads that travelled north through the Somport pass to France and westward towards Pamplona, had been a rural settlement until mid-century when the king designated it an administrative, mercantile, and religious centre. Here, in this burgeoning urban setting, life became more regulated by the fuero, or charter, granted by the king around 1077, that defined the rights and obligations of citizens. To further commerce, Sancho Ramírez instituted a new standardized system of weights and measures. An engraved line, still visible on the south wall of Jaca Cathedral, shows the official measure used in commercial transactions.7 Evidence of substantial mercantile activity in the region exists in a document describing the customs duties set by the king. It makes clear that goods from both Islamic and Christian lands passed through the area.8 Sancho Ramírez also established a mint at Jaca which struck coins with his uncrowned profile head, in rough imitation of Roman coinage, on one side, and a cross of victory raised high on a pole framed by foliage on the other. By 1076 Jaca had become an episcopal centre.9 The king’s brother, García, was made the bishop of Jaca and a new cathedral, dedicated like the pope’s church to Saint Peter, was begun, funded in part by the king’s sister, as indicated in chapter 3. The new church portal, public and complex, with its sacred pictorial and written language both shaped and

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reflected the ethos in Aragon at this moment of change. Its monumental presence displayed the unassailable Christian order of existence with a persuasive sense of actuality aimed at the diverse urban citizenry composed of locals, Christian immigrants from beyond the Pyrenees, and non-Christians from the Iberian peninsula. Along with giving shape to Christian identity, the cathedral and its sculpture made tangible the piety of its patrons, making visible the tacit link between the king, his family, and the divine power that was understood as preserving the safety of the realm in a dangerous region located close to hostile territory. The large chrismon at the centre of the tympanum recalled Christian victory through its association with Constantine, the ultimate Christian warrior.10 This symbol of Christian victory, although more emblematic than the churches at Sancho Ramírez’s fortress-monasteries, stood in a similar way as an affirmation of the divine sanction of Christian triumph over Islam. Moreover, it recalled that the ultimate victory available only to faithful and penitent Christians was that of the soul over death at the end of time. The Jaca tympanum, along with the four nearby examples that echo its composition, contributed to the sociogeographic identity of the frontier kingdom of Aragon through its clear depiction of providential order. Art historians writing in the early twentieth century, attempting the creation of a chronology of Romanesque sculpture, were just as struck by the novelty of the Jaca tympanum as its medieval observers may have been. Porter, misled by false documents, enthusiastically declared that it might be the first carved tympanum in Europe.11 Following his trail, Gaillard and Gómez-Moreno, and later, after the middle of the twentieth century, Ubieto Arteta, Durliat, Lyman, Moralejo, and Simon all explored the role the tympanum might have played in the reappearance of monumental sculpture in the eleventh century and the formulation of the Romanesque style.12 While a specific date for the tympanum is difficult to pin down, most scholars now accept that it was created between 1080 and 1105.13 More recent scholarship addressing the Jaca tympanum has moved away from the early twentieth-century interest in dates, chronologies, and the stylistic teleologies, which were originally motivated by nationalism. Close readings of the tympanum’s imagery and inscriptions, its iconographical sources, and its meaning within the context of the liturgy have replaced these earlier concerns. A number of scholars, Miguel Dolç, Juan Esteban Lorente, Robert Favreau, and Calvin Kendall among them, have focused on the graphic elements of the tympanum.14 Deci-

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phering the Trinitarian and anagrammatic meanings of the chrismon has drawn their particular attention. The meaning of the word ‘duplex’ in the inscription around the chrismon was a hotly contended issue. The transcribed inscription reads: ‘Hac in scvlptvra, lector sic noscere cvra: P Pater, A Genitvs, Dvplex est Spiritus Amvs. Hii tres ivre qvidem Dominvs svnt vnvs et idem’; and translates as, ‘In this sculpture, reader, take care to understand in this way: P is the Father, A is the Son, the double consonant is for the Holy Spirit. These three are indeed rightly one and the same, the Lord.’15 Some authors argued that ‘duplex’ stood for the combined humanity and divinity of Christ.16 Others thought ‘duplex’ referred to the Holy Spirit; either the letter ‘s’ or omega; or the double sources, the Father and the Son, from which the Holy Spirit proceeds according to Catholic dogma.17 Simon proposed a wide-ranging solution suggesting that ‘duplex’ is a vague term that refers to the many dual aspects present in the tympanum’s imagery, such as its two lions.18 The controversy was settled by Favreau and Kendall, who simultaneously but independently pointed out that medieval writers, such as Isidore and Bede, used the word ‘duplex’ to refer to the Latin letter X.19 With this in mind, both authors proposed that if the Greek letters rho, alpha, and chi that appear in the Greek monogram of Christ are read as the Latin letters they resemble – P, A, and X – then the word ‘pax’ is present in the chrismon.20 According to both authors, the presence of the word ‘pax’ referring to the Trinity identifies the portal as the doorway of eternal salvation or the state of spiritual ‘peace’ that only the penitent can obtain. Favreau cites a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians written by Atton, bishop of Vercelli (c. 924–60), which explains the correlation between the letters of the word ‘pax’ and the parts of the Trinity in the same way as the inscription around Jaca’s chrismon.21 Other scholars have focused their attention on the portal’s lion imagery. The lion on the left, assumed to be forgiving, and the fierce lion on the right of the chrismon, in combination with the threat of the second death mentioned in the inscription, led some authors to interpret the relief as an allegorized Last Judgment with the two lions representing Christ who both forgives and damns.22 In two more recent studies, Dulce Ocón Alonso traces the iconographic sources of the Jaca tympanum finding, for example, the artistic origins of the sculpture’s paired lions in pagan, Palaeo-Christian and Jewish art often in a funerary context.23 She indicates that the symmetrical placement of the lions on either side of the chrismon evokes imagery associated with the sacred portal of metamorphosis and regeneration that frequently appeared in

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the funerary sculpture of antiquity.24 Interpreting this ancient theme in terms of Jaca’s contemporary historical context, she suggests that the combination of lions perceived to be apotropaic, and the chrismon signifying Christian victory, make emphatically visible God’s approval of the Aragonese. She notes the early Christian origin of the chrismon and its association with Saint Peter, attributing its use on Aragonese tympana to the Gregorian reform supported by Sancho Ramírez and Bishop García. Seeing the chrismon as the seal of Saint Peter and as the emblem of Constantine, Ocón indicates that it makes reference to both the Aragonese king’s faithfulness to the pope and the idea of righteous religious crusade.25 Moralejo, Caldwell, and Brown explore the Jaca tympanum within the context of the liturgical ceremony. Moralejo, followed by Caldwell, notes visual and verbal references to the liturgy of public penitence on the tympanum.26 He sees the relief as ‘a vehement exhortation’ to the sinner to participate in the ritual of public penitence, a sacrament that could only be administered by a bishop or the pope. On the basis of evidence from other sites, he concludes that part of this ritual could have taken place in front of Jaca Cathedral.27 Along with the allusions to public penitence, Caldwell sees references to the sacrament of baptism, such as in the mention of the second death in the inscription, although she admits that these are more subtle.28 As both rituals took place during the Easter season, she hypothesizes that the Easter liturgy probably provided the inspiration for the cathedral tympanum’s iconographical program.29 Brown looks to the ritual of church dedication to explain the presence of the chrismon in the centre of the Jaca tympanum and the many other examples located over church portals throughout the Pyrenees on both sides of the modern border separating France and Spain. He suggests that the chrismon is the permanent sign that remains after the consecration ritual as a tangible mark of Christ’s blessing and protection of the church and the transformed, sacred quality of its interior space.30 For the medieval Aragonese, as for modern scholars, the Jaca tympanum was a work rich in connotations and resonant with symbolic values. Redolent with meaning, it launched an artistic tradition, albeit local and limited. Three other churches aside from the already-mentioned Santa María, Santa Cruz de la Serós, had tympana that bear similarities to that at the cathedral. Two are located in the small villages of Navasa and Binacua, in close proximity to Jaca, and the third is at the church of San Martín in the town of Uncastillo, approximately 100 kilometres away. The later tympana at Navasa, Binacua, and Uncastillo lack inscriptions and

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depend on images alone to convey their meaning to the viewer. Unlike Santa María and the cathedral of Jaca these other churches have no affiliation with the king or royal family. At Santa Cruz de la Serós, Binacua, Navasa, and Uncastillo, the tympana emulate that at Jaca without being slavish copies. While the modern observer tends to focus on the differences in appearance among the group, this would not have been the case for the medieval viewer. According to Richard Krautheimer’s highly regarded ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of Medieval Architecture,”’ medieval copies imitated the most important elements of a prototype, not necessarily its precise visual appearance, but those features that best expressed its meaning. Following Krautheimer then, the elements common to the five Aragonese tympana should indicate the motifs that their makers, and presumably medieval viewers, found most meaningful. The elements repeated in the copies also indicate how the original was understood in the period just after its creation. The features eliminated in the copies point towards elements in the original that may have been important only within the context of the new cathedral situated in a more politically charged, urban environment with a community of viewers from varied backgrounds who held different beliefs. At Jaca the presence of a frontier ethos produced a stronger impetus to create a work that worked effectively to unite a diverse citizenry and promote the royal family’s ideology of righteous war. The similarity between the Jaca tympanum and that at Santa Cruz de la Serós is immediately apparent. At both sites the main elements of the composition – a large chrismon dominating the centre flanked by lions symmetrically placed – are the same. The more skilfully executed tympanum at Jaca, however, has held more appeal to modern taste. The differences between Santa María’s portal sculpture and the more technically refined tympanum of Jaca Cathedral have more often than not been viewed as the result of inaccurate copying and lack of skill. For instance, Porter saw the tympanum at Santa Cruz de la Serós as ‘a debased, less subtle copy of the original,’ while Whitehill describes it as ‘insipid, clumsy and debased,’ Enríquez de Salamanca, as ‘una barbaie desconcertante,’ and Kendall, as ‘rather crude.’31 But what might seem debased or misplaced to the modern eye was not necessarily so for the medieval viewer. The less accomplished execution of Santa María’s tympanum does not necessarily indicate that it was less meaningful than the more skilfully carved relief at Jaca. A careful analysis of the inscriptions and imagery of the two tympana indeed reveals that their disparities actually

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create important variations in meaning that were created for different audiences – diverse, secular, and transient at Jaca; monastic, homogenous, and sedentary at Santa Cruz de la Serós. At the church of Santa María the relief of the carvings is high enough and the placement of the tympanum low enough to make both its images and inscriptions legible to a viewer standing before the portal. Like a modern corporate logo, the forms of the chrismon are simple, few in number, and the wheel-like pattern is easy to recognize even for an illiterate viewer. Although composed mainly of letters, it can be perceived as a pictogram, the sign that stands for God. To the cognoscenti familiar with other examples of the monogram of Christ, the chi and the rho of Santa María’s chrismon would seem conventionally situated but the rest of the letters would look misplaced, at least at first glance. An omega dangles from the cross arm on the left where tradition dictates the placement of an alpha, while an ‘S’ is situated on the right where the omega should be. A ‘V’ or perhaps an alpha fallen on its head rests near the bottom of the circular frame. Modern scholars reading with vision trained for precision and consistency found the unusual distribution of the letters of Santa María’s chrismon perplexing. Those writing early in the twentieth century, such as Whitehill, Gaillard, and Alain Sené, saw the atypical arrangement of its letters as the result of incompetence.32 A more recent interpretation, however, reveals an intriguing and believable explanation. According to Angel San Vicente and Ángel Canellas López, the letters of the chrismon should be read like the numbers on a clock starting with the chi, then moving down from the top around to the right following the perimeter of the circular frame. If the letters are read in this clockwise fashion they follow the usual sequence chi, rho, sigma, alpha, omega, standing for XPistuS, Alpha, Omega or Christ, the beginning and the end.33 A closer examination, informed by the knowledge of the ‘pax anagram’ – the reading of the Greek letters as the Roman letters they resemble – reveals a reason for the adoption of this unconventional placement. While the Jaca tympanum includes an inscription around the chrismon that points the observer towards the translation of the Greek letters into Latin with the phrase: ‘Hac in scvlptvra, lector sic noscere cvra: P Pater, A Genitvs, Dvplex est Spiritus Almvs’ the designers of Santa María’s tympanum follow a shorthand, visual strategy that is more subtle and demands more erudition on the part of the viewers than the Jaca inscription.34 The Latin letters P, A (formed by the vertical bar of the rho and the lower right diagonal of the chi), and X are larger, making them stand out from

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the Greek sigma and omega (fig. 5.5). Once the viewer is prepared to see it, the word ‘pax’ is easy to observe. Like the smaller Greek letters forming the monogram of Christ, the larger Latin letters are read in a clockwise fashion to form the word ‘pax.’ While the word ‘pax’ may be more obviously seen at Santa María, an inscription does not explain its Trinitarian symbolism as it does at Jaca. The Latin inscription carved in Carolingian lettering around the frame of Santa María’s chrismon follows the clockwise pattern of reading before it continues along the bottom edge of the tympanum. Transcribed, it reads: Ianva svm perpes; per me transite, fideles. Fons ego svm vite; plvs me qvam vina sitite. Virginis hoc templvm qui vis penetrare beatvm, Corrige te primvm, valeas qvo poscere XPISTVM35

On a literal level the inscription is the voice of Santa María’s portal, addressing the believers (fideles), inviting them to come into the space of the church. Simultaneously, on an anagogical level the voice of Santa María’s portal is also the voice of Christ. The placement of its first three lines around the chrismon creates a visual link between the words and Christ’s monogram that emphasizes this understanding.36 Using the dual symbolism of ‘the eternal door’ and ‘the fountain of life,’ in a combined paraphrase of John 10:9 and Apocalypse 21:6, the inscribed voice of Christ speaks directly to the faithful proclaiming that he is the gateway to eternal life.37 While he is calling them into the building, he is at the same time making the more significant invitation, albeit conditional, to the Heavenly Jerusalem for eternity. The chrismon provides an image, although a non-representational one, of the apocalyptic Christ and his words. This is not Christ the wrathful judge who will separate the sheep from the goats but the benevolent ruler of the New Jerusalem, described in chapters 21 and 22 of the Apocalypse, who promises to wipe away all tears and banish death. The mention of the promise of the waters from the fountain of life and the word ‘pax’ underline the positive outcome of the Last Judgment for the faithful.38 Although the inscription calls for the worshipper to ‘reform’ before entering the door, the consequences of rejecting this advice are not represented. Expressed in Latin with its aura of mystical authority, like the mass and prayers performed within the sacred space of the church, the inscription was only directly accessible to the literate mem-

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bers of the female monastic community that lived at Santa María, the clergy, the king’s court, and a few others who could read. Situated in the hills, away from the main roads, few other than the monastery’s wellinformed inhabitants would have viewed the church’s tympanum on a regular basis. The chrismon at San Pedro in the urban centre of Jaca, like that at Santa María, fills the centre of the church’s tympanum taking the form of an eight-spoked wheel created by the Greek letters chi and rho and a cross bar. At the cathedral, in contrast with the clockwise arrangement at the monastic church, the letters are placed according to the conventional distribution of early Christian examples with a small alpha on the left and a small omega on the right. The ‘S’ completing the abbreviation for XPistuS is likewise in its traditional spot at the foot of the rho’s vertical bar.39 Unlike the inscription at the rural monastic church, the words around the chrismon at Jaca Cathedral assume nothing about the religious status of the observer. Where Santa María’s inscription addresses the faithful (fideles), as a group in the first two lines and as individuals in the latter two,40 Jaca’s speaks to a single reader (lector), instructing that individual, saying: Hac in sculptvra, lector sic noscere cvra: P Pater, A Genitvs, Dvplex est Spiritus Amvs. Hii tres ivre qvidem Dominvs svnt vnvs et idem.41

Without the help of the inscription it is unlikely that the viewer – medieval or modern – would notice the pax anagram in the Jaca chrismon. The letters are of different scales and their disposition does not conform to any discernable pattern of reading. The clue to its existence at Jaca is literary, not visual as at Santa María. The inscription alone leads the viewer to see the word ‘pax’ and understand its Trinitarian significance. At Santa María the word ‘pax’ is more readily visible but it comes without any didactic explanation spelling out its Trinitarian meaning. The voice represented by the inscriptions at both churches differs. At Santa María the voice of the inscription around the chrismon is understood to be Christ’s through the symbolic references to ‘the eternal door’ and ‘the fountain of life.’ At Jaca the identity of the speaker is unspecified; it is left up to the observer to imagine. The inscription carved on the lower edge of the tympanum at San Pedro likewise offers no identification of the speaker. This anonymous voice issues its ultimatum, counselling:

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Vivere si qveris qvi mortis lege teneris: Hvc svplicando veni. renvens fomenta veneni. Cor viciis mvnda. pereas ne morte secvnda.42

It combines the expressions ‘law of death’ used in Romans 7:6 and ‘the second death’ from Apocalypse 21:8 which foretells that sinners shall ‘have their portion in the pool burning with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.’43 It clearly informs the observer that prayer and the rejection of evil are the means to escaping perpetual punishment after death and winning eternal life. At Santa María the inscription along the bottom of the tympanum also advises the observer to repent but it does not make so vivid the penalty for those who reject the advice. The inscriptions at San Pedro and Santa María, with their direct address to the observer, were meant to act in a performative way. Borrowing from John Austin’s work on speech act theory, Kendall posits that portal inscriptions, like these, which engender action in the present moment, are ‘performatives.’44 They are words spoken not simply as assertions but to stimulate immediate action in the recipient of the message. Santa María’s inscription was calculated to bring about change for the better in the responsive observer with the promise of eternal life as the incentive for abandoning sin. If perceived as the direct address of Christ, the command to reform and the promise of redemption that would follow must have been difficult for the faithful to ignore. The unidentified speaker of the Jaca inscriptions makes no direct reference to the church portal being the door to heaven or the conditions upon which entrance depends. Although the presence of the word ‘pax’ identifies this doorway as the gateway of eternal salvation, its presence is subtle and overshadowed by the more plainly stated prospect of death and damnation. The words offer instruction on the Trinity, exhort the reader to repent and pray, and make clear the prospect of eternal suffering. The tone of the speaker is admonitory and negative. The visual imagery carved on the two Aragonese tympana, while similar, reveals differences that produce significant shifts in meaning. Like the inscriptions, the images at Santa Cruz de la Serós offer a more general and more reassuring message than those at Jaca Cathedral. At both churches two large lions stand facing the chrismon on either side but the more complex cathedral composition includes additional figures and inscriptions explaining the lions. At Santa María the flaccid smoothness of the lions’ bodies belies the ferocity communicated by their exaggerated teeth. The animal on the

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left lifts its forepaw high in a salute and bows its head toward the chrismon, appearing to lick it with a long tongue protruding through bared fangs. On the right, a fiercely snarling lion holds up its head and raises its forepaw only slightly. A rosette fills the empty space under its belly. The jewelled collars encircling their necks and the rings on their tails seem more appropriate to a house cat than to the king of beasts. For the most part scholars have looked to the tympanum of Jaca Cathedral with its explanatory labels to interpret the meaning of the lions of Santa María. At San Pedro the two profile lions are virtually identical except that the one on the right bares its teeth. The figures carved beneath their feet and the inscriptions define their differences rather than variations in their physical appearance. Over the lion on the left the inscription reads: ‘Parcere sternenti / Leo scit XPistuS que petenti.’45 The relief below is a literal depiction of the first part of the sentence. It shows a man on his hands and knees facing away from the chrismon under the legs of the lion. He holds a snake. The lion places a forepaw on one of the man’s legs while treading with a back paw on the tail of the reptile. Although most often understood as a symbol of evil, the serpent in this instance, as Simon has convincingly demonstrated, may also be read as standing for the humility that the truly penitent sinner must feel to obtain absolution.46 Moralejo established that the barefoot, tunic-clad figure bowing beneath the feet of the lion is a sinner shown in the act of public penitence. The figure’s clothing and pose of supplication, according to the Spanish scholar, duplicate those of actual penitents who performed the ritual before the west portal of the cathedral.47 Inscribed over the snarling lion on the right are the words: ‘Imperivm mortis con / Cvlcans est leo fortis.’48 The lion below stands on the tail of a basilisk slithering out of a patch of vines while placing a forepaw firmly on the rump of a dog-sized animal usually assumed to be a bear but identified by Kendall as a leontophonos, a creature whose flesh was deadly to lions.49 In either case the inscription makes it clear that this animal and the basilisk are meant to symbolize the power of death.50 Although the frontality of the chrismon, the strict profile of the lions, and the symmetry of the composition of the Jaca tympanum give it a powerful iconic stillness, the inscriptions and the poses of the lions indicate that action is in the process of occurring. According to the inscription on the right, the lion is in the very midst of trampling death. On the left, both the imagery and the inscription are ambivalent. The lion could be in the process of sparing the man, whose bowing posture and costume suggest he is a penitent, but the scene is unclear.51 The inscription above

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says only that Christ knows to spare the penitent, not that he is forgiving him or that he has. The paw on the man’s leg can be read as a protective gesture or as a hostile one. It is virtually the same as that of the lion in the act of trampling the animals representing death. Lions are shown in action on both sides of the tympanum, but no action has been completed. It is as if its designers were attempting to show destiny unfolding before the very eyes of the viewers, thereby pointing to their agency in the final outcome of their fate. The inscriptions and the ancillary figures give specific meaning to the Jaca lions, leading the viewer to interpret them as allegorical representations of Christ, the Lion of Judah from the Apocalypse 5:5, champion over death and agent of divine justice, who, at the end of time, will save the repentant and condemn those who will not renounce evil.52 The absence of these features on Santa María’s tympanum left more responsibility for interpretation up to the viewer. What the primarily monastic audience brought to their understanding of the lions on Santa María’s tympanum from religious sources, poetry, or legends is difficult to assess. Some viewers, like modern scholars, might have brought to the site a memory and understanding of the cathedral tympanum but others would have had to rely on what they saw before them and what they knew about the representation of lions. On the tympanum of the monastic church, unlike the cathedral, the two lions differ noticeably in appearance from each other. On the simplest visual level, they express two different and opposed natures in their varied poses and expressions. The lion on the left appears submissive. It lifts its paw, sticks out its tongue and bows its head towards the chrismon in a deferential manner. On the right, the lion raises its head and snarls aggressively. The dual nature of the lion expressed by these differences in appearance is consistent with the way lions were generally understood during the medieval period. For Christians living in the Middle Ages, lions had both negative and positive connotations. In the context of the Old Testament the lion is most often represented as a ferocious creature to be feared. For instance, Proverbs 30:30 declares the lion ‘the strongest of beasts, who hath no fear of anything he meeteth.’ The lion was often represented as an unrestrained force that God’s champions must overcome, as in the stories of Samson (Judges 14:5–6), David (I Samuel 17:34–7), and Daniel (Daniel 6:16–22).53 The same theme is present in early chansons de geste where lions represent powerful malignant forces. Like the Old Testament strongmen, the medieval heroes of these poems reveal their strength by defeating lions, both real and symbolic. For instance, in

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the Poema de Fernán González, the Christian hero’s enemy, the Muslim – leader al-Mans. ur, is compared to the lion strangled by Samson.54 In the Song of Roland Charlemagne dreams of struggling with a lion the night before he meets the Muslim Emir Baligant.55 In the Poema de mío Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar displays his superior prowess by chasing a lion away from his cowardly sons-in-law. In the New Testament, Christ appears as the Lion of Judah in fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, for example, in Apocalypse 5:5, as mentioned above. Although the Lion of Judah is ultimately good, he was a fearful figure for the sinful and unrepentant. One example in the New Testament continues the Old Testament tradition of representing the lion as a force of evil. The author of 1 Peter 5:8 compares the devil to a lion, warning the reader: ‘Be sober and watch: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour.’ A popular source of animal lore, the Physiologus (the Naturalist), most likely written in second-century Alexandria, describes the lion as possessing three main characteristics.56 The lion erases its tracks with its tail so that it cannot be followed back to its den; it is ever vigilant, sleeping with its eyes open; and its cubs are born dead only to be brought to life by their father’s breath after three days. In allegorical terms the Physiologus interprets the lion as Christ who comes to humanity hiding his divinity. Although his body slept on the cross, ‘his deity watches from the right hand of the God and Father,’ and like the lion’s cubs, he was raised on the third day by God, the Father of all.57 The influence of the Physiologus was widespread. It served as the basis for most medieval bestiaries and for the ideas about lions that Isidore of Seville included in his Etymologies. In Book 12, chapter 2, Isidore gives an account of lions that includes the three characteristics mentioned in the Physiologus and also describes their relationship to humans, saying that they are gentle, will spare a prostrate man, and will kill humans only when extremely hungry.58 The generality of the lion imagery at the monastic church of Santa María suggests that its viewers, composed mainly of the monastic community that worshipped regularly at the church, were so well informed about the symbolic meaning of lions that they did not need explanatory labels like those at Jaca Cathedral. It is possible that lions served mainly as a mnemonic device for the erudite viewers, reminding them of what they already knew. Unlike the lions on the Jaca tympanum, which are shown in the midst of action, albeit frozen, those at Santa María are posed in a still tableau. They stand as a reminder of the dual nature of the lion/Christ rather than in the midst of the deeds determined by this

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duality. With this image before their eyes, the worshippers approaching the church are spoken to by the voice of the portal/Christ inviting them to enter and offering everlasting life to those who reform. Ultimately, the tympanum at Santa Cruz de la Serós is more reassuring and less didactic than that at Jaca. The cathedral tympanum instructs the observer by providing an illustrated model for correct behaviour in the bowing supplicant. The trampling lion and the inscription above make the unpleasant results of deviance from this example vividly clear. The nature of the differences between the tympana of the Cathedral of San Pedro in Jaca and the monastic church of Santa María at Santa Cruz de la Serós suggests that they are more than the result of slipshod copying.59 At the cathedral the chrismon reflects a traditional composition while that at the monastic church follows an intentional clockwise reorganization that makes the pax anagram more evident. The pax anagram’s Trinitarian significance, however, is not explained by inscriptions as at the cathedral. Santa María’s lions, too, lack San Pedro’s didactic labels. They stand motionless while those at the cathedral are frozen in the midst of action. At the rural monastic church the tympanum communicates less through verbal descriptions than through images, assuming the erudition of the viewer to understand their meaning. At the cathedral inscriptions elucidate the meaning of the figures. Unlike Santa María’s entrance, however, no voice of the portal inscribed on the tympanum invites the faithful into the cathedral; no inscriptions make reference to the allegorical understanding of the church entrance as a gateway to heaven. While there are apocalyptic associations in the words and images of both tympana, the inscriptions at Santa María with their reference to the fountain of life take a more encouraging tone than those at San Pedro that threaten and admonish. Both San Pedro and Santa María were constructed thanks to the impetus of the Aragonese royal family. This might account for the similarities of their tympana. Their differences most likely stemmed from the their locales, purpose, and audiences, which varied considerably. Constructed at a rural site away from the main thoroughfares, Santa María mainly served as a place of worship for its female monastic community. The author of its portal inscription felt confident enough in their belief to refer to them as ‘fideles.’ Surely, some of these religious women, who included the sisters of the king, were conversant with the biblical symbolism of the lions, the meaning of the chrismon and the pax anagram, and the anagogical implications of the portal’s invitation to enter the church. Santa María’s portal decoration was designed for Christian viewers famil-

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iar with the beliefs of the church and whose rule and daily rituals had forged them into a cohesive Christian community. Not far away, further up in the hills at an even more remote location, the inscription around the portal leading from the cloister into the monastic church at San Juan de la Peña shows the same allegorical understanding of the portal as gateway to heaven. Here too, the monastic community would have been educated in the beliefs of the faith and some would have been literate. As mentioned in chapter 4, Romanesque apses were added to the church late in the eleventh century. At the same time an inscription was added to the exterior of the older horseshoeshaped portal that allowed access from the south wall of the church into the cloister (fig. 5.6). It reads: Porta per hanc caeli fit pervia cvique fideli Si stvdead fidei ivngere ivssa dei.60

Although using different words, this inscription refers to the church door as the gateway to eternal life as does the inscription at Santa María. San Juan’s inscription refers to the believer but does not address him directly. The phrase ‘this gate,’ nevertheless, implies the presence of a speaker on the scene addressing the observer who is presumably one of the faithful, considering the advice being given and the monastic context.61 Here, as at Santa María, the inscription on an allegorical level is the voice of the portal, on a typological level it is the voice of the church, and on an anagogical level it symbolizes the means to heaven. The inscription written in a band across the west façade of the tiny church of Santa María at Iguácel also makes reference to the church portal as the place where the faithful enter heaven (fig. 5.7). Here, the voice of the portal tells the Christian worshipper: HEC EST PORTA DomiNI VNDE INGREDIVNTVR FIDELES IN DOMVM DomiNI QVE ECGLESIA IN HONORE SanCtE MARIE FVNDATA : IVSSV SANCIONI COMITIS EST FABRICATA VNA CVm CONIVGE NomiNE VRRCCA : IN ERA T : CENTESIMA XA EST EXPLICITA : REGNANTE REGE SANCIO R[A]MIRIZ IN ARAGONE QVI POSVIT RRO SVA ANIMA IN HONORE SanCtE MARIE : VILLA[m?] NominNE LARROSSA VT DET EI DomiNuS REQVIEM AM AMEN62

As at San Juan de la Peña, the presence of a speaker on the scene is implied and the listener is presumably one of the faithful. The inscrip-

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tion refers to the doorway as the means to enter ‘the house of the Lord,’ meaning both the physical building and the celestial realm. Although Santa María at Iguácel was not a monastic church like San Juan and Santa María at Santa Cruz de la Serós, it was the centre of a local pilgrimage and after 1080, a possession of the monks of San Juan de la Peña. It is fairly safe to assume that mainly Christians visited it.63 The voice of the portal, directly at Santa Cruz de la Serós and implicitly at San Juan de la Peña and Iguácel, invites Christians into the church, understood anagogically as heaven. Without Christian knowledge, the symbolic implications of the portal inscriptions would be missed. Only unwavering Christian belief could give the inscription, portal, and church the spiritual effect required to make the New Jerusalem immanent. The inscriptions on the tympanum over the west door at San Pedro in Jaca do not refer to the allegorical understanding of the portal as the gateway to heaven or to the viewer as one of the faithful. They do not invite the worshipper into the cathedral. In contrast to the rural churches mentioned above, San Pedro was located in a city on a major route traversed by merchants and pilgrims from across Europe. Its portal sculpture had to address a broader, transitory, and more varied audience, some of whom would not have been Christian. This may be why its inscription makes no assumptions about the faithfulness of the viewer and makes an effort to explain the meaning of its pictorial images. After 1077 when Sancho Ramírez issued the fuero, the population of the city grew, bringing together three separate older settlements in close proximity. The royal villa that stood on a rocky promontory to the east joined with the monastery of San Pedro (el Viejo) and the surrounding community located close to the site where the cathedral stands today. Incorporated with these two areas was the parish of Santiago that became, thanks to its proximity to the pilgrimage road, the centre of Jaca’s commercial and agricultural development.64 Jaca’s system of weights and measures, adopted around 1072, had already contributed to its growth as a market centre. Through the course of the eleventh century the popularity of Jaca’s royal villa as a site of royal administration grew until it became the favourite location.65 As the seat of the bishop, it was likewise a centre for the kingdom’s religious administration. The city was located on the pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, which led north to the Somport pass and France. The pilgrimage and the campaign against the Muslims brought travellers from north of the Pyrenees through the city. Transpyrenean influence arrived in a more permanent form as well. The freedom provided by the fuero

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attracted emigrants beyond the Pyrenees, especially from those regions around Toulouse and Montpellier and the counties of Béarn and Bigorra.66 By 1100 immigrants had increased the population so that a suburb was forming outside the rebuilt Roman walls that surrounded the city. The population of Jaca was not entirely Christian. A Jewish community had existed there since the 1030s. Evidence suggests they were probably merchants attached to the royal villa who acquired goods and provisions for the court. Nelson indicates that Aragonese custom charges from the eleventh century show a flow of Muslim goods and money through the area and he suggests that the Jewish merchants were most likely the middlemen for such trade.67 The fuero of Jaca makes reference to Jews, indicating that they were not free like Christians to grind grain at the mill of their choice.68 The same source makes it clear that Muslims lived in the city as well. One of its articles calls for humane treatment of imprisoned Muslim slaves.69 Jaca was a cosmopolitan city made up of émigré and local Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Because it was located on major thoroughfares, one of which passed right in front of the cathedral’s west façade, a transient population passed through the city. Unlike the consistent and select audience at the monastery of Santa Cruz de la Serós, the viewers of San Pedro’s tympanum were diverse in their beliefs and constantly changing. The cathedral tympanum aggressively proclaimed to Christians and nonChristians alike the authority of the church, making its truths unquestionable and compelling. The establishment of the power of the Christian God was crucial because it was to the grace of this God that the king, Sancho Ramírez, owed his right to rule. Not only royal power, but the righteousness justifying the war against the neighbouring Muslim cities, and the weight behind the privileges and laws laid down in the fuero, depended on belief in the power of this God to punish his enemies and reward his faithful followers. In this propagandistic display of Christian power, the Jaca tympanum was construed to contribute to the formulation of a more homogenous community who lived according to Christian precepts. To communicate the unassailability of Christian truth and God’s authority – and by extension that of his early representatives, the king and the bishop – to Jaca’s complex community of viewers, the tympanum of Jaca Cathedral had to be more than words and pictures above a door. In a world of few images, the monumental scale of the tympanum would have drawn attention. On the visual level, the main elements of its simple, symmetrical composition were easily legible. The vigilant lions on either

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side of an abstract symbol clearly expressed authority. Other details, such as the prostrate man, the pax anagram, and the depths of the tympanum’s theological message, would probably have required explanation. The designer of the Jaca Cathedral tympanum chose imagery that had long and deep historical roots throughout the Mediterranean region.70 Representations of paired lions placed at a gateway date back as far as the citadel at Mycenae. The ferocity of the lion, needless to say, made it an appropriate guardian figure that may have been perceived as talismanic. According to Erwin Goodenough: The lion in antiquity, it has appeared, went from religion to religion, indeed from civilization to civilization, with essentially the same value, whatever the name of the god or myth with which he was associated. His power, including his sexual power, was the first element of that value, a power that presented itself primarily in destruction and devouring. By the paradox of religious values this could be used simply as apotropaic, to ward off the enemy, human or spiritual: it could be used to represent the devouring terror of death. But beyond that it could represent the paradox of life transcending death, that conception of life in its greater sense which is achieved only through physical death or the spiritual death of one’s ego.71

Lions have a place in the written and visual imagery of Jews, Christians, and Muslims that essentially aligns with Goodenough’s claims for the lions of the ancient Mediterranean. In the Hebrew Bible the repeated references to lions emphasize the beast’s ferocious power. God in his wrath is described as being like a lion that destroys nations but in his destruction lies the hope of the Jewish people.72 The tribe of Judah from which the messiah is prophesied to come was associated with the lion as were the royal members of this house. The sides and steps of Solomon’s throne, for example, are described as being decorated by lions. The defeat of a lion, either by physical prowess as in the case of Samson, or by faith as exemplified by Daniel, was an indication of God’s favour. Heraldically placed lions flanking a central motif commonly appear in Jewish art, especially in the first centuries after the death of Jesus.73 For example, in the early fifth-century synagogue at Sepphoris the damaged panel of the mosaic floor closest to the bema where the Torah shrine stood shows two lions on either side of a circular wreath. Each raises a forepaw and places it on the head of a bull. The wreath encircled an inscription in Greek of which remain only the words ‘may he be blessed.’ According to Ze’ev Weiss and Ehud Netzer, the lions flanking the

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inscription may have been placed there to protect the names of those mentioned in it.74 Similar compositions existed in at least two other synagogues of roughly the same date and region. Symmetrically placed lions stand in front of cypress trees on either side of a Greek inscription surrounded by a circular frame on the floor mosaic of the synagogue at Hammat-Tiberias. In the floor mosaic at Beth Alpha, lions stand on either side of a structure with doors that is probably a Torah shrine. This mosaic panel is also situated before the bema where an actual Torah shrine would have stood. Goodenough suggests that lions were intended to protect the synagogue and that they represented the ferocious but saving power of the God of the Torah.75 In a less monumental form the motif of lions flanking the Torah shrine appears on a number of glass fragments found in Jewish graves in Rome. One example, now in the Vatican Museum, is divided into two registers.76 On the upper register two lions sit on either side of a Torah shrine with the doors open to reveal the scrolls.77 The motif, according to Goodenough, endured despite centuries of rabbinic opposition. The popularity of the motif, still used on modern Jewish cult instruments, finally forced the rabbis to abandon their cause.78 Medieval Jewish viewers familiar with either biblical or visual tradition must have understood the lions on the Jaca tympanum as powerful guardians connected with a divine force and its law. Although the chrismon was a strictly Christian symbol, the concept of representing God in the form of an abbreviation would have been a familiar one to Jews. Physical representations of God were strictly prohibited in Judaism. Even his name was so sacred that it could not be spoken in full. Instead it was represented with four letters, the sacred tetragrammaton JHWH, vocalized as Yahweh.79 Certainly, it was only a short intellectual leap from JHWH to XPS, even if deep understanding was not carried across the gap on the wings of belief. Lions also figure as a lethal force in the culture of Islam although they – are mentioned far less in the Qur’an than in the Bible. Only one passage – in the Qur’an refers to a lion. It is part of a sura that explains how Allah will punish unbelievers on Judgment Day. Sinners who do not heed the advice to abandon their evil ways are compared to asses taking flight from a lion.80 The sura ends with the line, ‘He [Allah] is worthy to be feared and worthy to forgive.’ Here, as in antique, Jewish, and Christian traditions, divine power symbolically represented by the lion has the ability to paradoxically destroy and save through his overwhelming strength.

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In Islamic visual art created prior to the twelfth century, lions are most often represented for their ferocity, which carries both positive and negative connotations.81 For example, the eighth-century floor mosaic in the audience chamber of Kirbat al-Mafjar, near Jericho in the Jordan Valley, shows a lion savaging a gazelle on one side of a pomegranate tree. On the other, similarly placed gazelles graze peacefully. The side of the mosaic with the lion is usually interpreted as an allegory of the chaos that occurs outside the Muslim world, while the opposite side represents the peace that follows when Islam has prevailed.82 At the same site, two seated, snarling lions placed on either side of a rosette form part of the pedestal that supports the figure of a prince, which once stood at the doorway to the palace’s bath. Here the lions serve as both guardians of the door and as an indication of the royal power of the figure that stands on the pedestal. On the Iberian peninsula lions frequently figure in the decoration of Islamic luxury arts. On the eleventh-century ivory box known as the – ‘Pamplona Casket,’ made at Madμnat al-Zahra, for instance, lions are represented in various contexts but always indicating power or strength. On the body of the box they are shown supporting the thrones of seated rulers in much the same way as they support the prince’s pedestal at Kirbat al-Mafjar. In contrast one scene on the back of the casket shows a pair of lions savagely attacking a hunter on foot. Medallions on the short ends of the box encircle hunters on foot slaying lions. Around the lid, several medallions show lions devouring gazelles, while one on the front depicts a mounted rider defeating a lion by spearing it in the neck. On the ‘Pamplona Casket’ the lion is shown as a powerful force that vanquishes the weak. It is to be feared, but it can be conquered by a superior individual for whom it substitutes as a symbol. By employing lion imagery, part of the Mediterranean visual lingua franca used for centuries to symbolize power, the designer of the Jaca tympanum made its basic message accessible to a variety of viewers. No Christian theological knowledge is necessary to understand that the two lions, forces of great ferocity, dominate the creatures under their feet and that their strength is linked to the power of the symbol at the centre of the composition. No figural image of God, which would have immediately alienated Jews and Muslims for whom this type of representation is strictly forbidden, appears in the relief.83 The tympanum, nevertheless, conveys the authority of the Christian God clearly to both the faithful and those who followed other beliefs. Although the nuances of the tympanum’s meaning would have been clear only to the most informed

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viewers, the potency of its symbolism could have been conceived in the hope of affecting a broad audience holding different views. A general understanding of the tympanum’s imagery of divine Christian authority, even without a belief in its message, would be the first step in a nonChristian’s incorporation into the Christian community. The creation of a homogenous population of Christian believers controlled by the psychological threat of eternal damnation as the punishment for misbehaviour would have served Sancho Ramírez and his brother, García, the bishop of Jaca, in their ambitions for political power. The impetus to incorporate non-believers into the Christian community, however, could also have come from a motivation that transcended the desire for secular power. In his study of the portal sculpture of Sainte-Marie d’Oloron, Peter Scott Brown notes the common use of the chrismon on church portals throughout the Pyrenees, pointing out the venerable history of the sign, its popularity in the region due to the Gregorian reform, and how it served as a lasting mark of a church’s consecration.84 On the Jaca tympanum, the chrismon would have been a reminder of the transformed, sacred nature of the space within; moreover, it would have expressed the availability of the peace guaranteed to all people through Christianity, which is espoused in the church dedication ritual. The Quid significant duodecim candelae, an anonymous ninthcentury exposition on church dedication, establishes that for the Carolingians, the dedication of a new church was not just the consecration of a building but of a people.85 In his analysis of this work, Brian Repsher explains that the author stresses that the consecration ritual emphasizes the universality of the church. He quotes the anonymous expositor who wrote, ‘Also the custom of the church, instituted through the tradition of the Apostles, arose that not only the faithful, but also heretics and schismatics and even Jews and pagans are suitable for the mercy of God.’86 The Carolingian author draws parallels between the dedication of a new church and the preparation of the uninitiated being instructed in Christianity.87 According to the expositor, it was the bishop’s responsibility to pray, teach, and reconcile all peoples, both believers and nonbelievers. If the responsibility of reconciling all people in Christianity was the responsibility of Carolingian bishops, it is possible that this was so for those in eleventh-century Aragon. Bringing all people together under the aegis of Christianity, as Ruth Bartal has pointed out, was also part of the sacred responsibility of Spanish Christian kings since the time of Reccared, who brought the Arian Visigoths into line with orthodox Chris-

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tianity.88 Sancho Ramírez’s institution of the Roman liturgy, his close relationship with the papacy, and his program of church building all suggest that he practised his role as promoter of the faith in earnest. His efforts to bring Muslims under Christian control were also justified in part by this sense of responsibility. The tympanum of Jaca Cathedral, with its large chrismon, the reminder of the consecration ritual, could be read as a manifestation of the sacred duty of both king and bishop to bring all people, including the non-Christian portions of Jaca’s population, into the church. By using visual language familiar to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the Jaca tympanum could present both an emphatic public assertion of Christian power and an invitation to join the community of faithful Christians to a diverse audience with different beliefs but similar pictorial traditions. In case there was any doubt about the meaning of the visual images of the relief, the inscriptions offered a further clarification. Written in the language of the church and legal documents, the appearance of the words would have carried authority even for those who could not read them. The stern tone of the inscriptions, in contrast to the more reassuring voice of those at Santa Cruz de la Serós, was probably thought to be necessary because the varied audience of the cathedral’s tympanum was assumed to be more difficult to reach than a community of nuns. Just as a priest negotiated the relationship between God and the worshipper through the divine office, a literate interlocutor, possibly one of the cathedral’s Augustinian canons, probably read the Latin inscriptions and explained how their words elucidated the meaning of the carved images for the illiterate and uninitiated. Perhaps this is why the inscription explaining the pax anagram around the cathedral’s chrismon is addressed to a lector. By translating and explaining the inscriptions on the tympanum, an interlocutor would incorporate the illiterate into the community of readers and bring the uninitiated into the community of those who were aware of the Christian truth that there is no peace or eternal life without Christ. The tympanum of San Pedro at Jaca sparked a limited local artistic tradition. This suggests that it was admired and that it communicated effectively. Three other churches aside from Santa María at Santa Cruz de la Serós have tympana that resemble San Pedro’s. Two are located in close proximity to Jaca in the small villages of Navasa and Binacua. The third is at the church of San Martín in the town of Uncastillo, approximately 100 kilometres away. All three of these later tympana lack inscriptions and depend on images alone to convey their meaning to the viewer. None of

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them replicates the tympanum of Jaca, that at Santa María, or each other but they are similar enough to evoke all the other members of the group. The elements common to these five Aragonese tympana indicate the motifs that their makers, and presumably medieval viewers, found most meaningful. The features repeated in the copies also shed light on how the Jaca tympanum was understood not long after its creation. A large chrismon similar to that at the cathedral fills the centre of the tympanum over the west portal of a modest twelfth-century church in the village of Navasa, located just eleven kilometres from Jaca (fig. 5.8). As at the cathedral, the chrismon on the tympanum here includes, in addition to the chi and the rho, a sigma, an alpha, and an omega arranged in the traditional order. The alpha and omega, however, hang from the diagonals of the chi, not from the crossbar as they do at Jaca, making the crossbar seem superfluous. The word ‘pax’ is again present in the chrismon but there are no visual clues to aid a viewer who comes to the relief unaware of the anagram’s presence. On the left side of the tympanum a kneeling, bug-eyed man embraces a four-footed beast with an open mouth and an extended tongue. On the right, a bird with a raised head stands on the curved back of a large animal facing the chrismon. The four figures are uncomfortably squeezed in around the large chrismon, completely filling the outer portions of its semicircular space. Their carving lacks finesse, suggesting that their sculptor did not have complete control of his medium. There is no doubt that the carver of the tympanum at Navasa imitated the composition of that at Jaca. The parochial church’s large central chrismon and the roughly symmetrical placement of the four-footed animals facing inward on either side, in a clumsy mimicry of Jaca’s lions, bring to mind the cathedral relief. Whether or not the village sculptor tried to duplicate the meaning of the urban tympanum is a more problematic issue. David Simon suggests that the four figures that surround the chrismon are an inaccurate rendering of the four evangelist symbols.89 Kendall, on the other hand, proposes that the sculptor has chosen selectively from the Jaca tympanum, showing on the left the signs of salvation – a risen man and a lion – and on the right a leontophonos and the basilisk representing damnation.90 The left side of the Navasa tympanum, indeed, bears a strong similarity to the Jaca relief in terms of the meaning it communicates. A kneeling figure, which looks out at the viewer while embracing a lion, substitutes for the penitent man on his hands and knees at the cathedral. His kneeling posture and the embrace suggest supplication of the lion / Christ who will forgive the beseeching

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sinner. Here as at Jaca, action is in progress and the man models the correct behaviour for the viewer whom he directly engages with his outward glance. There is less visual similarity between the right sides of the two tympana. The bird and the pig-like animal at Navasa bear little resemblance to the lion, basilisk, or bear/leontophonos at Jaca. They are, nevertheless, large frightening animals at which the lion on the left appears to be growling. A second variation on the Jaca tympanum appears over the south portal of a small, single-aisle church in the village of Binacua, located only five kilometres from Santa Cruz de la Serós (fig. 5.9). Like Navasa, it too is generally dated to the twelfth century. Here, the letters composing the chrismon compete for attention with the elaborately carved circular frame. As at Jaca, the chrismon forms an eight-spoked wheel. The confused arrangement of the letters, however, suggests that the sculptor did not understand their individual meaning. For example, the loop of the rho is not placed on the vertical spoke but on the right diagonal of the chi in the one o’clock position. The alpha hangs from the other diagonal. The sculptor situated the omega at the top of the vertical spoke and the sigma, the only letter in its traditional place, at its bottom. Small four-legged animals in circular frames fill the lower corners of the Binacua tympanum.91 Here, the powerful Lions of Judah have been transformed into graceful creatures that are more elegant than fierce in their delicate anatomy and backward-glancing poses. Encircled by frames that separate them from the rest of the composition, they are reminiscent of textile, ivory, or metal work decoration. Small bearded heads fill the spandrel-like area at the top of the tympanum and three small balls arranged in a triangle fill the empty space left between the circular frames of the chrismon and the lions. The creation of an elegantly decorated tympanum took priority over the direct expression of an ideological or theological message here at Binacua. The absence of the man, snake, basilisk, or bear suggests that the sculptor of this tympanum may have derived his composition from the closer church of Santa María rather than from Jaca Cathedral. A tympanum now over the doorway in the tower of the church of San Martín in Uncastillo, located more than three times as far from Jaca as Binacua or Navasa, is the fourth example that shows a striking similarity to the cathedral’s tympanum (fig. 5.10).92 Again, a chrismon with the pax anagram is placed in the centre of the composition but it is small, filling only the upper half of the central space. Although it lacks the cross bar of the chrismons at the other sites, the letters are in their traditional posi-

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tions. The alpha and the omega hang from the diagonal bars of the chi. On either side of the chrismon, large lions look out of the tympanum gazing from eyes in heads oddly suspended high above their bodies by long serpentine necks. Their bodies and their necks are in profile but their heads are shown from above. The lion on the left of the tympanum conquers a gigantic snake, devouring it tail first. On the right the lion embraces a supine man who clings to its forepaw in what is probably a gesture of supplication. Like the lions, the man looks out of the tympanum at the viewer. A small snake fills the space between this lion and the chrismon. Although some of the elements are missing and the positions of the forgiving lion and the triumphant lion have been reversed, the tympanum at Saint Martín communicates the same message by a means similar to the tympanum of the cathedral in Jaca. There may be no inscriptions here to engage the viewer with direct address; nevertheless, the lions and the small man look out at the observer in a visual equivalent that creates a similar psychological link calling for the viewer’s full attention and participation. Here, as at the cathedral, actions are in the process of occurring and the outcome is yet to be determined. All four of the tympana that bear a strong resemblance to that of Jaca Cathedral include a large centrally placed chrismon flanked by lions. A circular frame surrounds all the chrismons, and although the placement of the letters may vary, they are all easily recognizable as the monogram of Christ. Clearly, the combination of the chrismon, associated with Christ, the Trinity, victory over Christian enemies and death, and the consecration ritual and the lions, guarding the door and warding off evil and symbolically understood as Christ, held the most significant meaning for the copyists. Eternal, indomitable, and unwavering Christian strength then, was the main message that most late eleventh- and early twelfth-century viewers would have understood when they beheld the Jaca tympanum or any of its copies. Certainly, establishing this message, placed in the liminal space between outside and inside, at the symbolic frontier of eternity was of the utmost importance for the Aragonese in the face of increasing Muslim hostility generated by their king’s hegemonic ambitions. The tympana at Navasa, Santa Cruz de la Serós, and Uncastillo, made for Christian audiences, make this message of Christian strength more specific by showing lions of opposing character on either side of the chrismons. The paradoxical nature of the lions – ferociously destructive yet willing to spare supplicants, symbolically expressing Christ’s power to forgive or to damn – brings into the present moment the prospect of

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his Judgment, which could result in either eternal life or everlasting punishment. While the message of judgment is apparent in all but one of the copies of the Jaca tympanum, only two, that at Uncastillo and that at Navasa, depict a figure in the act of seeking forgiveness. As at the cathedral, the small figures model correct behaviour for the viewer and they are shown in the midst of the act of supplication without any sense of whether or not forgiveness will actually be given. The exhortation to penitence that Moralejo claims as the main meaning of the Jaca tympanum, on the basis of the prostrate figure, seems to have been of lesser importance to the copyists than to the designer of the original. This may have been because the rite of public penitence only took place at the cathedral. The copyists, and perhaps the medieval viewer as well, placed even less importance on the representation of the Lion of Judah conquering the power of death that is depicted on the right side of the tympanum at Jaca. Only the tympanum at Uncastillo, with its lion devouring a snake, includes imagery that expresses a similar meaning. In this example the designer of the relief chose to show the lion conquering a snake, an animal more frequently and clearly identified with evil than the bear-like animal and the basilisk shown at the cathedral. This change may even have made the general meaning of the leo fortis clearer than at Jaca for those who could not read the inscriptions. The specific idea of the Lion of Judah trampling mortality under foot and thereby making eternal life possible for the faithful disappeared in all the other copies. Looking backwards from the copies to the original, and judging on the basis of the elements they represent most often and most clearly, we can understand that the main messages understood by those who copied the Jaca tympanum were the absolute power of Christ, the reality of his ability to forgive or condemn, and the necessity of penitence as the only means of escaping his ferocity. The representation of the chrismon and the lions on the Aragonese tympana leave God invisible but still tangible in the physical world through the depiction of his name and through his symbolic representation in the form of the Lion of Judah. Clearly, the monogram of Christ, with its connotations of victory, ‘pax,’ and transcendent power, and the lions, which protect the portal both to the church and to eternity, allowing the penitent to enter and destroying the sinful, would have held the most meaning for the medieval Christian viewer. All the copies would have called to mind the cathedral’s portal and its prestige, if not necessarily all the subtleties of its meaning. They would have carried the conditional promise of salvation and the threat

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of damnation expressed by the Jaca tympanum beyond the boundaries of the royal city further into the king’s territory. Together they would have created a collective message of Christian power and predictable order in a realm faced with internal change and a Muslim enemy on its doorstep. Alone and collectively the tympana made visible the accessibility of heaven and the real possibility of eternal damnation for those who opposed Christian beliefs. Repetition would have helped to establish the importance and consistency of this Christian message throughout the region located not that far from territory where the population held very different beliefs. The new Romanesque churches of Aragon were physical structures, yet numinous, and resonant with metaphoric significance that was communicated by the rich array of inscriptions and images placed at their doorways. In cosmopolitan Jaca, with its population of Jews, Muslims, and local and émigré Christians, the images and inscriptions of the cathedral tympanum acted as a point of negotiation for their various religious identities. Before it non-Christians were confronted with the Christian message, and even if they did not believe in what they saw, they could not deny its presence or the sense of absolute power it conveyed by the means of visual language that would resonate with followers of all three of the Abrahamic religions. Christians, on the other hand, while offered validation of their religious beliefs, were reminded of the rewards and punishment meted out to those who did not uphold them. As the backdrop for penitential and baptismal rituals, the tympanum gave visualization, although non-figural and symbolic, to the Trinitarian God and the peace, knowable only through Christ, which would provide life after death, the ultimate reward for Christians. One step removed from the spiritual but enmeshed with the religious, San Pedro’s large chrismon and the lions made visible for both his subjects and enemies the divine source of the Christian king’s military prowess, sacred duty, and legal decrees. The chrismon, associated with the halcyon age of early Christianity and its religious and political victory over paganism, implied that divine providence would continue to ensure the victory of the Aragonese Christians over the Islamic rivals. The cathedral’s tympanum and its copies served to remind the populace of the necessity of submitting to the Christian God and his earthly agent, the king. The astonishing novelty of these large, carved stone reliefs must have created a sense of wonder in the medieval observer that reinforced the putative truth of their message. Like the fuero of Jaca, the new Aragonese coinage, and the system of weights and measures, the

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Romanesque tympana formed part of the emerging common code of public culture that both shaped and reflected the new order of life in late eleventh- and early twelfth-century Aragon. They signal the moment when the loosely defined, frontier population, virtually without images, began to evolve into a more uniform culture where visual representations were used self-consciously in service of the prevalent values. The consistency of their message marks a step away from the varied and shifting traits of a frontier culture towards the creation of a coherent sense of Aragonese identity.

Afterword

To some degree, frontiers are the business of all scholarship. The goal of the scholar is to blaze new trails into uncharted territory in hopes of discovering something new or previously unconsidered. When I began this work I followed the trail established by the scholarship of King, Porter, and their followers, who examined Spanish Romanesque architecture and sculpture in hopes of setting up stylistic filiations and firm chronologies of the churches they believed were constructed thanks to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. However, trying to push forward past the frontier they established was futile for me. I became bogged down in the minutiae of stylistic features, masonry analysis, forged documents, and contradictory evidence that seemed to lead nowhere. More significantly, I lost interest in trying to discover stylistic sources, fix dates, and chart the spread of artistic influences. In hope of finding motivation, I turned to Kingsley Porter’s letters for a hint at what might have driven him to pursue these issues so tenaciously even in the face of vigorous opposition. With the same motive, I examined the unfashionable scholarship of Georgiana Goddard King for hints at what lured her to undertake the difficult exploration of remote Romanesque churches in the Pyrenees when such an act was practically considered a taboo for women. When I looked beneath the academic veneer for the motivation that inspired their scholarship, I found what I was looking for. Following the way national identities, the pioneering spirit, and notions of boundaries and frontiers played out in the work of these earlier scholars put me on a path that led to a more interesting terra incognita. With general notions about frontiers and identities in mind, I reexamined the early monuments of Romanesque Spain. For the first time, I saw how the historical and geographical contexts in which they were built

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were both frontiers. Some of these buildings marked the passage from political decline to ascendance, some stood to delineate territorial boundary lines and the limits of power, while they all were exemplars of artistic transition both in their innovative formal features and in the way they were used to support the ideological strategies of those who built them. When viewed from the vantage point of the frontier, certain wellknown and meaningful Romanesque buildings, such as Santiago de Compostela, the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, and San Isidoro in León, which had featured large in art historical studies framed by the pilgrimage roads paradigm, receded in prominence. This is not to minimize their importance but only to note that their significance lies outside my particular approach. My goal in presenting this material is to bring readers to a place where they might strike off into uncharted territory of their own. My hope is that this work will allow them to reimagine the Romanesque monuments examined here as territory to be reexplored.

Notes

1. Frontiers and Pioneers: American Art Historians Discover Medieval Spain 1 Porter, ‘The Early Churches of Spain,’ 1:108. 2 Whitehill, ‘Changes in the Study of Spanish Romanesque Art,’ 257. 3 For the first decades of art history in the United States, see Smyth and Lukehart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States; Panofsky, ‘Three Decades of Art History’; Eisler, ‘Kunstgeschichte American Style’; Ackerman and Carpenter, Art and Archaeology; Robert J. Goldwater ‘The Teaching of Art in the Colleges of the United States,’ College Art Journal 2.2, supplement (1943): 3– 31; and Hiss and Fansler, Research in Fine Arts in the Colleges and Universities of the United States. 4 Panofsky, ‘Three Decades of Art History,’ 327, 329. 5 Ackerman referred to the scholars of this era as the ‘second generation’ of art historians in America. Ackerman and Carpenter, ‘Art History in America,’ in Art and Archaeology, 191. 6 See Lears, No Place of Grace. 7 For a full biography of King, see Saunders, ‘Georgiana Goddard King (1871– 1939).’ 8 In 1914 Bernard Berenson tried to hire King and in 1916 Archer Huntington tried to hire her as head curator at The Hispanic Society of America at a sizable increase in pay. Notes of Faculty Appointment Committee, 21 June 1916. Bryn Mawr University Archives. Huntington’s offer is also mentioned in an unpublished letter to King. 27 June 1916, Hispanic Society of America. 9 H.F.F., ‘Miss King to Return to Live in Bryn Mawr,’ The College News 24 Feb. 1937, 3. 10 Ibid.

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11 An unpublished letter from the Librarian of the Hispanic Society of America to King, 7 January 1912, mentions that Huntington suggested the idea to the scholar. Her introduction makes it clear that the manuscript was finished in 1912 and that she made three trips to Spain in order to complete her annotations. King, introductory note, in Street, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, xv. 12 His accounts normally include dates of campaigns, a brief synopsis of the historical context, measurements, and the lengthy, detailed descriptions necessary in the era before photographic reproduction. Street’s plans and sketches illustrate the volume. His social commentary includes prejudicial statements such as ‘the Spaniards are content to go on as their fathers have done before them, and until some external friend comes to make a railway for them, the people of Benavente and Leon will probably still remain as practically isolated from each other as they are at present.’ Street, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, 1:135. 13 King, introductory note, in Street, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, 1:xi, xiv. 14 Ibid., xv. 15 Street, Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers, 44. 16 King cited by Charles Mitchell, ‘Mr. Cooper and Miss King,’ Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin (spring, 1961), 6. 17 Street, Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers, 47. 18 King depended heavily on Berenson in her teaching. According to Agnes Mongan, King’s students virtually memorized his work. ‘Agnes Mongan interviewed by Caroline Smith Rittenhouse,’ 11 March 1985, unpublished paper, Bryn Mawr University Archives. 19 King, introductory note in Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, by Street, xiii. 20 Five years earlier she had already begun to explore how the pilgrimage routes led French and Lombard masons and sculptors into Spain in search of employment. See King, ‘French Figure Sculpture on Some Early Spanish Churches.’ 21 In 1919 and 1920 King and Lowber travelled in Spain at the expense of the Hispanic Society. King was paid $3,500 for her research and writing and Lowber was paid $1,000 for her photographs. King to Huntington, 16 April 1919, unpublished letter in the Hispanic Society of America. King also dedicated her Sicilian Painting to ‘E.H.L.’ King considered Heart of Spain, finished in 1926, as an equal collaboration with Lowber. The original manuscript had King and Lowber both listed as authors but the posthumous editor, Agnes Mongan, had it changed to ‘Georgiana Goddard King with photographs by

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23 24

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38

Edith H. Lowber.’ Agnes Mongan to Henrietta H. Landes, unpublished letter, 5 December 1940, Bryn Mawr University Archives. Rhys Carpenter described King’s process of scholarship, saying King ‘believed the scholar’s function to be one of creative reinterpretation, a personal revitalization of all that had lapsed into the inanimateness of the past.’ Carpenter, ‘Faculty Tribute to Miss King.’ See Mann, ‘Romantic Identity, Nationalism, and the Understanding of the Advent of Romanesque Art in Christian Spain.’ Bediér first presented his ideas in lectures delivered in 1904 and 1905 and subsequently in the four volumes of Les légendes épiques published between 1908 and 1912. King quotes a long passage from volume 3 of this work that discusses how the Chanson de Roland indicates knowledge of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. King, The Way of Saint James, 1:30–1. In an article published during the years King was working on The Way of Saint James she wrote, ‘Where the Romans marched, ran the roads of the Middle Ages, and there, today, the railways lay down their lines of steel. That, for instance, which runs from Salamanca to Astorga, keeps yet, for the traveler, a curious frontier feeling. To the right lies all of known Spain; to the left, mountains and then something vaguely imaged as Portuguese. Just so the road, which it scarcely supersedes, will have felt to Ferdinand the Great, and his ill-fated son, King Sancho, and his ill-used daughters Doña Urraca and Doña Elvira.’ King, ‘Early Churches in Spain,’ 559. King, The Way of Saint James, 1:iii–iv. Ibid., 1:165 Ibid., 1:169. Ibid., 3:17–18. Ibid., 3:23. See ibid., 3:143–4, 152–4, 169–71, 172, 181, 182, 184, 207, 209–210, 211. She states, ‘Paleolithic man had moved along it, and the stations of a living devotion today he had frequented.’ Ibid., 1:22. She described Spain in Heart of Spain as a place where ‘time has no power upon her beauty, which was ordained before time was. The twighlight of the ages is luminous upon her; she broods, aloof and fair, a place of enchantments’ (67). King, The Way of Saint James, 1:22. Ibid., 1:24. Ibid., 1:vii, ix. Alexandre de Laborde, Itinéraire descriptif de l’Espange, 2:194 cited in ibid., 3:169–71. Ibid., 1:222.

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Notes to pages 15–19 Ibid., 3:23. Ibid., 1:407. Ibid., 2:66–7. ‘Three days out, he mentioned that his friends all said a woman who would go off that way was not worth ... I never quite made out the phrase, though I have heard it, first and last, three times or four, but spoken always rapidly, and under the breath. The idea is, that she could not be worth much. In fine, he was fatally compromised by coming. Then I turned in the saddle and laughed, “Boy,” said I, “I am forty-two, old enough to be your mother. I can’t compromise you, nor you me.”’ Ibid., 2:380. Ibid., 1:261. ‘It would be absurd to assert that a woman alone, unused to the saddle, should be a stouter traveller than the great Englishman, but I may perhaps say modestly that with light saddle-bags I have often outrun his estimate by virtue of much resolution and urgent haste, and I have never yet been compelled to market for myself, or in his phrase, attend to the provend, simply because I was content to share what those about me ate.’ Ibid., 2:169. Saunders, ‘Georgiana Goddard King (1871–1939),’ 232. Ibid., 237, note 86. ‘Pilgrims of Saint James,’ London Times Literary Supplement,’ 30 December 1920, 890. King, The Way of Saint James, 1:iii. Ibid., 1:iv, 3. Ibid., 1:22. Wethey, ‘An American Pioneer in Hispanic Studies,’ 34. King, author’s preface, in Heart of Spain, np. King to Stein, 13 March, cited by Saunders, ‘Georgiana Goddard King (1871– 1939),’ 230–1. Delphine Fitz Darby to Suzanne Lindsay, 27 May 1989, Unpublished letter, University Archives, Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College. King to Stein, 25 November 1927, unpublished letter in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature, YCAL MSS 76 Box 113 Folder 2329. For comments on the development of Porter’s legend, see Seidel, ‘Arthur Kingsley Porter: Life, Legend, and Legacy.’ Porter was descended from Daniel Porter, who came to the United States from England around 1640. See ‘Arthur Kingsley Porter,’ in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White, 1940), 28:14. Lucy’s father, Thomas Wallace, had immigrated to the United States from England before 1841. He had no formal education but managed to acquire

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vast wealth through the manufacture of wire and other brass products with first his father and then his brother. See ‘Thomas Wallace,’ in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1955), 40:49. Lucy Kingsley Porter, ‘A. Kingsley Porter,’ xi. Coincidentally, Henry Adams was also extremely moved by Coutances. He wrote, ‘No other cathedral in France or Europe has an interior more refined – one is tempted to use the hard-warn adjective, more tender – or more carefully studied.’ Henry Adams, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 50. Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres was originally published in 1904 in a very limited edition so it is unlikely that Porter had seen it but Lucy most certainly had by the time she published the biography. Porter, Medieval Architecture. Porter says he actually wrote the book as a fulltime occupation between 1906 and 1909. See ‘A. Kingsey Porter,’ in Sexennial Record of the Class of 1904, Yale College, ed. G. Elton Parks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 204. During Porter’s undergraduate years at Yale, courses in the Fine Arts included drawing, painting, modelling and architecture. The architecture course was intended as preparation for work in an architect’s office. It included lectures on styles in architecture, the historical development of ornament, and instruction in free-hand drawing with pen and brush. See Yale College Elective Courses 1887–1901, 54–5. Seidel, ‘The Scholar and the Studio,’ 156. Medieval Architecture received a serious and lengthy if not completely positive review in France. See Serbia, ‘Un manual d’archéologie français.’ The book also had an impact on Raymond Pitcairn and influenced his development of ideas for the General Church of the New Jerusalem in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. Jane Hayward, introduction, Radiance and Reflection: Medieval Art from the Raymond Pitcairn Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982), 33. Porter, Medieval Architecture, 1:130. Ibid., 2:253. Lucy Porter, ‘A. Kingsley Porter,’ xi. Between 1911 and 1917 Porter also published a number of articles on Italian monuments. See ‘Bibliography of the Writings of A. Kingsley Porter, ibid. Porter, The Construction of Lombard and Gothic Vaults, 2. Porter, ‘The Development of Sculpture in Lombardy in the Twelfth Century,’ 154. For a more in-depth analysis of Porter’s and Mâle’s argument, see Mann, ‘Romantic Identity, Nationalism, and the Understanding of the Advent of Romanesque Art in Christian Spain. Mâle, ‘L’architecture et la sculpture en Lombardie à l’époque romane.’

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71 Ibid., 46. 72 Porter, ‘The Rise of Romanesque Sculpture,’ 422. 73 Porter begins to move away from the melting pot idea toward the notion of generative centre in 1926 with ‘Leonesque Romanesque and Southern France.’ 74 See Deschamps, ‘Notes sur la sculpture romane en Languedoc et dans le nord de l’Espagne.’ 75 In the same year Porter was the only foreigner asked by the Commission des Monuments Historiques of France to serve with the Services des Oeuvres d’Art dans la Zone des Armées, assessing the extent of the damage to France’s churches caused by the First World War. Around this time, Porter was offered jobs at Vassar, Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Yale where he had already been teaching part-time since 1915. 76 A. Kingsley Porter to Bernard Berenson, 21 Jan. 1920, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. 77 He writes to Berenson saying he has decided to accept the job offered him by Harvard but with some mixed feelings. He writes: ‘As I see things, an official position, like a social background (or what passes for such) or real reputation, is of value in that it does save time and energy which would otherwise be wasted in the effort to assert one’s self. But this official label of an university position is brought [sic] only at the price of time and energy. How does the balance stand?’ Porter to Berenson, 9 Jan. 1920, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. Porter began teaching at Harvard in the fall of 1921. 78 Porter to Berenson, 14 Jan. 1920, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. 79 King to Huntington, 1 April 1920, unpublished letter in Hispanic Society of America. 80 In 1927 Porter writes to Berenson: ‘The days in Seville are golden, but slip by too fast. I am trying really to get spoken Spanish. My tongue is as thick as a donkey’s and these European languages absorb more time and energy I so need for other things, but I can’t continue scraping along on a pastiche of semi-Italian phrases.’ Porter to Berenson, 19 Feb. 1927, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. 81 Willibald Sauerländer, ‘La cultura figurative emiliana in età romanica,’ in Nicholaus e l’arte del suo tempo: in memoria di Cesare Gnudi, ed. Angiola Maria Romanini (Ferrara: Corbo 1985,) 53–5. 82 Porter commends Rivoira for the number of monuments he managed to visit without the help of a car, saying, ‘Only one who has long experience with the inaccessibility of Lombard churches can appreciate the patience and enthusiasm which must have been required to write this work [Rivoira] at a time when automobiles were still unknown.’ Lombard Architecture, 1:5.

Notes to pages 24–6 169 83 Porter to Berenson, 26 July 1920, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. 84 Porter wrote to Berenson: ‘You have done lots of nice things to me, but never anything for which I am more grateful than pushing me into the Spanish Romanesque field once more. I have seldom worked at anything with such breathless interest as this new book.’ Porter to Berenson, 11 Nov. 1925, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. 85 Porter to Berenson, 24 May 1924, unpublished letter in the Harvard University Archives. 86 Porter, foreword, in The Sculptured Capital in Spain, 5. 87 Sweeping negative comments such as Daniel Cady Eaton’s ‘There is nothing in Spanish painting until the time of Velásquez and the school terminates with Murillo. Sculpture does not flourish at all and architecture is borrowed’ were frequent in Porter’s day. It is this kind of completely prejudiced and misinformed statement to which he is objecting. See Eaton, ‘Lectures on Italian Painting and Art,’ cited in Research in Fine Arts, ed. Hiss and Fansler, 48. 88 Porter, foreword, in The Sculptured Capital in Spain, 8. 89 Porter, ‘Pilgrimage Sculpture,’ 7–8. 90 Porter, ‘Spain or Toulouse? And Other Questions,’ 4. 91 Porter, ‘The Tomb of Doña Sancha and the Romanesque Art of Aragon,’ 165. 92 Porter casts himself in the role of the discoverer of both the Doña Sancha sarcophagus, although he admits it is known in Spain, and Nuestra Señora de Iguácel. 93 Porter, ‘Leonesque Romanesque and Southern France,’ 250. 94 Berenson introduced Porter to detailed Morellian analysis as the basis for deducing observations about style and authorship. Although they had corresponded since 1917 Porter and Berenson did not meet until 1919. It was right around this time that Porter grew less engaged in architecture and more interested in pictorial art. 95 Marcel Aubert, ‘A. Kingsley Porter (1883–1933),’ Revue Archéologique, 6th ser., 2 (1933), 327. 96 In Medieval Architecture, Porter claims that photographs present architectural forms as they ‘actually appear’ (1:viii). In ‘Pilgrimage Road Sculpture,’ he claimed, ‘The truth is that sculpture can be studied intelligently only by the aid of more photographs and better photographs than are anywhere at the disposal of the public (1 note 1).’ 97 All the photographs attributed to ‘LWP’ in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads were made by Lucy. 98 In 1909 Goodyear wrote to Porter, who was in Italy doing the research for Lombard Vaults, 1911, saying: ‘In my own experience I have often underval-

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102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Notes to pages 26–8 ued the great importance of photographic record and have very frequently been obliged, on account of necessary haste, to omit observations which have involved sometimes revisiting a monument at great cost in some other year, and on many occasions I have never been able to make good. I have found that my own excitement and delight over some obvious fact carrying with it strong argument, has caused me to overlook the fact that other persons will be absolutely indifferent to any kind of circumstances which are not verified by a photographic record (unhappily even such record constantly fails of producing conviction).’ Goodyear to Porter, 8 November 1909, unpublished letter in Harvard University Archives. See Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Goodyear Archival Collection, http:// www.brooklynmuseum.org/research/digital-collections/goodyear/. See ‘Documents in the History of Visual Documentation: Bernard Berenson on Isochromatic Film,’ in Art History through the Camera’s Lens, ed. Helene E. Roberts (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1995), 123–31. A letter of 1920 written by Porter to Berenson indicates that Porter used photographs to enhance initial observations made on site, saying, ‘I am delighted with some of the things that have turned up from the Burgundian photographs we made last summer.’ Porter to Berenson, 21 Jan. 1920, unpublished letter, in Harvard University Archives. Porter would eventually assemble an archive of 35,000 photographs and 11,700 negatives. James Ackerman, ‘The Visual Arts Collections: Manifold Resources,’ in The Invention of Photography and Its Impact on Learning: Photographs from Harvard University and Radcliffe College and from the Collection of Harrison D. Horblit, ed. Louise Todd Ambler and Melissa Banta (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univerity Library, 1989), 67, cited in Friedrich Kestel, ‘The Arthur Kingsley Porter Collection of Photography and the European Preservation of Monuments,’ Visual Resources, 9 (1994): 361. Porter, The Seven Who Slept, 14. A. Kingsley Porter to My New Friends, Trenton High School, 18 Feb. 1925, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. Porter to Berenson, 25 June 1926, unpublished letter in the Harvard University Archives. Porter, Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, 1:v. Beckwith, ‘Kingsley Porter: Blazing the Trail in Europe,’ 497. Porter to Berenson, 24 May 1924, unpublished letter in Harvard University Archives. Stephen Nichols, ‘Modernism and the Politics of Medieval Studies,’ in Medievalsim and the Modernist Temper, 32. See my comments on Émile Mâle in Mann, ‘Romantic Identity, Nationalism,

Notes to pages 29–32 171

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122

123

124

125 126 127 128

and the Understanding of the Advent of Romanesque Art in Christian Spain,’ 161. Mildred Stapely Byne to Porter, 27 Sept. 1922, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. Porter, ‘Pilgrimage Sculpture,’ 8. King, The Way of Saint James, 1:10. King, Pre-Romanesque Churches of Spain, 205. Porter, ‘The Rise of Romanesque Sculpture,’ 422. Samuels, Bernard Berenson, 67. Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 33, 95. Ibid., 203. In the mid-1920s Porter moves away from the ‘melting-pot’ concept towards the ‘generating centre’ as a way of explaining the advent of some Romanesque art. He claims the school of Aragon, although showing some outside influence, was ‘essentially local and autochthonic.’ Porter, ‘Tomb of Doña Sancha and the Romanesque Art of Aragon,’ 175. His comments about León as a centre of artistic creation that radiated influence almost echo those of Mâle about Toulouse. He writes, for instance: ‘One suspects indeed that León was the artistic focus of Spain ... And one even suspects that it was the artistic focus of considerably more than Spain,’ and later in this text he points out, ‘Throughout the entire eleventh and part of the twelfth century the great current of art in Europe is moving from the south to the north.’ Porter, Leonesque Romanesque,’ 236, 250. King, The Way of Saint James, 3:173. Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, 1:171. Norman P. Tucker, Americans in Spain: Patriots, Expatriates and the Early American Hispanists, 1780–1850 (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1980), 1. For a more comprehensive view, see Stanley T. Williams, The Spanish Background of American Literature, 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vol. 7, Outre-Mere and Drift-Wood (Boston and New York, Fireside Edition, 1910), 140–1. Longfellow stated, ‘There is so little change in Spanish character, that you find everything as it is said to have been two hundred years ago,’ cited in Kagan, ‘Prescott’s Paradigm,’ 426. Ibid., 430. Ibid., 431–2, 434. Porter, Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, 1:35–8. Ibid., 1:38.

172 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139

140 141 142 143 144

145 146

147 148

Notes to pages 33–6 Ibid., 1:44. Ibid., 1:78. King, Mudéjar, 24. King, Pre-Romanesque Churches of Spain, 205. Ibid., 202. King, Mudéjar, 211 Ibid., 210–12. Lears, No Place of Grace, xi–xii, 142–59. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: New York Literary Guild, 1933), 142. Charles Mitchell, ‘Mr. Cooper and Miss King,’ Bryn Mawr College Alumnae Bulletin (spring 1961), 5. She makes this clear in an unpublished letter to Archer M. Huntington saying,’ Were you glad of a Republican Spain? I am full of hope and delight.’ King to Huntington, 30 May 1931, unpublished letter in Hispanic Society of America. Porter, ‘Parva Componere Magnis,’ in Beyond Architecture 2nd ed., 56, 61. See Porter, ‘Paper Architecture,’ in Beyond Architecture (1918), 151–66. Porter, ‘The Art of Giotto,’ in Beyond Architecture (1918), 140. Ackerman and Carpenter, Art and Archaeology, 187. Porter wrote to Berenson: ‘Man with a capital M terrifies me. I am always thinking against public opinion while still miserably afraid of it. It is all very well to persuade one’s self intellectually that the brutes can only possibly be managed by holding out a piece of sugar, but the instinct to drive them by throwing stones becomes irrepressible whence a broken nose on the part of him who tries. I fear a lonely old age. If one could conquer the instinct of the herd, as the medieval saints did that of sex, what nirvana one could attain. But the herd impulse is infinitely more powerful, and I fear I am neither mediaeval (only XIX century romantic) nor a saint.’ Porter to Berenson, 11 Aug 1929, unpublished letter in the Harvard University Archives. Porter to Berenson, 19 June 1933, unpublished letter in the Harvard University Archives. Richard White has noted how Turner defined American culture as progressive, like the west ward-moving frontier, but that progress was achieved paradoxically by moving from civilization into the primitive wilderness over and over again. Richard White, ‘Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,’ 25. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘Significance of the Frontier,’ 37. Porter to Berenson, autumn 1923, unpublished letter in Harvard University Archives.

Notes to pages 36–8 173 149 Porter to Edward Forbes and Paul Sachs, 29 Aug. 1929, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. 150 Porter to Berenson, 21 Oct. 1928, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. 151 Louis Porter to Kingsley Porter, 10 Nov. 1928, unpublished letter in the Harvard University Archives. 152 Kingsley Porter to Louis Porter, 3 April 1929. He wrote to Edward Forbes and Paul Sachs: ‘I want to tell you in confidence that I feel the time has come for me to give up teaching.’ Unpublished letter, 29 Aug. 1929. Harvard University Archives. 153 Kingsley Porter to Louis Porter, 23 June 1929, unpublished letter, Harvard University Archives. 154 Porter to Havelock Ellis, 12 Jan. 1933, unpublished letter British Library. Porter’s correspondence with Ellis in the British Library begins 1 Nov. 1931, but it is clear they had already met each other. André Gide’s autobiography Si le grain ne meurt, in which he recounts the discovery of his homosexuality, was published privately in 1920 and publicly in 1924. The title, translated literally as ‘If the Grain Dies,’ is from John 12:24. 155 Richardson, ’The Fate of Kingsley Porter,’ 86–7; Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis, 418–19. 156 In a letter 17 June 1933 to Havelock Ellis he revealed his mixed feeling about returning to Harvard to teach and he says that he is considering starting ‘Prometheus Press,’ and would be against ‘obscurantism (academic, religious, as well as sexual) of all kinds.’ Porter to Havelock Ellis, 17 June 1933, unpublished letter in the British Library. 157 Bishko, ‘Salvus of Albelda and Frontier Monasticism in Tenth-Century Navarrre.’ See also Robert I. Burns, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,’ in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay (Oxford,: Clarendon Press, 1989), 307–30. For the concept of the frontier in the recent historiography of Spain, see Peter Linehan, ‘At the Spanish Frontier,’ in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet Nelson (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 37–59. For a recent historical study that uses the concept of the frontier to frame the understanding of Jewish culture in medieval Spain, see Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006). 158 Many of King’s students went on to distinguished careers as art historians. Among them were Marion Lawrence, who taught at Barnard College; Leila Barber, who taught at Vassar; Marianna Jenks, who taught at Duke University; Katherine Neilson, who taught at Wheaton and Hartford Colleges

174

159

160

161 162 163

164

Notes to pages 38–9 and worked at the Albright Knox Gallery, Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Yale University Art Gallery; and Agnes Mongan, Curator of Drawings at the Fogg Museum of Art. King’s only PhD student, Delphine Fitz (Darby) worked on Golden Age Spanish painting, specifically Ribalta and Ribera. Post’s dissertation was on Dante’s influence on Spanish allegory. A man of many interests, Post did not turn his attention to Spanish art until the 1920s, when he began his 14-volume opus on Spanish painting. Chandler Rathfon Post, A History of Spanish Painting, 14 vols (vols 13–14 ed. H.E. Wethey) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930–66). Like the other members of his generation who explored Spain, for Post, ‘an all day trip on donkey back to some remote church in the Pyrenees meant nothing to him even if the altarpiece he hoped to find proved a disappointment or non-existent.’ John H. Finley, Sydney J. Freedberg, Leonard Opdycke, and Benjamin Rowland, ‘Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, April 12, 1960,’ Harvard University Gazette (30 April 1960), 191. Post’s romantic ideas about Spain are evident in the preface of A History of Spanish Painting, where he explains the rewards of difficult travel in Spain saying, ‘Not that full compensation is lacking in the unique beauties of the landscapes, the unparalleled picturesqueness of the towns, the patriarchal customs and hospitality of the people; but even the keen pleasures of such often repeated pilgrimages consume time, and the number and length of the journeys set another obstacle in the way of efficient study.’ Chandler Rathfon Post, A History of Spanish Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), 1:viii. ‘Awards from the Carnegie Corporation Grant,’ Parnasuss 1 (1929), 45. Walter W.S. Cook, ‘The Stucco Altar-Frontals of Catalonia,’ Art Studies 2 (1924): 41. George Kubler and Craig Hugh Smyth, In Memory of Dr. Walter W.S. Cook: Tributes Delivered at A Gathering at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University , Thursday, September 27, 1962 (New York: Institute of Fine Arts, 1962), np. Edward Warburg described Post’s ‘factual’ method in the following way: ‘He [Post] was the epitome of the scholar-academician, who required his students to memorize the points he made both in his lectures and in his books, which were required reading. Under each heading he indicated which questions he might ask in the exam, and one had to memorize every point he made. I often wondered whether he ever really particularly enjoyed the paintings, or the sculpture, or the architecture he was talking about. He certainly knew all the facts about them.’ ‘An Undergradruate’s Experience of Fine Arts at Harvard in the 1920’s,’ in The Early Years of Art History in the United States, ed. Smyth and Lukeart, 43.

Notes to pages 39–42 175 165 For Cook’s relationship to German scholars of his day, see Brush, ‘The Unshaken Tree.’ 166 Walter W.S. Cook, ‘The Saint Martin Altar Frontal in the Walters Art Gallery,’ Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 9 (1948): 25. 167 This work was published as The Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela by Harvard University Press in 1926. 168 Ibid., 3. 169 As Peter Fergusson has pointed out, Conant shared with Porter and with their fellow Bostonian Ralph Adams Cram a utopian idea of the Middle Ages. See Fergusson, ‘Necrology – Kenneth John Conant,’ Gesta 24 (1985): 87. 170 Conant, The Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 19. 171 Ibid., 20, 31. 172 He states, ‘Yet it cannot really be proved that the beautiful formula of the Pilgrimage church interiors (prefigured, perhaps, at St.-Etienne, Nevers) was first developed by Bernardo for Santiago, though from the early date of his plan and from what we may judge of his originality and his ability, it would seem easily possible.’ Ibid., 20. 173 Fergusson, ‘Necrology – Kenneth John Conant,’ 87. 174 Whitehill, ‘Santo Domingo de Silos,’ 44–5. 175 Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 155. 176 Whitehill to Porter, 13 Aug. 1927, unpublished letter in Harvard University Archives. 177 Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 267. 178 For dates for various monuments, see especially ibid., 192, 194, 236, 266. 179 Ibid., 284. 180 ‘The convention of rendering drapery folds by two parallel incised lines, which Porter so learnedly derives from previous Spanish art, he himself admits ‘is an old motive which can be found almost anywhere.’ Schapiro, ‘The Sculptures of Moissac,’ 8, citing Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, 209. 181 For an account of their friendship, see Linda Seidel, introduction, in Romanesque Architectural Sculpture, by Shapiro, xi–l. 182 See Werckmeister, ‘Jugglers in a Monastery.’ For recent comments on Schapiro’s work on Spanish topics, see Williams, ‘Meyer Schapiro in Silos,’ and Seidel, introduction, in Romanesque Architectural Sculpture, ed. Shapiro, xi–l. 183 Whitehill, ‘Santo Domingo de Silos,’ 68. 184 Whitehill’s notes, cited in Walter Muir Whitehill: A Record Compiled by His Friends (Minot, MA: privately published 1968), 49.

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Notes to pages 43–5

185 See Harry Bober, ‘The Gothic Tower and the Stork Club,’ Arts and Sciences 1 (1962), 2. 186 John Williams cited by Saunders, ‘Georgiana Goddard King (1871–1939),’ 231. 187 For most recent views on Porter see Kathryn Brush, Vastly More than Brick and Mortar: Reinventing the Fogg Art Museum in the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 188 Gaillard, Les débuts de la sculpture romane espagnole, and La sculpture romane espagnole. 189 Lyman, ‘The Pilgrimage Roads Revisited.’ 190 Durliat, ‘Toulouse et Jaca.’ 191 Williams, ‘‘Spain or Toulouse?’ and ‘La arquitectua del Camino de Santiago.’ 192 Moralejo, ‘Une sculpture du style de Bernard Gilduin à Jaca,’ and ‘Sobre la formación del estilo escultórico de Frómista y Jaca.’ 193 Simon, ‘L’art roman, source de l’art roman,’ and ‘Ateliers roman et style roman.’ 194 See Williams, ‘Generationes Abrahae.’ 195 See especially Dodds, ‘Islam, Christianity, and the Problem of Religious Art.’ 196 Martin, Queen as King. 197 Paton, Pictorial Narrative in the Romanesque Cloister. 198 Harris, ‘Muslim Ivories in Christian Hands’; ‘Mosque to Church Conversions in the Spanish Reconquest’; and ‘Polemical Images in the Golden Haggadah (British Library, Add. Ms. 27210).’ 199 Robinson, In Praise of Song. 200 Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, Palace of the Mind: On Silos and Spanish Sculpture of the Twelfth Century (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, forthcoming). 201 Spanish scholarship on the art and architecture of the Middle Ages has blossomed in the last two decades but it tends, generally speaking, to focus more on traditional problems of style and iconography and in the case of architecture on archaeological issues; however, more scholars, for example Isidro Bango Torviso and Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras, are now considering the historical contexts of works of art more significant. 202 While the Reconquest may figure in the work of some of these scholars, issues of cultural exchange between Muslims, Christians, and Jews are less frequently under discussion than in the work of American scholars. A complete analysis of Spanish scholarship on Romanesque sculpture and architecture is beyond the scope of this project.

Notes to pages 46–8 177 2. Victory Proclaimed: The Architectural Patronage of Sancho el Mayor (1004–1035) 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

King, The Way of Saint James, 1:63. Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 141. See Landes, ‘The Apocalyptic Year 1000.’ For early twentieth-century scholarship that promotes the idea that the turn of the millennium effected architecture, see Focillon, The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, 1:25 note 1. More recent scholars who address the issue include Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español, 5; Le paysage monumental de la France autour de l’an mil, ed. Xavier Barral i Altet (Paris: Picard, 1987); Bango Torviso, Alta Edad Media del tradición hispanogoda al románico, 85; and Dodds, ‘Terror of the Year 1000.’ Focillon, The Year 1000, 40. For recent scholarly opinions, see essays in The White Mantle of Churches, and Before and After Time: Architecture and the Year 1000, ed. Christine Smith (New York: Harvard Design School and George Braziller, 2000). For a brief historiography of the views of modern historians on the year 1000, see Landes, ‘The Apocalyptic Year 1000,’ 13–29. Ibid., 25. Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings, 3–4. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 115. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain, 127. Castro, The Spaniards, 418. – For details on al-Mans. ur’s raids, see Évariste Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne Musulmane, 3 vols (Paris, G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1950–3), 2:233–58. Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings, 41. Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 76. – Al-Mans. ur was a devout Muslim. He built a large extension to the Great Mosque of Cordoba. He carried a Qur’–an copied by himself into battle, and went so far as to crucify scholars who diverged from orthodox beliefs. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 119. According to Peter Scales, The word fitna meant more than just a time of strife. Within its Qu’aranic context it meant a period of test or trial brought upon the faithful by God. At the same time it meant chastisement of the impious. Scales, The Fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba, 2. Frequently, Christian kings became involved in the affairs of rival Islamic factions for financial gain and to thwart the hegemonic goals of other Christians. Ibid., 40.

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Notes to pages 48–51

19 For a state of the question on Sancho el Mayor in Spanish literature, see Amancio Isla Frez, Realezas hispánicas del año mil, Galica medieval Estudios 6 (Coruña: Seminario de estudos galegos, 1998), 119–20. 20 Flocel Sabaté, Atlas del la ‘Reconquista’: La frontera peninsular entre los siglos VIII y XV, ed. Jesús Mestre Campi (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1998), 21. 21 Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 31. 22 Roger Collins claims that Sancho occupied these lands in the 1020s while Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez date Sancho’s first dominance of the area to the early 1030s. Collins, The Basques, 181; Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 31. 23 Durán Gudiol, Ramiro I de Aragón, 14. 24 Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 20. 25 A document in which Sancho gives the monastery of San Juan de Pitilass to the see of Pamplona provides an example. See Pérez de Urbel, Sancho el Mayor de Navarra, 388. Also see Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 33. 26 See Deswarte, De la destruction à la restauration. 27 Martín Duque, ‘De Sancho I Garcés a Sancho VII el Fuerte,’ 26. 28 Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 75–6. 29 Lapeña Paúl, El monasterio de San Juan de la Peña en la Edad Media, 46. 30 Sancho el Mayor was the first monarch of the Iberian Christian kingdoms to mint coins. These sueldos were minted in Nájera. M.A. Zamanillo, ‘Circulación monetaria y sistemas de pago en Navarra en los siglos X a XIII,’ in Primer Congreso General de Historia de Navarra (Pamplona: Príncipe de Viana,1988), 239–45 cited in Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 116–17. 31 Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 142. 32 Gaillard, ‘La pénétration clunisienne en espagne pendant la premier moitie du XI siècle,’ 86. 33 For example, Sancho’s buildings are not mentioned in either John Williams, ‘León and the Beginnings of the Spanish Romanesque,’ or Moralejo, ‘On the Road.’ 34 Bango Torviso, El románico España, 90. 35 Yarza Luaces, Arte y arquitectura en España, 159–60; Williams, ‘León and the Beginnings of the Spanish Romanesque,’ 167. 36 Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain, 113; emphasis is mine. 37 See Duque, ‘Sancho el Mayor,’ in Sancho el Mayor y sus herederos. 38 For the greater European context of Sancho’s buildings, see The White Mantle of Churches, ed. Hiscock.

Notes to pages 52–3 179 39 Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español, 50, 53; Gómez-Moreno, Iglesias mozárabes, 294; and Bango Torviso, El románico en España, 92. 40 Íñiguez, ‘Las empresas constructivas de Sancho el Mayor.’ Uranga and Íñiguez also include Loarre and the west portal of San Pedro at Siresa, in Uranga Galdiano and Íñiquez Almech, Arte medieval Navarro, 1:237. Martínez Prades, El Castillo de Loarre, 47. 41 A document written in Jaca a little after the year 1000 states that Sancho ordered castles built at Ruesta, Ull, Sos, Uncastillo, Luesia, Biel, Agüero, and Murillo. However a series of documents written a little before and after Sanchos’s death in 1035 determine more precisely that he built castles at Sos, Lobera, Uncastillo, Cercastiel, Luesia, Agüero, Murillo, Cacabiello, Loarre, and San Emeterio. Fernando Galtier Martí and Juan Ángel Paz Peralta, Arqueología y arte en Luesia en Torno al año mil: el yacimiento de ‘El Corral de Calvo’ (Zaragoza: Diputación general de Aragón, 1987), 14. 42 Uranga Galdiano and Íñiquez Almech, Arte medieval Navarro, 1:235–6. 43 Bishko, ‘Salvus of Albelda and Frontier Monasticism in Tenth-Century Navarre,’ 566. For a detailed explanation, see García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, El dominio del monasterio de San Millán de la Cogolla (siglos X a XIII) 119–52. 44 Fontaine, L’art préroman hispanique, 2:218. 45 Breaks in the irregular masonry of both the north and south walls near the point where the horseshoe and the semicircular arches meet provide additional evidence of two different building campaigns. 46 Monreal Jimeno, Ermitorios rupestres altomedievales, 167–73. 47 For an examination of the period represented in the Vita Sancti Aemiliani, see Santiago Castellanos, Hagiografía y sociedad en la Hispania Visigoda: La Vita Aemilaini y el actual territorio riojano (siglo VI) (Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 1999). 48 Julie Harris points out that Braulio’s Vita Sancti Aemiliani addressed its preface to Fronimiano, designated as the abbot of San Millán and that three of the witnesses to the text held institutional titles. Harris, ‘The Arca of San Millán de la Cogolla and Its Ivories,’ 11. For a summary of the early opinions on the history of the monastery, see: Lampérez y Romea, ‘La iglesia de San Millán de la Cogolla de Suso,’ 246. Antonio Ubieto Arteta suggests that there was no organized community of monks living according to a rule under an abbot until the second quarter of the tenth century although hermits may have lived at the site before this date. Ubieto Arteta, ‘Los primeros años del monasterio de San Millán,’ 199. Constructing the early history of the monastery is difficult because of the lack of written documentation, archaeological evidence, and the number of forged documents. It is a task beyond the scope of this study.

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49 Fontaine, L’art préroman hispanique, 2:221–2. 50 Lámperez y Romea, on the basis of a document later proved to be unreliable, believed that the church was consecrated in 929. Lampérez y Romea, ‘La iglesia de San Millán,’ 245. Gómez-Moreno claims that some areas built of sandstone still existing around the eastern-most caves indicate an earlier campaign of construction but that the two square apses and the first three bays of the nave were consecrated in 984. Gómez-Moreno, El arte árabe español hasta los almohades [y] arte mozárabe, 383. García de Cortázar also accepts the 984 consecration date. See García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, El dominio del monasterio de San Millán de la Cogolla (siglos X a XIII), 13. Fontaine accepts the 984 consecration as the date for the church. Fontaine, L’art préroman hispanique, 2:219. Ubieto Arteta, holds that the church was consecrated in 959 on the basis of a document. He mentions a second document from 984 that mentions the dedication of a basilica at that time. He believes that this dedication refers not to the consecration of a building but rather that it indicates an anniversary celebration of the church’s dedication. Ubieto Arteta, ‘Los primeros años del monasterio de San Millán,’ 192. 51 Ubieto Arteta, Cartulario de San Millán de la Cogolla (759–1076), no. 192 and no. 193. The author points out that no. 193 is written in script that is from the middle of the twelfth century. 52 ‘Antequam hopnino ex toto ab animis labatur huic operi inserendum videtur, qualiter Almazor rex maurorum, tempore Ferruccii abbatis, combusit monesterium sancti Emiliani superioris, cuius dilapidationis vestigia parent usque odie in fracta capitella, que manent in fronte altarium ecclesie.’ Enrique Flórez, España sagrada (Madrid: Rodriguez, 1747–1878), 50:374, cited by Gómez-Moreno, Iglesias mozárabes, 294, note 1. 53 Gómez-Moreno, Iglesias mozárabes, 294, 296. 54 Uranga Galdiano and Íñiguez Almech, Arte medieval navarro, 1:186; Fontaine, L’art préroman hispanique, 2:20; Bango Torviso, El románico en España, 92. 55 Ubieto Arteta, ‘Los primeros años,’ 194. 56 Gómez-Moreno indicates that there were no documents produced at the monastery between 997 and 1010. Gómez-Moreno, Iglesias mozárabes, 294. 57 Bishko, ‘Salvas of Albelda and Frontier Monasticism in Tenth-Century Navarre,’ 566; García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, El dominio del monasterio de San Millán de la Cogolla, 140–2. 58 Because the location of the church is determined by the cliff, it is not oriented exactly. 59 Scholars disagree over its specific date. Gómez-Moreno dates the church to the mid-ninth century on the basis of a document dated to 858 that records a

Notes to pages 55–6 181

60 61 62

63

64

65

66

donation from García Jiménez, king of Pamplona and Galindo, count of Aragon. Gómez-Moreno, Iglesias mozárabes, 31, 39. His opinion is followed by Whitehill and by Canellas López and San Vicente. Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 252; Canellas López and San Vicente, Aragón Roman, 75. More recent scholarship disclaims the authenticity of this document. Lapeña Paúl asserts that the document of 858 is false and that the earliest authentic documentation from San Juan dates to the tenth century. She finds the tenth-century documents problematic because they refer only generally to a monastery of San Juan. The designation San Juan de la Peña did not exist before 1025. Lapeña Paúl, El monasterio de San Juan de la peña, 39. Ricardo del Arco y Garay claims the oldest part of the lower church dates to the time of Sancho Garcés I, who reigned in Pamplona from 905 to 925, and that it was consecrated in 922. Arco y Garay, La Covadonga de Aragón, 39. Other scholars who date the church to the tenth century include Oliván Baile, Yarza Luaces, and Lapeña Paúl. Oliván Baile, Los monasterios de San Juan de la Peña y Santa Cruz de la Serós, 27; Yarza Luaces, Arte y arquitectura en España 500–1250, 106; Lapeña Paúl, San Juan de la Peña, 19. This also happens at Saint-Martin-du-Canigou in Cataluña. The horseshoe-shaped portal that now opens from the upper church into the cloister also came from this church. Gómez-Moreno, Iglesias mozárabes, 38. Lapeña Paúl, El monasterio de San Juan de la Peña, 7. For the modern history of this tradition, see Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 251 note 2. Lapeña Paúl, El monasterio de San Juan de la Peña, 52. The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña, trans. and intro. Lynn H. Nelson (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1991), 6. Another legend had it that a group of Christians built a fortress here in the eighth century as a base of resistance against the invading Muslims but their cause was not successful. Lapeña Paúl El monasterio de San Juan de la Peña, 7. Written history of the monastery does not begin until the eleventh century, although the oldest parts of the monastery suggest an earlier date. Lapeña Paúl, San Juan de la Peña, 50. – In 998 and 999 the Muslims under al-Mans. ur attacked Pamplona and the area as far east as Pallars. In 1006 Abd al-Malik attacked Sobrarbe and Ribagorza. The paucity of documents surviving from the first quarter of the eleventh century has led Lapeña Paúl to surmise that all Aragonese monasteries were devastated by these raids. Lapeña Paúl, El monasterio de San Juan de la Peña, 46. Some scholars suggest that fleeing Pyrenean monks who sought refuge at the Burgundian abbey of Cluny bear witness to these attacks. Fortún Pérez de Ciriza and Jusué Simonena, Historia de Navarra, 1:67. This document survives only in a later copy, but the authenticity of its infor-

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68 69

70 71

72

Notes to pages 56–7 mation is not questioned. Ubieto Arteta, Cartulario de San Juan de la Peña, Doc. 44. Ibid., Doc. 47. Ubieto suggests that some of the information in this document is authentic but some is not. The portion of the document that refers to the institution of the rule is considered authentic but the parts making reference to Cluny are not. This document is a late eleventh-century copy of an original. For a more extensive explanation, see Lapeña Paúl, El monasterio de San Juan de la Peña, 49. This author also mentions two more documents that make reference to the Benedictine rule in Aragon in the 1030s. Lapeña Paúl, San Juan de la Peña, 8. For example, Georges Gaillard, following the historian Antonio Linage Conde, suggests that ‘l’esprit clunisien’ inspired the monastic reforms of the Navarese king and his successors. He speculates that William, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitiers and one of Cluny’s most enthusiastic supporters, could have introduced Sancho to Odilo, abbot of Cluny. If not through William, Gaillard postulates, Sancho could have heard tales of the Cluniac reform in Gascony. Gascon monks had resisted the reforms with violence until it was forced on them by their count. Gaillard saw Bishop Oliba, the reformer of Catalan monasteries, as another conduit that could have carried the influence of Cluny to Sancho el Mayor. Although he was mistaken about the Cluniac basis of Oliba’s Benedictine monasticism in Cataluña, he was correct about the link between Sancho and the Catalan churchman. Gaillard, ‘Le pénétration clunisienne en Espagne,’ 93–8. See also Linage Conde, Los orígenes del monacato benedictino en la Peninsula Ibérica, vol. 2. Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, Leire, un señorío monástico en Navarra (siglos IX–XIX), 95 Current historical accounts tend to challenge the older notion of an isolated and backward Christian Spain reformed thanks to Cluniac monks. Bishko convincingly points out that the views of earlier historians regarding the impact of Cluny on the reign of Sancho el Major are grossly exaggerated and sometimes based on documentation now believed to be false. He asserts that San Juan de la Peña seems to have been the home to some Spanish monks trained at Cluny but neither this monastic house nor any other was given over to Cluny during Sancho’s reign. Bishko ‘Fernando I and the Origins of the Leonese-Castilain Alliance with Cluny,’ 3–4. His opinion is followed by Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez. These authors also indicated that Sancho often tied bishoprics to abbacies as was the case when the abbot of Leire also served as bishop of Pamplona. This contradicts the Cluniac practice of total independence from the secular clergy. Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 139. Now general opinion holds that he looked not north of the Pyrenees as much

Notes to pages 57–9 183

73 74 75 76

77

78 79 80

81 82 83

84 85

as he looked to Cataluña for inspiration. Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain, 168–70; Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 138; Bishko ‘Fernando I and the Origins of the Leonese-Castilian Alliance with Cluny,’ 3. See also José Luis Senra Gabriel y Galán, ‘Ángeles en Castilla: reflexiones en torno a renovación monástica y arquitectua en el siglo XI,’ in Patrimonio artístico de Galicia y otros estudios: Homenaje al Prof. Dr. Serafín Moralejo Álvarez, ed. Ángela Franco Mata (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 2004), 3:261–74. Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain, 166–7. Reilly, The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain, 1031–1157, 66–7. Lapeña Paúl, El monasterio de San Juan de la Peña, 47. ‘Nous te prions comme seigneur, te supplions comme père, t’implorons comme fils, de ne pas faire la sourde oreille à nos paroles, ou mieux aux préceptes divins, ni de laisser prévaloir la conjuration des méchants contres les lois divines et les satuts des saints en ce qui concerne les églises et la correction des monastères.’ Oliba, cited by Gaillard, ‘Le pénétration clunisienne en espagne dans le première moitiée du XIe siècle,’ 88. Rudolf Beer, ‘Los manuscrits del monastir de Santa María de Ripoll,’ Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 5 (1910), 64; and Anslem Albareda, L’Abat Oliba, Fundador de Monserrat (971–1046) (Monstserrat: Monestir de Moutserrat, 1931), 240, cited in Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 38. For the relationship between Sancho and Oliba, see Linage Conde, Los orígenes del monacato benedictino en la Península Ibérica, 2:887–92. Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 138. Scholars have been misled by documents forged in a later period in which ambitious monks tried to demonstrate that their monasteries were directly under the jurisdiction of Rome. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 138. Durán Gudiol, ‘La iglesia de Aragón durante el siglo XI,’ cited by Gaillard, ‘Cluny et L’espagne dans l’art roman du XIe siècle,’ Études d’art Roman, 97. Most archeologists agree that the small church dedicated to Saint-Germain that was built at this time disappeared without a trace. Durliat, Roussillon roman, 43. Pierre Ponsich, ‘La grande histoire de Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa au Xe siècle,’ Études roussillonnaises 5, (1974): 7–40. García’s document was published by Pierre de Marca in the seventeenth century as a letter from the monk to Oliba but it is actually a sermon meant to be read on the anniversary of the church’s consecration. Durliat, Roussillon roman, 40.

184

Notes to pages 59–61

86 The central apse was replaced in the sixteenth century and the south apse was recently rebuilt. 87 Only the south tower still survives, although marred by awkward buttressing added in the fourteenth century. García’s account also records that Oliba erected a lavish ciborium supported by seven columns of red marble surmounted by white marble foliate capitals over the altar. The ciborium was decorated with polychromed wood sculptures of the four evangelists and the Agnus Dei. 88 Rollan Ortiz, La cripta de Sancho el Mayor, 1. 89 The disruption of the masonry here indicates clearly that something beyond the columns has been lost. The masonry in this area has clearly been disturbed a number of times making its original configuration difficult to reconstruct. 90 Analogous arches exist at the Visigothic churches of San Fructuoso and Santa Combe de Bande. 91 Schlunk, ‘Arte romano, arte paleocristiano, arte visigodo, arte asturiano,’ 2:284. 92 Francisco Simón y Nieto advanced the theory that the eastern section of the crypt was part of a Roman church built some time before 459 when Pallantia was destroyed by Theodoric. He believed that it was expanded in 672 when the Visigothic king, Wamba, supposedly brought the relics of San Antolín from Narbonne. Simón y Nieto ‘Descubrimientos acqueológicos en la catedral de Palencia.’ The majority of scholars date this part of the crypt to the seventh century. Helmut Schlunk believes it is the confessio of a two-level martyrium built for the relics of San Antolín in 672. Schlunk, ‘Arte romano,’ 283– 5. His opinion is followed by Fontaine, L’art préroman hispanique, 1:197; Rafael Martínez, La catedral de Palencia: historia y arquitectura (Palencia: Merino, 1988), 30–1, and Rollan Ortiz, La cripta de Sancho el Mayor, 20. 93 Cayetano Enriques de Salamanca claims that the transverse arches were once horseshoe shaped and they have been scrapped down to their current semicircular shape. Cayetano Enriquez de Salamanca, Rutas del románico en la provincia de Palencia (Madrid: Rozas 1991), 37. 94 In some versions of the tale Saint Antoninus does not appear to Sancho. Instead the king discovers the presence of the saint’s relics when he encounters an inscription on an altar. 95 Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, De rebus hispaniae, lib. VI, cap. VI, cited in Orastegui Gros amd Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 48. Julio González claims the legend was in cirulation by the late eleventh century. González, ‘Siglos de Reconquista,’ in Historia de Palencia, 182. 96 Ibid.

Notes to pages 61–5 185 97 All three documents are reproduced in Documentación de la catedral de Palencia (1035–1247). 98 Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain, 177–9. González, ‘Siglos de Reconquista,’ 182. 99 González, ‘Siglos de Reconquista,’ 182. 100 Documentación de la catedral de Palencia, 4. 101 Justo Pérez de Urbel says the document, although not authentic, is truthful: that the document may have some authentic points but it must have been written in the twelfth century. Pérez de Urbel, Sancho el Mayor de Navarra, 396–7. 102 Documentación de la catedral de Palencia, 7–8. 103 González points out that in 693 the bishop of Palencia participated in the sixteenth Council of Toledo and that for the next 200 years there is silence from the diocese. During the mid-tenth century a few documents mention bishops in the area including one named Julián but it is unclear if these men really ruled Palencia or whether the area was part of their other holdings. González, ‘Siglos de Reconquista,’ 182. 104 Fortún Pérez de Ciriza and Jesué Simonena, Historia de Navarra, 1:101–2; Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain, 179. 105 For a thorough account of the competition between the Leonese and the Castilians for the area between the Cea and the Pisuerga, see García Guinea, El arte románico in Palencia, 14–22, and Rollan Ortiz, La cripta de Sancho el Mayor, 31–3. 106 Bishko, ‘Fernando I and the Origins of the Leonese-Catilian Alliance with Cluny,’ 14. 107 Cid Priego, El arte prerrománico de la monarquía asturiana, 169–91. 108 For a thorough discussion of this monument, see ibid., 80–91. 109 See Manuel Gómez-Moreno, ‘La destrucción de la Cámara Santa.’ 110 Schlunk, Arte romano, 335, 339, 351–2. 111 Cid Priego, El arte prerrománico de la monarquía asturiana, 89. 112 Schlunk, Arte romano, 284. 113 For the idea of Visigothic and Asturian continuity in architecture, see Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain, 77–81. 114 Manuel Núñez Rodríguez, ‘La arquitectura como expresión de poder,’ in Homenaje al profesor Martín González (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1995), 205. 115 Arbeiter and Noack-Haley, ‘The Kingdom of the Asturias,’ 113. For a more detailed comment, see Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 142–5. 116 Collins, Early Medieval Spain, 229. 117 Chronicle of Sampiro, 344, cited in Collins, Early Medieval Spain, 240.

186 118 119 120 121

122 123

124 125 126

127

128 129

Notes to pages 66–8 Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of Party-Kings, 259. See Bango Torviso, Sancho el Mayor y sus herederos, 1:76–7. Martín Duque, ‘De Sancho I Garcés a Sancho VII el Fuerte,’ 28. In the early tenth century the sons of Alfonso III moved the capital from Oviedo to León and the old capital and the rest of the Asturian region lost its prominence. Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primer románico en Navarra,’ 252. During the first modern restoration of the monastery that took place in 1867, the year before the monastery was declared a national monument, the restorers cleared the soil from the central section of the crypt and discovered that the columns extended downward and were supported by bases. These excavators did not go further. They simply closed the hole and put things back the way they had found them. Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primer románico en Navarra,’ 249. During the second excavation Íñiguez Almech discovered that the columns did indeed extend below the level of the floor but that they rested on bases situated at different heights making the original level of the crypt difficult to define. Íñiguez, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Leyre,’ 202. Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primer románico en Navarra,’ 257. Martínez de Aguirre, ‘La nave gótica de Leire: evidencias para una nueva cronología.’ For two typical traditional accounts, see Pedro de Madrazo, ‘San Salvador de Leyre, Panteón de los reyes de Navarra,’ in Museo Español de Antigüedades 5 (Madrid: T. Fortanet, 1875), 207–33; Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 205–8, and Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primer románico en Navarra,’ 227; Gaillard, ‘La sculpture du XIe siècle en Navarre avant l’influence des pèleginages. Although the church at Leire was probably founded before the advent of the Pamplona royal family, most of the documents both spurious and sound indicate that the royal family or bishops acting at the request of the sovereign made all but one donation to the monastery before 1000. Burials of at least two if not six members of the royal family in the monastery probably explain these donations. Forgeries and interpolated documents make it difficult to be precise about this and many other issues regarding Leire. See Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, Leire, un señorío monástico en Navarra, 43–50, 84. Document cited by Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primer románico en Navarra,’ 223. Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español, 150; Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primero románico en Navarra,’ 227, 230. Moral Contreras, Leyre en la historia y en el arte, 218. Lojendio, Navarre romane, 381; Ethel Tyrrel suggests that the

Notes to pages 68–70 187

130

131 132 133 134 135 136

137

138 139 140 141 142 143

144 145 146

147

crypt was begun by Sancho el Mayor or Iñigo Arista. Tyrrel, ‘Historia de la arquitectura románica del monasterio de San Salvador de Leyre,’ 318. Of the one hundred and nine Leire documents written before 1083, fortynine are problematic. Nineteen are falsifications, six are falsified or remade, and twenty-three have interpolations. Before 1022 there is only one document that indicates that Sancho made a donation to the monastery and it is interpolated. Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, Leire, un señorío monástico en Navarra, 50, 92, 95. For the fullest account, see P. Kehr, ‘El Papado y los reinos de Navarra y Aragón hasta mediados del siglo XII, Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón, 2 (1946), 74–186. Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, Leire, un señorió monástico en Navarra, 327. Ibid., 93–4, 96. Ibid., 96. – Al-Mans. ur raided Pamplona in 978, 994, 998, 999, and 1002. Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, Leire, un señorió monástico en Navarra, 322. Carlos María López, ‘Apuntes para una historia del eremitismo navarro,’ in España eremitica (Pamplona, 1970), 313 cited in Moral Contreras, Leyre en la historia y en el arte, 27. Eulogius of Córdoba passed through the region, visiting the monasteries of Navarra and Aragon en route to northern Europe. His 851 letter is the first credible written reference to the religious community at Leire. Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, Leire, un señorío monástico en Navarra, 77. Ibid., 93. Íñiguez Almech, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Leyre,’ 192. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 197. Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primer románico en Navarra,’ 258. Scholars have also noted similarity between Leire’s capitals and those at two other early eleventh-century Catalan churches, Santa María at Manresa and San Pedro de las Puellas, Barcelona, but a common rudimentariness of forms seems all that is really held in common. Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primero románico en Navarra,’ 258–9; Gudiol Ricart and Gaya Nuño, Arquitectura y escultura románicas, 120; Lojendio, Navarre romane, 77. Moral Contreras, Leyre en la historia y en el arte, 221. Íñiguez, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Leyre,’ 198. Lojendio, Navarre romane, 77. For a detailed description and analysis, see Schlunk and Manzanares, ‘La iglesia de San Pedro de Teverga y los comienzos del arte románico en el reino de asturias y León.’ An inscription once in the north apse but conserved only in a copy mentions

188

148 149 150 151

152

153 154 155

156 157 158 159

Notes to pages 71–6 the date of 1076 so the church must have been finished by then. Schlunk and Manzanares suggest, on the basis of stylistic comparisons to other monuments, that San Pedro was more or less contemporary with San Juan y San Pelayo in León that was finished in 1063 but this is by no means secure. Ibid., 299. Ibid., 289. Íñiguez, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Leyre,’ 198. Moral Contreras, Santas Nunilo y Alodia, 26–30. Gómez Moreno attributes the reconstruction of the monastery to Sancho el Mayor in 1057 in El arte románico español, 150. See also Tomás Biurrun y Sótil, ‘Monasterio de San Salvador de Leire,’ in El arte románico en Navarra o Las ordenes monacales, sistemas constructivos y monumentos Cluniacenses, Sanjuanistas, Agustinianos, Cistercienses y Templarios (Pamplona: Aramburu, 1936), 64; Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primer románico en Navarra,’ 230; Gudiol Ricart and Gaya Nuño, Arquetectura y escutura románicas, 121; Íñiguez, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Leyre,’ 207; Lojendio, Navarre romane, 69; and Moral Contreras, Leyre en la historia y en el arte, 73. Lampérez y Romea, Historia de la arquitectura cristiana española en la edad media, 225; Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 206; Gaillard, ‘La sculpture du XIe siècle en Navarre avant l’influence des pèlerinages,’ 112, 244; Tyrrel, ‘Historia de la arquitectura románica de monasterio de San Salvador de Leyre,’ 314. Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, Leire, un señorió monástico en Navarra, 95. Ibid., 112, note 35. ‘Ego Sancius, de Pampilonia Garseani regis filius, tamen indignus sub nutu Dei rex, qui pater dum fuit in hoc seculo semper habuit diuulgatum nomen inter principes alios, inter ea proles semper desiderans uidere illam dedicationem domus Sancti Saluatoris necnon sanctarum uirginum Nunilonisatque Elodie.’ Martín Duque, Documentación medieval de Leire, 89–90. Íñiguez, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Leyre,’ 201–2. Ibid., 203. Orcastegui Gros and Sarasa Sánchez, Sancho Garcés III el Mayor, 117. Ibid., 34, 39.

3. Piety in Action: Royal Women and the Advent of Romanesque Architecture in Christian Spain 1 King, Heart of Spain, 92–3. 2 Porter, Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, 1:56. 3 Reilly, Conquest, 51–2.

Notes to pages 76–8 189 4 Theresa Earenfight, ‘Partners in Politics,’ in Queenship and Political Power in medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. Earenfight, xiv. 5 See Earenfight, Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. 6 For a slightly earlier period, see Collins, ‘Queens Dowager and Queens Regent in Tenth-century León and Navarre.’ 7 Ibid., 7. 8 Segura Graíño, ‘Participación de las mujeres en el poder político,’ 453. 9 Buesa Conde and Simon, La condesa Doña Sancha y los orígenes de Aragón, 87. 10 Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest. 11 The proportion the widow actually received depended on local legislation, the number of children in the family, and the debts that were left by the deceased. Ibid., 99–101. 12 Ibid., 215. 13 Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile, 1–2. 14 For the role these royal women played in religious reforms, see Walker, ‘Sancha, Urraca and Elvira.’ 15 Parsons, ‘Family, Sex, and Power: The Rhythms of Medieval Queenship,’ in Medieval Queenship, 3. 16 Reilly, Conquest, 52. 17 For a full account of Queen Urraca’s reign, see Reilly, The Kingdom of LeónCastilla under Queen Urraca, and Martin, Queen as King. 18 Pick, ‘Gender in the Early Spanish Chronicles,’ 245–6. 19 For more detailed histories of the infantado, see Henriet, ‘Deo votas,’ 189–203. 20 Cristina Cuadra García, ‘Religious Women in the Monasteries of CastileLeón,’ in Women at Work in Spain from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times, ed. Marilyn Stone and Carmen Benito-Vessels (New York and Washington: Peter Lang, 1998), 51. 21 According to Pelayo, Teresa told her Muslim husband that if he touched her he would be struck down by God. He did not heed her warning and was struck down by the angel of the Lord. Before he died, he sent Teresa home with lavish gifts. Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, Chronicon regum Legionensium, in The World of El Cid, trans. Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 77. 22 Henriet, ‘Deo votas,’ and Viñayo González,’ Reinas e infantas de León, abadesas y monjas del Monasterio de San Pelayo y San Isidoro.’ For a more detailed history of infantado associated with León, see also Walker, ‘Sancha, Urraca and Elvira,’ and Martin, Queen as King, 63–5. 23 Historia Silense (1959), 168. 24 Viñayo González, ‘Reinas e infantas de León, abadesas y monjas del monaste-

190

Notes to pages 78–82

rio de San Pelayo y San Isidoro,’ 125. 25 Historia Silense, 205. That Fernando entrusted his daughters with all the monasteries in the realm is probably somewhat exaggerated. See Barton and Fletcher, The World of El Cid, 61, note 191. 26 For a recently written account of these women, see Walker, ‘Sancha, Urraca and Elvira,’ 124–31. 27 Lapeña Paul, Santa Cruz de la Serós, 121–2. 28 Buesa Conde, ‘Doña Sancha, una infanta al servicio de Aragón’ in La condesa Doña Sancha y los orígenes de Aragón, ed. Buesa Conde and Simon, 36. 29 For a full biography of Doña Sancha, see González Miranda, ‘La condesa Doña Sancha y el monasterio de Santa Cruz de la Serós’; Gómez de Valenzuela, Mujeres medievales aragonesas, 8–11; Lapeña Paul, Santa Cruz de la Serós, 124–6; and Buesa Conde, ‘Doña Sancha,’ 15–53. 30 Buesa Conde, ‘Doña Sancha,’ 18. 31 Lucy Pick has discussed how early Spanish chronicles emphasize the way the members of royal families, irrespective of the gender, shared or competed for power publicly and privately depending on the circumstances. She notes how these histories express the belief that the patronage of religious institutions and prayers of royal women ensured the divine sanction of the royal family’s goals. Pick, ‘Gender in the Early Spanish Chronicles,’ 245–6. 32 Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español, 8–9; and Gaillard, Les débuts de la sculpture romane espagnole, xii. 33 He states, ‘Especialmente recibieron inspiraciones todos ellos de sus repectivas mujeres y hermanas.’ Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español, 8. 34 Ibid., 8–9. For Ermesendis, see Patricia Humphrey,‘Ermessenda of Barcelona: The Status of Her Authority,’ in Queens, Regents and Potentates, ed. Vann, 15–35. 35 Gaillard, Les débuts de la sculpture romane espagñole, xii. 36 Ibid. 37 King, The Way of Saint James 1:294. 38 Ibid., 2:78. 39 In 1610 Juan B. Labaña wrote that an inscription in the wall over the tomb then in Santa María at Santa Cruz de la Serós read ‘Hic requiescit Sancia,’ cited by Simon, ‘The Doña Sancha Sarcophagus and Romanesque Sculpture in Aragon,’ 23. 40 Only one Spanish scholar, Ricardo del Arco y Garay, actually addresses the patronage of the Doña Sancha sarcophagus as more than an aside. He suggests that Sancha’s nephew, Pedro I, commissioned the sarcophagus to commemorate his aunt’s virtue in perpetuity. Sancha, according to del Arco, was too humble and too prudent to have commissioned the work herself. His con-

Notes to pages 82–3 191

41 42 43

44

45

46 47

tention is inconsistent with Sancha’s commanding role in the Aragonese court. The display of women’s virtue, however, turns out to be a key issue connected with the patronage of royal women in eleventh- and early twelfthcentury Christian Spain. Porter, ‘The Tomb of Doña Sancha and the Romanesque Art of Aragon,’ 165. Porter, ‘La tumba de Doña Sancha y el arte románico en Aragón,’ 122. Porter, ‘The Tomb of Doña Sancha and the Romanesque Art of Aragon,’ 175. Beenken, ‘Das romanische Tympanon des Städtischen Museums in Salzburg und die lombardishe Plastik des zwölften Jahrhunderts’; and Francovich, ‘Wiligelmo da Modena e gli inizii della scultura romanica in Francia e in Spagna.’ His mid-twelfth-century date for the sarcophagus was accepted by other French scholars such as Marcel Durliat. See Durliat, L’art roman en espagne, 25, 65. The work of David Simon, the scholar currently best informed about the sarcophagus, follows the paradigm laid down by the generation of scholars before him. Arrived at by essentially following their method of detailed formal analysis, his date for the sarcophagus – the second decade of the twelfth century – is later than Porter’s but earlier than Gaillard’s. Believing in this date, needless to say, Simon doubts the sarcophagus’s traditional connection with Sancha, although he accepts that its carving may represent her and her sisters. In his most recent work on the sarcophagus he emphasizes the important role played by Sancha and women in general in eleventh and twelfth century Aragon but he situates this consideration of historical context only within the ‘Spain or Toulouse?’ paradigm. See Simon, ‘Roland, the Moor, the Pilgrim, and Spanish Romanesque Sculpture,’ ‘Le Sarcophage de Doña Sancha à Jaca’; ‘The Sarcophagus of Doña Sancha,’ in The Art of Medieval Spain A.D. 500–1200, ed. Jerrilynn Dodds (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1993), 229–32; ‘El sarcófago, un monumento para la dinastía,’ in La condesa Doña Sancha y los orgínes de Aragón, ed. Buesa Conde and Simon, 57–95. Rose Walker also accepts that the image on the front of the sarcophagus represents Sancha and her sisters but she too disconnects it from Sancha’s patronage by accepting, on the basis of stylistic grounds, that it was carved after her death. Walker, ‘Sancha, Urraca and Elvira,’ 128. See Caldwell, ‘Urraca of Zamora and San Isidoro in León.’ Caldwell developed these themes more fully in Queen Sancha’s ‘Persuasion.’ Williams, ‘León and the Beginnings of the Spanish Romanesque,’ 170–3, and ‘León: The Iconography of a Capital.’

192

Notes to pages 83–4

48 Therese Martin also addresses San Isidoro in a number of other publications. See her ‘Un nuevo contexto para el Tímpano del Cordero en San Isidoro de León’; ‘La rivalídad entre la catedral y San Isidoro a la luz de las Fuentes (ss. XI–XIII)’; ‘The Art of a Reigning Queen as Dynastic Propaganda in TwelfthCentury Spain’; ‘De “gran prudencia, graciosa habla y elocuencia” a “mujer de poco juicio y ruin opinion,”’ and ‘Reading the Walls.’ 49 Walker, ‘Sancha, Urraca and Elvira.’ 50 Walker convincingly demonstrates that the sculptural and painted decoration of the Panteón was intended to have a commemorative, perhaps even a thaumaturgical function, for the members of the royal family that were buried therein. She notes how the theme of intercession, present in both the capitals and frescoes of this liminal space, located between the royal palace with its earthly concerns and the church with its paradisiacal implications, was meant to insure the salvation of the dead. Walker, ‘The Wall Paintings in the Panteón de los Reyes at León.’ 51 González, ‘Siglos de reconquesta,’ in Historia de Palencia, 1:177. 52 Simón y Nieto, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Nogal,’ 191. 53 According to Gómez-Moreno, a third inscription existed but even by his day it was so badly mutilated it could no longer be read. Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico, 83. Simón y Nieto mentions that in his day there were five plaques in the walls. See his ‘El monasterio de San, Salvador de Nogal,’ 188.’ Miguel Ángel García Guinea claims the epigraphy and diplomatic formulas are consistent with the eleventh century, in ‘El arte románico en Palencia,’ 1:221. 54 These plaques are transcribed in Simón y Nieto, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Nogal,’ 200–1, 207–10. They are also transcribed and illustrated in Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español, 83, pl. XCVI. Translated, they read: ‘In the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ in honour of the Holy Saviour, Elvira Sanchez made this in era 1101 [AD 1063]. King Fernando reigns in Leon and Castile’ and ‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in honour of the Saviour Elvira Sánchez made this.’ At a later date the phrase ‘xemenus: fecit: et: sculpsitistam: porticum: orate: (pro) eo’ was added to the second inscription in a different script. This was probably added when the original church was expanded in the twelfth century. Epigraphic evidence dates them to the eleventh or twelfth century. Simón y Nieto, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Nogal,’ 201. When I visited this church in 1995 these plaques were still in the wall but they had disappeared by the time I visited the church again in 1998. 55 Simón y Nieto, ‘El monasterio de San Salvador de Nogal,’ 202; Archivo Histórico Nacional, carp. 881 nos 16 and 20, cited in Julio González, ‘Siglos de Reconquesta,’ in Historia de Palencia, 1:187. Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (1000–1073), 2:296–8, doc. 602.

Notes to pages 84–7 193 56 Archivo Histórico Nacional, Sahagún carp. 881 nos 16 and 20, cited in González, ‘Siglos de reconquesta,’ 1:178, 187. Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (1000–1073), 2:314–17, doc. 615. 57 Whitehill suggests on the basis of archaeological evidence and a consecration celebrated in 1162 that the nave and the south portal with its pointed arch date to the twelfth century. Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 214. Arnáiz Alonso and Rodrigo Mateos suggest on the basis of the style of the entrance portal that the nave of the church dates to around 1200. Arnáiz Alonso and Rodrigo Mateos, El románico en torno al Camino de Santiago en Castilla y León, 85. Marcel Durliat suggests the nave of the church was constructed in the end of the twelfth or in the early thirteenth century. Durliat, L’art roman en espagne, 296. 58 Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español, 84. 59 Gaillard, Les débuts de la sculpture romane español, 145; Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español, 85; Miguel Ángel García Guinea, El arte románico en Palencia, 87; Moralejo, ‘San Martín de Frómista,’ 30; Durliat, L’art roman en espagne, 297. For recent scholarship on San Martín, see San Martín de Frómista, ¿paradigma o historicismo? 60 Miron, The Queens of Aragon, Their Lives and Times, 29. 61 Francisco Simón y Nieto reproduces the will of Doña Sancha in ‘Los Campos Góticos,’ 167 note 1. The will is published in Documentación del monasterio de San Zoilo de Carrión (1047–1300), 11–13, doc. 4. 62 ‘... in this monastery of Saint Martin, which for the love of God and his saints and for the purification of my sins I began to build in Frómista.’ Documentación del monasterio de San Zoilo de Carrión, 12. 63 Herrero Marcos and Arroyo Puertas, Arquitectura y simbolismo de San Martín de Frómista, 16. 64 Urraca’s will is published in Documentación del monasterio de San Zoilo de Carrión, 37–9, doc. 21. 65 Eighty-six corbels, eleven capitals, and forty-six bases have been completely replaced. They are clearly marked with the letter ‘R.’ Frómista was restored by the architect M. Aníbal Alvarez (1850–1930), who began the project in 1895 and finished it in 1904. For a full account, see Herrero Marcos and Arroyo Puentas, ‘La restauracíon, de Aníbale Alvarez: informes, memorias y presupuestos de loa años 1895, 1896 y 1901,’ in Arquitectura y simbolismo de San Martín de Frómista, 47–94. 66 Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 214; GómezMoreno, El arte románico español, 85. García Guinea, Guía de San Martín de Frómista. 7. 67 Moralejo, ‘San Martín de Frómista,’ 30–1. 68 Durliat, L’art roman en espagne, 296.

194

Notes to pages 87–91

69 Ibid., 280; Moralejo, ‘San Martín de Frómista,’ 30. 70 Moralejo, ‘Cluny y los orígenes del románico palentino, 18; Durliat, L’art roman en espagne, 291. 71 Sepulchral inscription of Alfonso V in the Panteón, cited by Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 145 note 3. 72 For a thorough and convincing interpretation of how this space worked, see Walker, ‘Wall Paintings.’ 73 Historia Silense, cited by Williams, ‘León and the Beginnings of the Spanish Romanesque,’ 167. 74 Historia Silense, trans. Barton and Fletcher in The World of El Cid, 55. 75 Ibid. 76 Caldwell, Queen Sancha’s ‘Persuasion,’ 2; see Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 143, note 2, for early bibliography. 77 Caldwell, Queen Sancha’s ‘Persuasion,’ 25. 78 Ibid., 16. 79 Williams, ‘San Isidoro in León,’ 178. 80 Walker, ‘Wall Paintings,’ 221; Martin, Queen as King, 81. 81 Walker, ‘Wall Paintings,’ 221–2. 82 Martin, Queen as King, 74. 83 Durán Gudiol, Ramiro I de Aragón, 40–1. 84 Ibid., 85–6. 85 This document is first cited by Porter in ‘La tumba de Doña Sancha,’ 126. It is transcribed in Cartulario de Santa Cruz de la Serós, ed. Ubieto Arteta, 22–3, doc. 7. 86 Ibid., 22. 87 ‘Alia qui remanent faciant tres partes: una ad Sancti Iohannis, alia ad Sancta Maria et ancillis eius, tercia ad labore de Sancti Petri de Iacha.’ Ibid., 23. 88 Moralejo, ‘Sobre la formación del estilo escultórico de Frómista y Jaca’; Bredekamp, ‘Dei romanishe Skulptur als Experimentierfeld,’ 103–4. 89 Íñiguez, ‘La restauración de la cathedral de Jaca.’ 90 For discussion, see Ubieto Arteta, ‘La catedral románica de Jaca,’ and ‘El románico de la catedral jaquesa y su cronología’; and Durán Gudiol, La Iglesia de Aragón durante los reinados de Sancho Ramírez y Pedro I, 137–40, 161–7, and Ramiro I de Aragón, 136–41. 91 For a transcription of this document, see Ubieto Arteta, ‘El románico,’ 196–8. 92 Huesca, Teatro histórico, viii, 97–8 cited by Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 235. 93 Ramiro died in 1063 so it cannot be any later than that date. 94 ‘ut per hedificia ipsius Ecclesie per nos constructa manifestatur, scilicet, quod eius tectum fiat & perficiatur de crota lapidea sive boalta per omnes tres naves sive longitudines incipientes ab introtu magna porte usque ad altaria

Notes to pages 91–5 195

95

96 97

98

99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106 107

major, que sunt in capite ipsius Ecclesie, & una turris supra dictam portam, ubi jam incepimus eam hedificare pro campanali um octo campanis, quator magnis & duabus mediocris, & duabus parvis, cum quibus dominus noster pius pater excelsus laudari, & uniuersus populus evocari possit, cujus tegumen volumus etiam fieri de lapide firmo.’ Documentos correspondientes al reinado de Ramiro I, 241. ‘Nos ranimirus quamuis indignus Rex Aragonum una cum filio nostro Sancio donamus deo et Beato Petro iaccensi ecclesiae. tredecim ecclesias circumadiacentibus ciuitati iaccensi.’ Documentos correspondientes al reinado de Ramiro I, 177. Íñiquez Almech, ‘La catedral de Jaca y los orígenes del románico español.’ A document dated 15 March 1061 signed by Ramiro commends his daughter Urraca to the abbess and sisters of Santa Cruz de la Serós. Ubieto Arteta claims that this document is a falsification made in San Juan de la Peña but that they used an authentic document in the process. Cartulario de Santa Cruz de la Serós, 6, 15, doc. 7. See Cristina Cuadra García, ‘Religious Women in the Monasteries of CastileLeón,’ in Women at Work in Spain: From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times, ed. Marilyn Stone and Carmen Benito-Vessels (New York: Peter Lang 1998), 48–50. Lapeña Paul, Santa Cruz de la Serós, 121. The document is transcribed in Cartulario de Santa Cruz de la Serós, 16. Ibid., 16. González Miranda, ‘La condesa Doña Sancha y el monasterio de Santa Cruz de la Serós,’ 187–8. Cartulario de Santa Cruz de la Serós, 23. Cited by Porter, ‘La tumba,’ 122. According to Porter this document is conserved in Madrid in the Archivo Nacional, Folder 401, 12/1. Porter, Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, 1:70, note 554. It is transcribed in Cartulario de Santa Cruz de la Serós, 35. Roughly translated, this passage from the will reads: ‘I, Sancha, grant whatever will be found of all my possessions after my demise for the workshop of the church of Santa María for the sake of the redemption of my sins.’ See The Art of Medieval Spain, A.D. 500–1200. cat. 128, 268–9. Gómez-Moreno, El arte rómanico español, 57–8. The church was destroyed in the fifteenth century when the present church was built. For an extensive list, see Whitehill Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 209–12. Moralejo Álvarez, ‘Sobre la formación del estilo escultórico de Frómista y Jaca,’ 427 ff; 434, fig. 2. The current capital now in place is a restoration but the remains of the original now in the museum in Palencia indicate that

196

108 109 110

111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130

Notes to pages 95–101 it is a fairly accurate copy. For the original, see Durliat La sculpture romane de la route de Saint-Jacques, figs 285–7. Herrero Marcos and Arroyo Puertas, Arquitectura y simbolismo de San Martín de Frómista, 145. Moralejo Álvarez, ‘San Martín de Frómista,’ 29–30. Sonia C. Simon, ‘Iconografía de un capital del claustro de la catedral de Jaca,’ in Jaca en la Corona de Aragón (Siglos XII–XVIII), (Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragon, 1995), 423–36. Moralejo Álvarez, ‘San Martín de Frómista,’ 32. Williams, ‘A Source for the Capital of the Offering of Abraham in the Panteón de los reyes in León.’ An inscription just above the cup’s foot, ‘+ IN NOMINE D[OMI]NI VRRACCA FREDINA[N]ADI’ makes Urraca’s patronage perfectly clear. John Williams points out the similarity of this imitation to the genuine antique cameo of the Medusa incorporated into the enamel cross in the treasury of Essen Cathedral. John Williams, ‘Chalice of Urraca,’ in The Art of Medieval Spain A.D. 500–1200, 255. Caldwell, ‘Urraca of Zamora,’ 20. For more examples, see Moralejo, ‘Reutilización e influencia de los sarcófigos antiguos en la España medieval.’ Ibid., 188. Caldwell, ‘Urraca of Zamora,’ 21. Carolyn l. Connor, Women of Byzantium (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 50. Bandmann, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning, 51–2. Segura Graíño, ‘Participacíon de las mujeres en el poder politico,’ 450. Vann, Queens, Regents, and Potentates, 126. Historia Silense, 33. Martin, Queen as King, 1–29. Pick, ‘Gender in the Early Spanish Chronicles, 245. Ibid., 246. Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims, 10–11. Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest, 220. Martin, King as Queen, 160. See Henriet, ‘Deo votas: l’Infantado et la fonction des infantes dans la Castille,’ 198–200 for full details.

4. Shaping the Christian Presence in Aragon: The Frontier FortressMonasteries of King Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064–1094) 1 Porter, Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, 1:64.

Notes to pages 101–5 197 2 Whitehill to Porter, 17 Dec. 1928, unpublished letter in the Harvard University Archives. 3 For full accounts concerning the castle and its building campaign, see Martínez Prades, El Castillo de Loarre. 4 Francis Terpak Wands, for example, sees Loarre as ‘a late stage in this atelier’s [the Gelduinus workshop of Toulouse] existence when – after a period in Agen of creating highly ornate floral and intricate drapery patterns – a tendency emerges in Loarre to simplify forms.’ Wands, ‘The Romanesque Architecture and Sculpture of Saint Caprais in Agen’ (PhD diss., Yale University, 1982), 185–6. 5 Ubieto Arteta, Historia de Aragón, 7. 6 Sénac, ‘Frontière et reconquête,’ 48, and La Frontière et les hommes, 389. 7 Sénac, La Frontière et les hommes, 389. 8 Sénac, ‘Frontière et reconquête,’ 48–50. 9 Sénac, La Frontière et les hommes, 389. 10 For a detailed analysis of the rule of Sancho Ramírez, see Lapeña Paúl, Sancho Ramírez. 11 Two synthetic works address the early medieval architecture of Aragon. These are Durán Gudiol, Arte altoaragones de los siglos X y XI; and Esteban Lorente, Galtier Martí, and García Guatas, El nacimiento del arte románico en Aragón. Both consider different buildings and slightly different geographical boundaries as well as proposing quite different interpretations of early eleventh-century Aragonese architecture. According to Durán Gudiol the ‘preRomanesque’ architecture of Aragon can be broken into three developmental stages: Mozarabic, Aragonese Second Mozarabic, and Lombardo-Mozarabic. For the authors of El nacimiento there was an indigenous style, albeit manifest in only two churches, a First Romanesque style brought by Lombard masons in the first third of the eleventh century and then a LombardoRomanesque phase lasting from the mid-eleventh to the mid-twelfth century. This latter group is in turn divided into three phases: the Gállego churches, the Jaca-Lombard hybrids, and the Valle de Benasque group. In a more summary work, Rutas del románico en la provincia de Huesca (Madrid: Los Rozas 1987), 12. Cayetano Enríquez de Salamanca suggests that only Lombard style buildings preceded the fully developed Romanesque buildings. See also Galtier Martí, ‘Scemate longobardino.’ 12 According to Esteban Lorente and his coauthors the first campaign produced the nave of the church and the second added vaults over the nave and a small chapel to the north wall. In the sixteenth century the east end was enlarged, the vault over the second bay of the nave was rebuilt, and a new portal was added. Esteban Lorente et al., El nacimiento del arte románico en Aragón, 282–4.

198 13 14 15 16

17

18 19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Notes to pages 105–9 Puig i Cadafalch, Le premier art roman. Esteban Lorente et al., El nacimiento del arte románico en Aragón, 97–103. Ibid., 97–9. Although at first glance the horseshoe shape of the apse might suggest a Mozarabic influence, the apses are not radically horseshoe shaped the way they would be in a Mozarabic church. The entrance arches to the churches are semicircular whereas in a Mozarabic church they too would be horseshoeshaped. For a full analysis of the use of the term ‘First Romanesque,’ see Edson Armi, ‘Orders and Continuous Orders in Romanesque Architecture,’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34 (1975): 173–88. Esteban Lorente et al., El nacimiento del arte románico en Aragón, 153. This only occurs at Lárrede, Busa, and Gavín. San Urbez, once in Basarán, but moved and rebuilt in the ski resort of Fórmigal, also exhibits horseshoe arches. As it was completely dismantled before moving, it is difficult to say if the horseshoe arches are original or a product of the restorers, who did not hesitate to add a completely modern tower to the church. At the small church of San Román de Valvarque, not far from Urgel, a frieze of vertically placed stones rings the top of the apse. Here, however, the stones are flat and not curved as in the Serrablo monuments. Mâle, Religious Art in France, 302. For a thorough state of the question on this issue, see Durliat, ‘Le camíno francés et la sculpture romane’ Cabanot, Les débuts de la sculpture romane dans le sud-ouest de la France; and Durliat, La sculpture romane de la route de Saint-Jacques Porter in opposition to Mâle, claimed that Romanesque sculpture developed in Aragon ‘autochthonously.’ Porter, ‘The Tomb of Doña Sancha and the Romanesque Art of Aragon,’ 175. See, for example, the essays in Bango Torviso, Sancho el Mayor y sus herederos, vol. 2. For an account of Ramiro’s campaigns against the Muslims, see Durán Gudiol, Ramiro I de Aragón, 51–4. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain, 81. See also Sénac, La frontière et les hommes, 398–403, and Lapeña Paúl, Sancho Ramírez, chapter 5. Buesa Conde, Sancho Ramírez, 208. Sénac, La frontière et les hommes, 357–9. Ibid., 53. Nelson, ‘The Foundation of Jaca,’ 697. Buesa Conde, El Rey Sancho Ramírez, 25. Bishko, ‘The Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest, 1095–1492,’ 403. Durán Gudiol, La iglesia de Aragón durante los reinados de Sancho Ramírez y Pedro I (1062?–1104), 26.

Notes to pages 109–12 199 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

44

45 46

47 48

Ibid., 26. Nelson, The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña, 19. Buesa Conde, Sancho Ramírez, 95. Ibid., 242. Nelson, ‘The Foundation of Jaca,’ 694. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon, 13. Buesa Conde, Sancho Ramírez, 135. Sénac, La frontière et les hommes, 359. Arco, ‘El monasterio de Montearagón,’ 1; and Gascon de Gotor, ‘La residencia de los monjes de Montearagón en Huesca,’ Museum 4 (1914): 53. See Ubieto Arteta, ‘La construcción de la colegiata de Alquézar; and Durán Gudiol, Historia de Alquézar. Diego de Aynsa y de Griarte, Fundacio excelencias, grandezas memorables de la antiquisima ciudad de Huesca, asi en lo temporal, espiritual, divididas en cinco libros cuyos fugetos dira pagina siguente (Huesca, 1619), Book 3, 434–41. A document dated 1089 in which the king made a donation to San Juan de Funes indicates the foundation of Santa María in Ujué. It states: ‘Similiter placuit nobis uolenti animo et spontanea uoluntate et hedificamus ecclesiam beate Dei genitricics Marie de Uxue.’ Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘El primer románico in Navarra, 242; Lojendio, Navarre romane, 129. The rest of the church was destroyed in the fifteenth century when the Gothic church was erected. Although currently in the province of Navarra it was within Aragon in the eleventh century. After the assassination of Sancho de Peñalba in 1076, his territories were divided by his cousins Alfonso VI, king of Castile, and Sancho Ramírez. Alfonso took the area now know as the Rioja and Sancho Ramírez was crowned king of Pamplona. Although there is limited debate about the transcription of some of the words in this inscription, all scholars accept the portion indicating that Sancho Ramírez donated the land. Caro Baroja, ‘Santa María de Iguácel, su construcción y la inscripción conmemorativa de ésta.’ For an elaboration on this point, see Mann, ‘San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre,’ 125–31. For reconstruction of upper area of this portal, see: Moralejo Álvarez, ‘La sculpture romane de la cathédrale de Jaca,’ 100–1. While the upper portions of the portal were rebuilt the lower mainly preserve their original appearance. An inner row of voussoirs is missing judging by the distance between the edge of the palmettes and the interior edge of the impost block but otherwise the portal seems intact. For recent comments on masons’ marks, see Martin, ‘Reading the Walls.’ Both churches also display capitals depicting angels holding roundels

200 Notes to pages 112–14

49

50

51 52 53

54

55 56

enframing busts, figures struggling with vines, squatting monkeys, a bird with spread wings, men plunging their hands into the mouths of lions or holding lions on cords, and animals spewing foliage. The general similarity between the Jaca and Loarre sculpture has been pointed out by scholars in the past. See Gaillard, Les débuts de la sculpture romane espagnole, 46; Porter, ‘Iguácel,’ 116; Durliat, L’art roman en Espagne, 21, 65; Lyman, ‘The Pilgrimage Roads Revisited,’ 40; Simon, ‘Daniel and Habakkuk in Aragon,’ 53; Moralejo Álvarez, ‘Une sculpture du style de Bernard Gilduin a Jaca,’ 9, 14. Capitals at Loarre and Jaca are so close in figure style that they too appear to have been produced by the same hand. Two capitals located in the east end of Jaca show figures with the balloon-like faces, large mouths, and staring eyes witnessed in a number of Loarre capitals. Compare, for example, the figures on the corners of a double capital on the north side of Jaca’s central apse to the angels on the corners of the Daniel and Habakkuk capital in Loarre’s nave. The sculpture of the apses was damaged by remodelling and installation of ornate altars during the seventeenth century. The modern restoration was carried out by Iñíquez Almech. See Oliván Baile, Los monasterios de San Juan de la Peña y Santa Cruz de la Serós. The construction of these apses is more complicated than other authors have pointed out. There are clear, awkward breaks between the arcade capitals at the openings and those capitals that actually support the arched openings between the apses. To the best of my knowledge no one has pointed out or explained these breaks. Simon, ‘Daniel and Habakkuk in Aragon,’ 53. Gaillard, ‘La sculpture du XI siècle en Navarre avant l’influence des pèlerinages,’ 244–7. A capital on Iguácel’s south flank is composed of a row of pinnate leaves with a single prominent vein overlapping larger leaves with their veins incised and at the top, tall, flat volutes. On the exterior of Ujué, a badly damaged capital may have once looked the same. A pinnate leaf still virtually intact has the same enframed arrangement of eight leaves divided by a prominent vein. On the interior of Ujué there is a schematized flattened version of the Iguácel composition or perhaps the related capital on the exterior. The model/copy relationship between the tympanum over Jaca Cathedral’s west portal and the more simplified version at Santa María in Santa Cruz de la Serós has received more scholarly attention than any other. The relationship between these two tympana will be treated in depth in the next chapter. For an in-depth discussion of the cloister capitals, see Sonne de Torrens, ‘Sabiduría Divina y Teología Trinitaria. For the traditional 1063 dating, see Gómez-Moreno, El arte románico español,

Notes to pages 114–15 201

57 58 59

60

61 62

63

19; Porter, ‘Iguácel,’ 127; Canellas López, Aragon roman, 157. For the most recent ‘state of the question,’ see Moralejo Álvarez, ‘La sculpture romane.’ Ubieto Arteta, ‘La catedral románica de Jaca,’ 137. Moralejo Álvarez, ‘La sculpture romane,’ 80–5. Pope Alexander II sent Simeon, prior of the monastery of San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre a bull dated 18 October 1071. It places this newly founded monastery under papal protection. The most relevant portion states: ‘Hec igitur karissimus filius noster Sancius rex Hispanie salubri consideratione perpendens predictum monasterium sancti PETRI de castello Luar ab eo constructum et edificatum, mediante legato nostro Hugone Candido et cardinali presbitero nec non uenerando abbate monasterii sancti Johnnis babtiste de Penna, in proprium ius et tutelam sancte Romane ecclesie suscipi et apostolicis priuilegiis muniri desiderat et corroborari pariterque ex subiectione eiusdem monasterii constitutum censum, uidelicet unciam auri, per singulos annos apostolice sedi persoluendum esse destinanuit.’ This is transcribed in Kehr, Papsturkunden in Spanien, 2:261–2. The actual document supposedly seen by Padre Ramón in the archive of Montearagón before the monastery was destroyed by fire does not exist. Seven copies from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries do. Most authors accept these as authentic reproductions of the original. According to Kehr, the eleventh-century copy manifests the characteristics of the original. For a time Durán Gudiol considered the document false but he came to accept it as real. Ibid., 261. This inscription reads: + IN DEI NNE:hIC RE QVIESCIT: FAMVLVS DE I TVLGAS QVI OBIIT PRI DEI KLS DECE ... IN E RA MCXXXIII ... LEGERIT ... ORE ... NET ILLI ... For all the readings of the inscription, see: Whitehill, ‘An Inscription of 1095 at Loarre.’ Magallón y Cobrera, Colección diplomática de San Juan de la Peña, 47. Julio Caro Baroja, ‘Santa María de Iguácel, su constución y la inscripción conmemorativa de esta,’ Príncipe de Viana 33 (1972): 266, 271. See also his ‘Sobre las recientes revisiones de la inscripción de Santa María de Iguácel,’ Príncipe de Viana 36 (1976): 142–3. This seemingly irrefutable date and Iguácel’s dependent artistic relationship with Jaca, dated at the earliest to the late 1070s, presents a disturbing problem

202 Notes to pages 115–19

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80 81 82 83

84 85

if the goal is to establish a precise chronology. The goal here is only to indicate that all the buildings were constructed around the same time during the reign of Sancho Ramírez. Lacarra and Gudiol, ‘Le primer Románico en Navarra,’ 242. Ibid. Transcribed in Cartulario de Santa Cruz de la Séros, ed. Ubieto Arteta, 35. Ubieto Arteta, ‘La construcción de la colegiata de Alquézar,’ 245, 256. Ibid., 256. Ubieto Arteta, ‘L’art roman en Aragon,’ 160. Buesa Conde, El rey Sancho Ramírez, 66. Ubieto Arteta, ‘L’art roman en Aragon,’ 158; Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, 128; MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages, 19; Lacarra, ‘Aspectos ecónomicos,’ 270. Nelson, ‘The Foundation of Jaca,’ 698–9. Ibid., 699. Buesa Conde, El Rey Sancho Ramírez, 46. Ibid., 47. See Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 45–74. For the most recent opinions, see Cynthia Robinson, ‘Palace Architecture and Ornament in the “Courtly” Discourse of the Muluk al-Tawa’if: Metaphor and Utopia’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1995), and In Praise of Song; and Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision, 148–52. The courtyard has been heavily remodelled and restored in more recent decades but the general paradisiacal impression is accurate. See Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision, 148 note 52. Robinson, In Praise of Song, 48–87. Robinson, ‘Arts of the Taifa Kingdoms,’ 57. Robinson, In Praise of Song, 44. Antonio Marongiu, ‘Un momento tipico de la monarquia medieval: el rey juez,’ Anuario de historia del derecho español 23 (1953): 677–715. See Antonio Ubieto Arteta, ‘Ramiro I de Aragón y su concepto de la realeza,’ Cuadernos de Historia de España 19 (1953): 45–62. Also see Sénac, La frontière et les hommes, 293. This is in all the documents after 1076. Sénac, La frontière et les hommes, 294. While the king had divine authority he was also compelled to regulate the people of his realm and to maintain a state of common well-being. He was considered their protector, judge and guide in both peace and war. See Ramiro I’s endowment, dated 1036, Charter 69, in Croníca de San Juan de la

Notes to pages 119–21 203

86

87 88

89

90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Peña, cited by Nelson, ‘The Foundation of Jaca,’ 692; Marongiu, ‘Un momento tipico,’ 679. Aragon became a stable political entity after 1137 when Sancho Ramírez’s granddaughter was wed to the count of Barcelona, creating a merger of the two territories known from that date as the Corona de Aragón. Sénac, La frontière et les hommes, 357. Ramiro I seems not to have been an active builder of churches although both versions of his will mention bequests for the building of bridges and fortresses. Ubieto Arteta, Cartulario de San Juan de la Peña, 150–9. San Pedro at Siresa is the exception to this general rule. It has no complex mouldings or sculpture. At first glance it may seem similar to First Romanesque because of the varying wall planes. But a closer inspection reveals that it is missing the characteristic Lombard bands and corbel tables generally associated with the style. Crozet suggests that the building exhibits a unique local style. What the church lacks in richness of carved decoration, it makes up for in size. At thirty-two metres in length it is the largest of the churches built by Sancho Ramírez. Why this church was not built in the Romanesque style is a mystery. Perhaps, with its westwerk and continuous transept the church is evoking Carolingian prototypes. According to Ubieto Arteta, Siresa was one of the Aragonese foundations that were Carolingian in origin. He claims the most ancient building at the site was constructed in the – ninth century but it was destroyed in the raids of al-Mans. ur. Perhaps the eleventh-century building made reference to the monastery’s ancient roots. See Crozet, ‘L’église abbatiale de Siresa (Huesca).’ Esteban Lorente et al., El nacimiento del arte románico en Aragón, 269. Lacarra, ‘Aspectos ecónomicos,’ 264. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, 127. With the invasion of the more fundamentalist Muslims, the Almoravids, in 1086, parias slowly disappeared. To pay the parias the taifa kings were obliged to tax their subjects, and this was contrary to the teachings of the laws of Islam. Lacarra, ‘Aspectos ecónomicos,’ 258. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon, 13. Reilly, The Conquest of Muslim and Christian Spain 1031–1157, 44. Sénac, La frontière et les hommes, 300. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 147. – – b. Buluggμn, Al-Tibyan, trans. Tibi, 87–8 cited in Kennedy, Muslim Abd Allah Spain and Portugal, 147–8. Gaillard, Les débuts de la sculpture romane espanole, xix. Although historians have connected the birth of Romanesque architecture in

204 Notes to pages 121–8

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

118

119

Spain with the collection of parias, it is only recently that art historians have begun to explore the possibility. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, 128; Lacarra, ‘Aspectos ecónomicos,’ 270; Ubieto Arteta, ‘L’art roman en Aragon,’ 158; MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages, 19. John Williams has written about the impact of the financial contributions of the Castilian kings on the construction of Cluny. Williams, ‘Cluny and Spain. Lacarra, ‘Aspectos ecónomicos,’ 261–2. See also Hetherington, Medieval Rome, and Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome. Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome, 98. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, ed. Joseph Simon (Malibu: Pangloss Press, 1987), 63. Ibid., 64. Master Gregorius, The Marvels of Rome, trans. John Osborne (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987). Ibid., viii. The Marvels of Rome (Mirabilia Urbis Romae), ed. and trans. Francis Morgan Nichols (New York: Italica, 1986), 46. Moralejo, ‘La sculpture romane,’ 85–93. Moralejo, ‘Sobre la formación del estilo escultórico de Frómista y Jaca,’ 1:429. Moralejo, ‘La sculpture romane,’ 86. The sarcophagus of Ecija, from the early sixth century depicts both these subjects. Bandmann, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning, 53. Heckscher, ‘Relics of Pagan Antiquity in Mediaeval Settings,’ 206. Lacarra, Aragón en el pasado, 47. E. Baldwin Smith, Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 201. Porter, Iguácel, 121. Arco y Garay, ‘Obras y hallazgos en el castillo de Loarre, 15. The plaque does not fit comfortably in its current position. It is lifted into alignment with the rest of the relief by a small piece of wood set under its base. This suggest that the restorer did not replace the relief in its original position. The first restoration of the castle took place between 1914 and 1916. Similar motifs showing the damned are seen in other Last Judgments such as those at Conques, where angels drag away several of the condemned in a net, and at Saint-Trophîme in Arles, where a long line of tortured figues are chained together for eternity dancing a conga through the fires of hell. Canellas López, Colección diplomática de San Andrés de Fanlo, 90, doc. 46.

Notes to pages 128–35

205

120 Lacarra, Documentos para el estudio de la reconquista y repoblación del Valle del Ebro, 19, doc. 18–19. 121 For the history of the site, see Passini, ‘Samitier, un site frontalier défensif de la Canal de Berdún,’ Sénac. 122 In the ninth and tenth centuries churches at the limit of the territories conquered by the Arabs were frequently dedicated to Saints Emeterio and Celendonio. Ibid., 63. 123 Chamoso Lamas, ‘Revisión de las formas constructivas en el Castillo de Loarre,’ 384–99. 5. The Frontier of Eternity: Church Portal Decoration in Romanesque Aragon 1 Porter, Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, 70. 2 Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 257. 3 Apocalypse 21:6. All biblical citations are from Douay-Rheims Bible (www.drbo.org). 4 San Caprasio was restored to its current appearance in the 1960s. According to Ana Isabel Lapeña Paúl, San Caprasio was built between 1020 and 1030. Lapeña Paúl, Santa Cruz de la Serós, 20. 5 Calvin Kendall bases his theory in part on Augustine’s claim that ‘the temple of the Lord in the literal sense is the house which Solomon built ... allegorically, it is the Lord’s body ... or his Church; tropologically, it is each of the faithful ... anagogically, it is the joys of the heavenly mansion.’ Kendall, ‘The Gate of Heaven and the Fountain of Life,’ 111. 6 Kendall, Allegory, 3. 7 Lapeña Paúl, Sancho Ramírez, 132–3. 8 Ibid., 127. 9 For details, see Lynn Nelson, ‘The Foundation of Jaca,’ 698–9. 10 This understanding of the chrismon in northern Spain and southern France is convincingly demonstrated by Peter Scott Brown in his dissertation on Sainte-Marie d’Oloron, ‘Portal, Sculpture, and Audience of the Romanesque Cathedral Sainte-Marie d’Oloron,’ 243. 11 Porter first makes this claim in ‘The Tomb of Doña Sancha and the Romanesque Art of Aragon,’ 175. 12 Morelajo Álvarez, ‘La sculpture romane de la cathédrale de Jaca,’ provides a thorough discussion of the question in the scholarly literature up to 1979. Updated summaries of the scholarly literature are provided in Esteban Lorente, ‘El tímpano de la catedral de Jaca (continuación),’ 1:451–60, and in Ocón Alonso, ‘El sello de dios sobre la iglesia,’ 77–81, and ‘El tímpano de Jaca.’ 13 Ocón Alonso, ‘El sello de dios sobre la iglesia,’ 78.

206 Notes to pages 135–7 14 For two thorough discussions of the question on the inscriptions on the Jaca tympanum, see Esteban Lorente, ‘Las inscripciones del tímpano de la catedral de Jaca,’ 143–7, and Favreau, ‘Les inscriptions du tympan de la cathédrale de Jaca,’ 549–51. 15 Transcription and translation in Kendall, Allegory, 128–9. 16 The scholars that proposed this reading include Gaillard, ‘Notes sure les tympans aragonais,’ 233; José Vives, ‘Las leyendas epigráficas del tímpano de Jaca,’ Hispania sacra 9 (1956), 18. Caamaño Martínez, ‘En torno al tímpano de Jaca’ 200–1; Ocón Alonso, ‘Problemática del crismón trinitario,’ 223; Sauerländer, ‘Romanesque Sculpture in Its Architectural Context,’ 19; Ocón Alonso, Tímpanos románicos españols, 1:242–4. 17 Those who read ‘duplex’ as being the S or the omega are Dolç, ‘Tres inscripciones de la catedral de Jaca,’ 423; and Caldwell, ‘Penance Baptism, Apocalypse,’ 26ff. Those who understood ‘duplex’ as being the omega are Canellas López and San Vicente, Aragon Roman, 159–60; Durán Gudiol, ‘Las inscripciones medievales de la provincia de Huesca,’ 100–3. Ricardo del Arco y Garay first proposed the theological interpretation of ‘duplex.’ del Arco y Garay, ‘Fundaciones monásticas del Pirineo Aragonés,’ Príncipe de Viana 13 (1952): 263–398; see also Caamaño Martínez, ‘En torno al tímpano de Jaca,’ 201–3. It was more fully developed in Esteban Lorente, ‘Las inscripciones del tímpano de la catedral de Jaca,’ 150–1. 18 For instance, the lions are both fierce and forgiving. He points out that the dual nature of Christ was of particular significance to Christians in Spain where the Adoptionist heresy had once undermined the orthodox belief in Christ’s dual nature. Pressing his point further, he asserts that this theme of duality also emphasizes the special nature of Jaca as a royal capital and the seat of the bishop. Simon, ‘El tímpano de la catedral de Jaca,’ 407–19. 19 Kendall, ‘Verse Inscriptions of the Tympanum of Jaca and the PAX Anagram,’ note 35. Favreau, ‘Les inscriptions du tympan de la cathédrale de Jaca,’ 552–3. 20 Both scholars published this discovery in 1996. Their work will be discussed more fully below. Favreau, ‘ Les inscriptions du tympan de la cathédrale de Jaca,’ 551–2. Kendall, ‘The Verse Inscriptions of the Tympanum of Jaca and the PAX Anagram,’ 412. 21 Favreau, ‘Les inscriptions du tympan de la cathédrale de Jaca,’ 552–4. 22 Frans Carlsson, The Iconology of Tectonics in Romanesque Art (Hässlehom, 1976), 112; Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 241. 23 Ocón Alonso, ‘El sello,’ and ‘El tímpano.’ 24 Ocón Alonso, ‘El sello,’ 82. 25 Ocón Alonso, ‘El tímpano,’ 224–5.

Notes to pages 137–41 207 26 Moralejo Álvarez, ‘La sculpture romane,’ 94–5; Caldwell, ‘Penance, Baptism, Apocalypse,’ 28. 27 Moralejo Álvarez, ‘La sculpture romane,’ 94. 28 Caldwell, ‘Penance Baptism, Apocalypse,’ 30. 29 Ibid., 35. 30 Brown ‘Portal Sculpture and Audience,’ 249. 31 Porter, Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, 70; Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 257; Cayetano Enríquez de Salamanca, Rutas del románicos en la provincia de Huesca (Madrid: Rosas, 1988), 44. Kendall, The Allegory of the Church, 112. 32 Whitehill, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, 257; Gaillard Les debuts, 128; Sené, ‘Quelques remarques sur les tympans romans à chrisme en Aragon et Navarre,’ 1:372. 33 ‘Le chrisme, très sec de lignes, offre une particularité: ses signes alphabétiques sont placés successivement entournant dans les sense des aiguilles d’une montre, de sorte que les yeux en font la lecture selon un circuit continue et fermé, depuis la première lettre jusque’à la dernière, contrairement à la lecture en croix qu’impose la distribution habituelle de signes composant l’anagramme du Christ.’ Canellas López and San Vicente, Aragón roman, 233. 34 ‘In this sculpture, reader, take care to understand in this way: P is the Father, A is the Son, the double consonant [x] is for the Holy Spirit. These three [PAX] are indeed rightly one and the same, the Lord.’ Transcription and translation Kendall, Allegory, 230. 35 ‘I am the eternal door; pass through me, faithful ones. I am the fountain of life; thirst for me more than for wine. You who wish to enter this blessed church of the Virgin, reform yourself first, in order that you may be able to call upon Christ.’ Transcription and translation Kendall, Allegory, 112. 36 Kendall, ‘Gate of Heaven,’ 116. 37 John 10:9 ‘I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved.’ Apocalypse 21:6, ‘I am the alpha and omega; the beginning and the end. To him that thirsteth, I will give of the fountain of the water of life, freely.’ 38 The reading of the understanding of the chrismon as representing Christ, the beginning and the end, is of course based on two verses of the Apocalypse 1:8 and 21.6 mentioned above. ‘I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, saith the Lord God, who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.’ Apocalypse 1:8. 39 Kendall, Allegory, 230. 40 Kendall points out that the first two verses use the plural imperative to address the Christian community and the last two verses use the singular imperative to address the individual worshipper. Ibid., 112.

208 Notes to pages 141–3 41 ‘In this sculpture, reader, take care to understand [the symbolism] in this way: P is the Father, A is the Son, the duplex is the Holy Spirit. These three are indeed rightly one and the same, the Lord.’ Transcription and translation, Kendall, Allegory, 128–9. 42 ‘If you who are bound by the law of death seek to live, come hither in prayer, renouncing the fomentations of poison. Cleanse your heart of vices, lest you perish in the second death.’ Transcription and translation, Kendall, Allegory, 230. 43 ‘But the fearful, and the unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, they shall have their portion in the pool burning with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.’ Apocalypse 21:8. 44 Kendall, Allegory, 95. 45 ‘The lion knows to spare the man who prostrates himself and Christ knows to pardon the man who prays.’ Transcription and translation, Kendall, Allegory, 130. 46 David Simon takes issue with the interpretation of the serpent as a representation of evil. On the contrary, he asserts that it represents the humility of the penitent. He notes that there are parallels between the bestiary meaning for the snake and the ritual for public penitence. Like the snake that sheds its skin every forty days, the penitent had to shed his cloths and don penitential garb for the forty days of Lent. Bestiaries draw parallels between the snake casting off its skin and man rejecting sin in order to return to the innocence of Adam in paradise. Simon shows that at least in one site in the Pyrenees this equation of the snake with humility existed. On the church of Saint-André at Luz-Saint-Saveur an inscription says, ‘The serpent that each year sheds its skin is very humble. Abandon the cult of impurity. If you wish to enter (this place) since it lies open, seek this (humility) for yourself.’ What may weaken his argument somewhat is the way that the lion treads on the tail of the snake as the lion on the right of the tympanum treads on the adder and the basilisk. Simon, ‘El tímpano de la catedral de Jaca,’ 411–13. 47 Moralejo, ‘La sculpture romane de la cathédrale de Jaca,’ 93–5. 48 ‘The strong lion is trampling underfoot the sovereign power of death.’ Transcription and translation, Kendall, Allegory, 230. 49 Kendall indicates that the leontophonos is mentioned in Pliny’s Natural History and in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies and in some twelfth-century versions of the Physiologus. Its burnt flesh was poisonous to lions. Lions consequently chased them with ferocity and killed them with the weight of their paws. Kendal, ‘Verse Inscriptions,’ 408–10. 50 Both inscription and image seem to be a variation on Psalm 90:13: ‘Thou

Notes to pages 143–9

51 52

53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65 66

209

shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk: and thou shalt trample under foot the lion and the dragon.’ Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from SaintLazare, Autun,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 1–30. Apocalypse 5-5: ‘And one of the Ancients said to me: Weep not; Behold the Lion of Judah, the root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loosen the seven seals thereof.’ Margaret Haist suggests that this Old Testament focus on the ferociousness of lions may have come from direct experience with the animals that posed an actual threat to humans in the Middle East. Margaret Haist, ‘The Lion, Bloodline, and Kingship,’ 7–8. Beverly Anne Orr, ‘The Sculptural Program of the Royal Collegiate Church of San Isidoro in León’ (PhD Diss., Ohio State University, 1988), 77. Linda Seidel, Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Façades of Aquitaine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 68 note 122. Clark and McMunn, introduction to Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages, 2. Grant, Early Christians and Animals, 52. Isidore, cited in ibid.,131. Gaillard, ‘Notes sur les tympans aragonais,’ 199, and Ocón Alonso and Rodríguez Escudero, ‘Los tímpanos de Jaca y Santa Cruz de la Serós,’ 260. ‘Through this gate the gate of heaven becomes accessible to each believer who strives to combine the commandments of God with faith.’ Translation and transcription, Kendall, Allegory, 113. Ibid. ‘This is the gate of the Lord through which the faithful enter into the house of the Lord which is a church founded in honour of Saint Mary. It was built on the order of Count Sancho together with his wife named Urraca. It was finished in Era 1110 [= AD 1072] in the reign of King Sancho Ramírez in Aragon, who established for the sake of his soul in honour of Saint Mary the villa called Larrossa, so that the Lord may give him (?) eternal (?) rest. Amen.’ Transcription, Kendall, Allegory, 325, note 5. He notes the difficulty of transcribing the letters of this inscription because some are very worn. Translation, ibid. 110–11. The band with the inscription turns the corner where it names the scribe and the sculptor. Canellas López and San Vicente, Aragón roman, 163. Nelson, ‘The Foundation of Jaca,’ 703. Ibid., 696–7. Falcón Pérez, ‘Una ciudad franquicia: Jaca,’ 108. Evidence suggests that by 1137 the majority of the city’s population was non-Arongonese. See Antonio

210

67 68

69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83

84 85 86

87 88

Notes to pages 149–54 Ubieto Arteta, ‘Sobre demografía aragonese,’ 588–9, cited by Nelson, ‘The Foundation of Jaca,’ 704. Nelson, ‘The Foundation of Jaca,’ 700. ‘And that all men should go to mill in mills where they wish, except Jews and those who make bread for sale.’ Charter of Jaca (ca. 1077), trans. Thomas N. Bisson, in Medieval Iberia, ed. Constable, 125. ‘And if any man seize as pledge the Saracen man or Saracen woman of his neighbor, let him put him in my palace; and the lord of the male and female Saracen shall give him bread and water because he is a human being and should not starve like a beast.’ Ibid. Ocón Alonso traces the iconographic history of the Jaca tympanum in ‘El sello,’ 82–9. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 7:77–8. Ibid., 7:79. Ze’ev Weiss and Ehud Netzer, Promise and Redemption: A Synagogue Mosaic from Sepphoris (Jerusalem: Israel Museum,1996), 16. Ibid. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 7:85. Ibid., 3:95–6. For an account of more examples, see ibid., 7:29–30. Ibid., 7:68–9. Ladner, God, Cosmos, and Humankind, 258. ‘What is then the matter with them, that they turn away from the admonition as if they were asses taking fright that had fled from a lion?’ Qu’ran, sura 74. See Harner and Ettinghausen, ‘The Conquering Lion.’ This interpretation was put forward by Richard Ettinghausen in ‘The Throne and Banquet Hall of Khirbat al-Mafjar.’ For a different interpretation, see Behrens-Absouseif, ‘The Lion-Gazelle Mosaic at Khirbat al-Mafjar.’ Alain Sené suggests that the chrismon is actually chosen because Aragon is so close to Islamic territory where God is never shown. Sené, ‘Quelques rémarques,’ 368. See note 10 above. Repsher, The Rite of Church Dedication in the Early Medieval Era, 66. ‘Necnon et ecclesiae mos inolevit per traditionem apostolorum ut non solum pro fidelibus sed et pro hereticis scismaticis, necnon et pro Judeis et paganis domii misericordiam convenient.’ Transcribed and translated, ibid., 81. Ibid., 81, note 193. Bartal, ‘The Survival of Early Christian Symbols in Twelfth-Century Spain,’ 300.

Notes to pages 155–6 211 89 He sees Matthew and Mark on the left side of the tympanum and John and Luke on the right. Simon, ‘L’art roman, source de l’art roman,’ 266. 90 Kendall, Allegory, 127–8. 91 The sculptor may have intended these animals to be lions but they bear little resemblence to the actual animal. 92 Durliat thinks it may have been moved from another location in the church, Durliat, La sculpture romane, 247.

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Index

Figures in bold refer to illustrations. Adams, Henry, 167n56 Agüero, 50, 52, 109 Agüero, San Salvador, 109 al-Andalus, 46–50 Alfonso I, 66 Alfonso II, 57, 63–6, 70, 79, 84, 94, 100 Alfonso III, 65–6, 70 Alfonso V, 76 Alfonso VI, 79, 84, 94, 121, 199n43 – al-Mans. ur, 47–8, 50, 53, 57–8, 68–9, 74, 87, 119, 145, 177n16 al-Muqtadir, 102, 118, 121 alpha and omega, 132, 136, 155, 157, 207nn37, 38 Alquézar, 108, 110, 113–15, 117, 125, 128, 4.17 angels, 81, 127, 200 Apocalypse, 133, 140, 142, 144–5, 207n38 apses, 55, 60, 64, 67, 69–70, 72–4, 85– 6, 90–1, 104, 106, 110–14, 130, 198n16 Aragon, 5–6, 24, 28, 49, 54, 76–9, 81– 2, 90, 92–4, 96, 99, 101–3, 105–8, 110, 115–17, 124, 130, 132, 134–5, 159, 199n43

Aragonese Christians, 6, 159 Aragonese tympana, 137–8, 142, 155, 158 Aragón Roman, 201 arcades, 52, 55, 59–60, 64, 67, 73, 99, 120 arches, 52, 55, 59-61, 81, 85, 106, 130, 133 Asturian churches, 64-5, 70-1 Bagüés, 106 baquetones, 106 Barber, Leila, 173 barrel vaults, 55, 60, 67, 70, 72, 86, 91, 95, 106, 120 basilisk, 143, 155–6, 158, 208n46 Bédier, Joseph, 12, 165n24 Benedictine rule, 50, 53, 56–8, 69, 85 Berenson, Bernard, 10, 22–4, 27–8, 30, 35–7, 163n8, 168nn77, 80, 169nn84, 94 Berenson, Mary, 29 Beth Alpha synagogue, 151 billets, 111–12 Binacua, 106, 137–8, 154, 156, 5.9 Bryn Mawr College, 7, 9, 16

238 Index Carrión de los Condes, 193 Castile, 5, 47, 49, 52, 54, 62–3, 75, 78, 85, 88, 90, 96 Cataluña, 58–9, 106–7, 182n72 caves, 53, 55, 57, 61, 69, 72, 74, 99 chrismon, 6, 92, 96, 135–44, 146, 153– 9, 205n10, 207nn32, 33, 38, 210n83 Christ, 42, 85, 98, 127, 133, 136, 139– 42, 144–6, 154–5, 157–9 Christians, 3–4, 6, 33, 44, 46–8, 56, 75, 95, 102, 110, 119, 121, 124–6, 128– 30, 144, 148–50, 154, 159 Chronicle of Alfonso III, 65–6 Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña, 55, 109 church portals, 137, 147, 153 Cluny, 42, 51, 58, 121, 182n71 Codex Aemilianensis, 66 Codex Albeldensis, 65 Codex Calixtinus, 11, 42 Codex of Albeldensis, 66 Conant, Kenneth, 7, 38–40 consecrations, 59, 70–1, 85, 88, 114– 15, 133, 137, 153 Constantine, 122, 135, 137 Cook, Walter W.S., 7–8, 38–9, 43 corbel tables, 106 Cordoba, 47, 119 Coutances Cathedral, 19, 167n59 crypt, 14, 52, 55, 59–60, 63–4, 67–73, 120, 128–9, 184n92 Daniel in the lions’ den, 112, 123, 144, 150, 200n49 domes, 86, 92, 101, 103–4, 111, 117, 120, 125–6 Doña Mayor, wife of Sancho el Mayor, 5, 15, 77, 79–81, 84–90, 97 Doña Sancha sarcophagus, 81, 96, 190n40, 191n45, 3.3

Ellis, Havelock, 37, 173 Elvira, daughter of Fernando and Sancha, 78 Elvira Sánchez, countess, 84, 86, 89 Fantova, 129 Felicia, wife of Sancho Ramírez, 93, 109 Fernando I, 50, 53, 62, 78–9, 85, 87–9, 93, 98, 121 First Romanesque, 105–6, 198n17 Fitz (Darby), Delphine, 18, 173– 4n158 fortresses, 50, 52, 62, 90, 113, 125–6, 128–9, 131 Frómista, San Martín, 5, 80–1, 85–7, 90–1, 93–7, 123, 193n65, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 frontier, 3–5, 23, 29–30, 32, 36, 38, 44– 5, 48–9, 56–7, 73, 75–6, 96, 102, 107–8, 161–2 Fuero of Jaca, 76, 109, 116, 134, 148– 9, 159, 210nn68, 69 Galicia, 11, 41 García, bishop of Jaca, 116, 134, 153 García, monk of Cuxa, 59 García Sánchez III el de Nájera, 71 Gascony, 48–9, 51, 109 Goodyear, William Henry, 26, 169n98 Gregory VII, pope, 109 Hammat-Tiberias, synagogue, 151 Harvard University, 7, 19, 22, 35–40, 42, 168n77 – Hish am, 47–8 Historia Silense, 87–9, 98 horseshoe arches, 50, 52, 55, 59–60, 73–4, 120, 198n16

Index Huesca, 58, 91, 102, 108, 114, 116, 121, 123–5; San Pedro el Viejo, 123 Huntington, Archer, 9, 23, 163n8, 164nn11, 21 Iguácel, Santa María, 25–6, 94, 111, 113–14, 123, 147–8, 200n53, 209n62, 4.9, 4.14, 4.15, 5.7 infantado, 77–8, 83, 88, 90, 100 inscriptions, 84, 86, 89, 97, 111, 114, 122, 133, 135–44, 146–8, 150–1, 154, 157–9 Jaca, 13, 24, 30, 44, 76, 91, 93–5, 106, 109–16, 123–4, 132–4, 137–41, 146, 148–9, 154–8, 200nn49, 54, 206nn14, 18; bishop of, 116, 153; cathedral (San Pedro), 6, 85, 87, 90–2, 95–6, 112–14, 116, 123, 130, 132–9, 141–3, 145, 149-59, 4.16, 4.21, 5.1 Jenks, Marianna, 173n158 Jews, 32–3, 44, 149–51, 153–4, 159, 210n68 King, Georgiana Goddard, 4, 7–19, 21–3, 29–30, 33–4, 57, 66, 77–80, 85, 94, 101, 161, 163n8, 164nn11, 21, 173n158, 1.1; students of, 38, 173n58 La Alberca, martyrium, 64 Lárrede, San Pedro, 106, 4.6 Lasieso, San Pedro, 120, 4.20 Last Judgment, 128 Lawrence, Marion, 173 Leire, 67–72, 74; abbot of, 58, 68; monastery of, 56, 69 Leire, San Salvador, 67–70,

239

186nn123,127, 187nn139, 143, 2.15, 2.16, 2.17, 2.18, 2.19, 2.23, 2.24 León, 5, 25, 44, 47–9, 61–3, 65, 76, 78, 84–5, 88, 90, 94–6, 100, 123; Panteón de los Reyes, 83, 87–9, 123, 3.11; San Isidoro, 44, 82–3, 87, 89, 93, 95, 98, 100, 123, 162 León-Castile, 76–7, 82-3, 85, 93–4, 99, 107, 125 leontophonos, 143, 208n49 Lérida, 74, 108 Lion of Judah, 144–5, 150, 156, 158 lions, 6, 81, 92, 123, 133, 136–8, 142–6, 150–2, 155–9, 200n48, 206n18, 208nn45, 48, 49, 211n91 Loarre, San Pedro, 6, 50, 52, 95, 101– 6, 108, 110–12, 114–15, 117–18, 123, 125–6, 128–30, 200n49, 201nn59, 60, 204n117, 4.1, 4.3, 4.4, 4.11, 4.22, 4.23, 4.24 Loarre, Santa María, 52, 103–5, 4.2 Lombard bands, 106 Lowber, E.H. (Edith), 11, 164n21 Luesia, 50, 52 Mâle, Émile, 12, 21–2, 25–6, 29, 43, 80, 102, 107 masonry, 67, 70, 101, 103, 105, 111, 117 masons, 50, 52, 55, 72, 85, 88–9, 104– 5, 111–12, 121, 133 melting pot, 4, 21, 29–30 Mongan, Agnes, 164n21, 173n158 Montearagón, 108, 110, 115, 117, 125, 129, 201n59 mouldings, 67, 104, 111–12, 114 Mozarabic architecture, 33 Mozarabic church, 54, 117 Mudéjar, 17, 33–4 Muslims of Zaragoza, 74

240 Index Nájera, 71, 94 Navarra, 48, 52, 59, 63, 74, 103, 121 Navasa, 137–8, 155–8, 5.8 Neilson, Katherine, 173 Nogal de las Huertas, San Salvador, 84–7, 94–5, 97, 192n54, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 Norton, Charles Eliot, 8, 35 Obarra, 106, 4.5 Odilo, abbot of Cluny, 57, 182n69 Oliba, bishop of Vic, 57–59, 70, 183n85 Oviedo, 29, 46, 58, 61–3, 65, 70; Cámara Santa, 63, 2.14 Palencia, 52, 60–6, 74, 84–5, 95, 120; bishop of, 58, 61; cathedral of, 63, 66, 69; crypt of San Antolín, 60–1, 63–4, 66, 73–4, 120, 184n92, 2.11, 2.12 Pamplona, 16, 49, 54, 58, 66–7, 77, 115, 134; bishop of, 58, 68–9, 182n71 Pamplona Casket, 152 parias, 73–4, 117–18, 120–1, 134 pax anagram, 139, 141, 146, 150, 154, 156, 206n17 penitence, public, 137, 143, 158, 208n46 photographs, 10–12, 15, 21, 23, 25–7, 101, 164nn12, 21, 169nn96, 97, 170n100 Physiologus, 145, 208n49 pilgrimage, 11, 13, 15, 17, 21, 29–30, 40, 107, 109, 115, 122, 134, 148, 161 pilgrimage roads, 4, 22–5, 27, 29–30, 41, 80, 101, 116, 148 Poncio, bishop of Oviedo, 58, 61–4 Porter, Arthur Kingsley, 4–8, 12, 19– 44, 80, 82, 101, 127, 135, 138, 161,

167n61, 169nn75, 77, 80, 82, 1.4; students of, 38–9 Porter, Lucy, 19–20, 23, 26, 37, 167n59, 169n97 Post, Chandler Rathfon, 7–8, 38–9, 174nn159, 160, 164 Prescott, William, 4, 31–2 queens, 5, 15, 75, 79–81, 83, 88, 97–8 Qur’an, 151 Ramiro I, 63, 81, 90–1, 102, 107, 118 Ribagorza, 48-9, 106 Ribagorza, 107 Ripoll, 58 Romans, 32–3, 95–7, 124, 134, 142 Rome, 97, 109, 122, 124 rosettes, 143 Ruesta, San Juan, 50 Sacrifice of Abraham, 44, 113, 123 Saint-André-de-Sorède, 70 Saint Antoninus, 60–2, 184n94 Saint-Genis de Fontaines, 70 Saint James, 11–12, 14, 17–18, 47, 80, 107 Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, 58–9, 70, 2.10 Samitier, 129, 4.25 San Adrian de Sasave, 60, 63–4, 116 San Bartolomé at Muro de Roda, 105 San Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza, 53 Sancha, daughter of Ramiro I, 77–8, 81--2, 90–3, 97 Sancha, wife of Fernando I, 49, 66, 79, 83, 85, 89 Sancho el Mayor, 5, 46–71, 73–9, 84, 90, 94–6, 99, 103, 107–8, 110, 118– 19, 182nn69, 71, 184n94, 187n130 Sancho Garcés IV el de Peñalén, 71, 103

Index Sancho Ramírez, 5–6, 77–9, 94, 101–3, 105, 107–11, 113–31, 133–5, 148–9 Sancho Ramírez, count, 120 San Juan de la Peña, 24, 51, 54–6, 59, 61, 69, 72–3, 91, 112, 115–16, 148, 180n59, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 4.7, 4.10, 4.12, 5.6 San Julían de los Prados, 64 San Miguel de Escalada, 52 San Millán de la Cogolla, 48, 50–60, 69, 72–3, 94, 119, 189n50, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 San Pere de Roda, 70 Santa Cruz de la Serós, 79, 81, 91–2, 94; San Caprasio, 133, 205, 5.2; Santa Maria, 12, 78–9, 81, 91–4, 110, 114–15, 123, 133, 137–9, 142, 146, 148–9, 154, 156--7, 3.12, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 Santa María del Naranco, 63–4, 2.13, Santiago de Compostela, 4, 11, 13–14, 21–2, 24, 29–30, 40–1, 43, 47, 50, 80, 86, 89, 95, 107, 115, 119, 134, 148, 161–2 Santo Domingo de Silos, 33, 40–2, 75, 94, 101, 162 Sasave, San Adrian, 116 Schapiro, Meyer, 38, 42 semicircular arches, 3, 5, 50, 52, 55, 57, 59, 85, 95, 104, 106 Serrablo churches, 105–6 Siresa, San Pedro, 109 snakes, 143, 156–8, 208n46 Sobrarbe, 107 Sos del Rey Catolico, 129 Stein, Gertrude, 18, 34 Street, George Edmund, 9–10 taifas, 5, 48, 73, 102, 107–8 Teresa, daughter of Ramiro I, 78, 81, 91–3, 103 Teverga, San Pedro, 70–1, 2.21, 2.22

241

Ticknor, George, 31–2 Toledo, 60–2, 65 Toulouse, Saint-Sernin, 40, 43, 102 towers, 104, 106, 108, 119–20, 126, 128–9, 156 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 36, 48 Ujué, Santa María, 110, 112–15, 199n43, 4.8, 4.13 Umayyad caliphate, 46–7 Uncastillo, 50, 52, 137–8, 154, 156–8; San Martín, 137, 154, 5.10 Urban II, pope, 109 Urgell, 92, 108 Urraca, daughter of Ramiro I, 78, 90–1, 93 Urraca, infanta, daughter of Fernando and Sancha, 77–9, 82–3, 89, 98 Urraca, sister of Sancho el Mayor, 76 Urraca, Queen, 77, 83, 86, 98 Vermudo II, 65 Vermudo III, 49–50, 57, 61, 63–5, 76, 88 Visigothic kings, 49, 65, 184n92 Visigoths, 33, 65–6, 95 Voto, 55 Wamba, 184n92 Whitehill, Walter Muir, 7, 38–9, 41–2, 50, 71, 86, 88, 138–9 Yale University, 7, 19–20 year 1000, 3, 33, 46–7, 50, 57, 102 Zangwill, Israel, 29–30 Zaragoza, 52–3, 55, 102–3, 108, 118, 121, 124, 128; Aljafería, 118, 4.18, 4.19; taifa of, 102, 121, 134