THE capital of every shaft introduced into the design of the PÓrtico de Gloria is, as we have already remarked, exquisitely sculptured. We have tried to describe some of the more noticeable ones, but there are also interesting subjects depicted on many of the smaller and less prominent capitals. On the capital of a pillar attached to the eastern wall of the narthex, near the statue of Esther, we find little monsters, winged dragons with horses’ feet. Others again have exuberant foliage, amongst which there sometimes appears the profile of a beautiful female head. A favourite subject is a couple of harpies with women’s heads (a band across the forehead and flowing hair), the bodies are those of birds varying in size and type. On a capital opposite the southern or “Pagan” arch is depicted a poor unfortunate mortal with a tormenting monster on either side of him; one of these is engaged in pulling out his tongue with a long pair of tongs, and the other is trying to strangle him with a rope, one end of which he has strung round the victim’s neck. Though the theme of the PÓrtico may not be the Last Judgment, it must, I think, be admitted that these creatures have a very infernal appearance. On another capital are depicted two hideous harpies with equine heads, and serpents’ tails which coil round their carrion-like feet. These horrid animals glare down upon the spectator with the most fiendish expression imaginable.

In some of our finest cathedrals the capitals are often very little carved, or not carved at all. At Winchester we

find in the north transept (1079-93 A.D.) the so-called cushion capital, which Parker describes as a “plain cubicle mass with the lower angles rounded off, forming a sort of rude cushion shape.” There are plain capitals in the arcade of Canterbury, and in the crypt, but these last were evidently intended to be sculptured after they had been put into place, for some are finished and others are half-finished. At Westminster too we also find plain capitals, but it is evident that the artist who superintended the sculpture of Santiago Cathedral meant to have every one sculptured. As Lopez Ferreiro has remarked, it is very rare to find a church with such a variety of carved capitals. Counting those of the windows and side chapels, there are nearly a thousand, all completed with the most perfect work and finish. In the interior of the cathedral the capitals are almost all of the best granite, but they look like sculptured marble; some of the figures in them have eyes of jet. The foliage of many is as fine and delicate as lace work. “No epoch of architecture,” wrote Viollet le Duc, “has produced such a variety of capitals as the twelfth century.” The sculptors truly seem to have looked upon their work as a labour of love and devotion.

Lopez Ferreiro believes that the capitals of Santiago Cathedral were completed before the close of the eleventh century, and therefore before the epoch at which the French capitals attained to their fullest perfection.[165] Some of them certainly were, but I am a little sceptical about the best ones. Those which resemble the early capitals with rude volutes, such as one sees in the White Tower, London (1081 A.D.), might well date from the eleventh century, and those in the Puerta de los Platerias may be of the same date. But this question is worthy of more careful study than has yet been devoted to it. Some of the capitals of the PÓrtico de Gloria are very Byzantine in their execution, as are those of the Puerta de los Platerias. Here we see interlacings, a sort of basket work ornamented with dots like pearl passementÉrie and the trumpet pattern, which are certainly indicative of the sculpture of the Eastern Empire. There is a great deal of this work in Ireland, and for a long time patriotic Irish archÆologists clung to the belief that these twistings and plaitings and spirals were of purely Celtic origin and typical of Celtic art,[166] but that idea is now exploded. “There is no doubt,” writes Miss Stoke,[167] “that in the history of Christian art in Ireland we see two currents meeting, one Byzantine the other Latin,” and she then points out that similar designs, “like regularly plaited twigs,” are to be found in the church of St. Clement in Rome, which dates from 650 A.D.; where these twigs are plaited together (a case rare in Ireland) they are intended as a symbol of the Holy Trinity, the Three in One, as the inscription Unitas—Trinitas found with it in France indicates.

To any one who is fond of beautiful sculpture a walk round the gallery which encircles the cathedral of Santiago is nothing short of a delight. The arches of windows through which we look down into the naves are supported by carved capitals of the most perfect workmanship; there are many hundreds of them, and there are not two alike.

Frenchmen claim that all this beautiful work was done under the supervision of monks from Cluny; if not, indeed, by them, they argue that the same class of finely sculptured foliage is to be found at Toulouse and elsewhere in Southern France. Yet, according to Viollet le Duc, it was after 1130 that the monks of Cluny began to turn to Nature for fresh ideas. They then sought for new elements, and these they found in the vegetation of their own fields, and it occurred to them that, instead of arranging canthus leaves stiffly and conventionally, like those on the friezes and capitals of Syria, each sculptor should be at liberty to gather such foliage as grew in his own neighbourhood, and arrange it as his own taste should dictate. It was towards 1160 that these monks completed their arcades at VÉzelay, and displayed their capitals sculptured with an elegant suppleness that nothing has ever equalled. The general form of these capitals, like those at Santiago, was Roman, but the grouping and adjustment of the flowers of the fields are managed with such grace and skill that the cleverest of modern sculptors would find it hard to compete with them.

As at VÉzelay, so at Santiago, there is such varied grouping of the foliage as could only have been arrived at by each individual sculptor drawing his inspiration from the tender sprays themselves and working out his own fancy. Towards the close of the twelfth century the mass of traditional

ornamentation such as interlacings, and billets, began to disappear and their place was filled by local vegetation. There is plenty of this new decorative sculpture in the choir of Notre Dame de Paris, which was begun in 1163 and finished before 1190, the work of the lay-school, l’Isle de France. The sculptors went out into the fields to search for the leaves and buds that would best suit their purpose. Every man wished his block of stone to become a capital whose beauty distinguished it from all the rest.[168] The work of this period is wonderfully original, but it is far from being realistic.

The general composition of the Paris capitals resembles that of those of Santiago Cathedral, but is not nearly so beautiful. The foliage, too, that grew in the neighbourhood of Paris, and was adapted by the sculptors there, is quite different from the foliage of the Santiago capitals, which seem to have been copied from the cabbages which form the staple food of the Gallegan peasants. These cabbages shoot up with long thick stems more than a yard above ground before they spread out their long, curling leaves, and more nearly resemble wild bracken than English cabbages. The fact that the leaves on the Santiago capitals seem to be full of sap and lifelike, must likewise be due to the sculptor’s keen observation and study of the original plant as it grew in its native soil. Viollet le Duc says that it was in Notre Dame de Paris that this stone vegetation first unfolded its leaves, and that other sculptors of northern France took thence their ideas; but it was not till some years later that they learned to represent the leaves as they grew. It needed consummate art to form, out of many parts, one combined whole which should resemble an individual and real plant or animal; even the imaginary and fantastic animals that twelfth-century artists represented as creeping out from between the foliage looked real and lifelike. The zenith of ornamental sculpture, in the opinion of Viollet le Duc, was reached at that moment when Roman tradition had disappeared, and when the search after reality had not yet imposed its exigencies upon the sculptor. This was the most brilliant period of the French school, and it lasted for about twenty-five years, between 1199 and 1215. The new school spread its influence into every province of France and even into foreign countries, but at the same time the work of each province preserved a certain individuality of its own. In Bourgogne there was a tendency even to exaggerate nature.

When the lay schools were formed, when art had come forth from the monasteries and taken its place in the family and in the workshop of the artisan, the members of each corporation were free to do as they pleased with their blocks of marble or stone, they had no written rules to follow; the father taught his son, and the master explained his method to his disciple or apprentice. It seems to have been their first care to break with the past, and to study nature in the woods and fields in search of fresh inspiration. “Alas,” cries Viollet le Duc, “that in Art progress should lead us to a zenith and then force us to descend!” Sculpture falls at last through her very zeal for reality.

The capitals of Santiago like those in France were sculptured before the mason lifted them to their place. Each workman was responsible for the work of his own capital, and we often find the name of the proud sculptor cut into the stone.

But how did such perfect sculpture spring up in this remote town of Galicia, contemporaneously with, if not earlier than, the best French work? “Pour former l’artiste,” says the writer we have been quoting, “il est besoin d’un public apprÉciateur, pÉnÉtrable au langage de l’art; pour former le public, il faut un art comprehensible, en harmonie Âvec les idÉes du moment.” And what sort of a public had Santiago in those days. Was it not one of the most brilliant of the world’s intellectual centres? All this exquisite sculpture was produced during Galicia’s second Golden Age. In the Middle Ages there was a far stronger tie between the artist and the public than there is in our day. “Le moyen age n’aurait pas fait un si grand nombre de sculpteurs pour plaire a’ une coterie, l’art s’Était democratisÉ autant qu’il pent l’Être.” In our day art speaks only to the few, the chosen and the cultivated few, with money in their pockets. It is a dead language to four-fifths of the world, not because the people have rejected it, but because it has neglected the people.

One of the glories of the lay schools of the thirteenth century, remarks Viollet le Duc, is the way in which they helped to spread art among the people. From the moment that you begin to teach the people that art is only for a caste, a select few, you cannot continue to spread it abroad. You cannot command taste. Art is a tree which can only spread and grow when it is given fair play. “Le rÉgime fÉodal n’avait ni AcadÈmies ni conseils de batiments civils, ni comitÉs protecteurs des Arts.” In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

there were no prizes, no medals to strive for, but art lived and flourished everywhere.

Many of the capitals in Santiago Cathedral are decorated with groups of animals, birds, harpies, dragons, in endless variety, while a few, especially those in the gallery above the apse, are true to the old Byzantine design of plaits and bands and dots; some again of the later style have pods full of peas or beans instead of foliage, and in others the foliage is curling daintily at the tip like ostrich feathers. The scalloped capital, the most common of all in England in the first half of the twelfth century, is not to be found in Santiago. The abacas is always square in Galicia; as far as I remember, it is also square in French Gothic capitals as well as in Norman, but in English Gothic it is generally round.[169] In England, too, there has been much discussion as to how the use of this sculpture was first introduced. Sir Gilbert Scott thought he could trace it from Byzantium through the south of France; and Parker attributes its introduction into England to the Crusaders in the latter half of the twelfth century, but Viollet le Duc scoffs at the idea. “Soldiers,” he says, “do not usually find a place for art in their knapsacks.” “We have seen,” writes Parker, “by the testimony of Gervase, that the chisel was not used in the “Glorious choir of Conrad” at Canterbury, which was built between 1096 and 1130, and an examination of the old work proves the exactness of the statement; all the sculptured ornament on the old work is shallow, and such as could well be executed with an axe, which is not a bad tool in the hands of a skilful workman, and is still commonly used in many parts of England and France.... The chisel is only required for deep-cutting, and especially under-cutting, and that we do not find on any buildings of ascertained date before 1120.” Parker speaks of some very rich Norman sculpture on the capitals of the little old church of Shobdon in Herefordshire, built about 1150 by Oliver de Merlemond: the founder went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostella in Spain while this church was being built. Parker thinks he must have brought home with him some drawings, or a remembrance of what he had seen on his way through France, and applied this knowledge to the new building. He adds, “It would be a curious matter of research to ascertain where he found it.” It is much more likely, in my opinion, that he got his ideas from the sculpture of St. James, i.e. Santiago, though I do not remember seeing anything exactly like the illustration given in Parker’s book. The sculpture of the Santiago[170] capitals bears close inspection, like those of St. Sernin, in France, but at the same time it is of a kind that looks well from a distance, which is not the case with those of St. Sernin.

Mateo did not erect the PÓrtico de Gloria until after he had completed the so-called “Palace of Gelmirez” adjoining the cathedral, and also the little church which has been erroneously called “la Catedral Vieja” (the old cathedral). In both of these there is contemporary sculpture of great interest and merit. Underneath the principal entrance to the cathedral, and below the flight of steps by which the principal entrance is reached, there is another entrance in the western wall, that of the little church, or crypt, beneath the PÓrtico de Gloria, which is now called the chapel of St. Joseph. An eighteenth-century circular arch, broken by a coat of arms, forms the head of the doorway, on either side of which, on pedestals, stand the figures of two knights in armour work of the fifteenth century. As soon as we have entered we perceive that the little church and the portico above are the work of the same architect, and, consequently, of the same period.

On St. Joseph’s Day this little church stands open from early morning till late at night, and on the Eve of St. Joseph’s Day it is also open; but throughout the rest of the year travellers invariably find it closed. Even now it is very seldom visited by travellers as in the days of Street, who discovered its existence by a mere accident.

On entering the door the visitor confronts a relief figure, somewhat under life size, of St. James the Less, the garments of which are highly coloured, red and blue. St. James holds in his hand a scroll on which his name is written. In front of the statue is a very ancient baptismal font with a thick stem. Sanchez calls this statue Byzantine, but some think it to be Mateo’s work. Opposite the entrance, at the end of a modern passage, about three yards in length, is a stout clustered pier (A) from which spring three arches, one to the north, one to the south, and one to the east; the first two give entrance as it were to twin naves leading to the high altar, the third arch joins the clustered pier (A) to another and yet more robust clustered pier (B), an elephantine one, in fact, which in its turn also throws out three arches to north, south, and east. A third and smaller clustered pier (C) is joined to the second (B) by the last mentioned arch. An aisle running round the third clustered pier forms a

circular apse in which are the chief altar, and an altar to the Virgin and to St. James on either side.

The form of the little church is that of a Latin cross; but the three stout piers, A, B, and C, taking up so much room that, being planted in a line with one another in the centre, they prevent the church from having any central nave; they give it instead a couple of twin naves, and make it look like two churches. Street remarked with regard to this church that its arrangement was very peculiar. The fact of the matter is, that Mateo had to build strong and lasting foundations for his portico to rest on; and the crypt church had to be adapted to them as best it might. From the clustered pier (C) springs the arches which form a vaulting to the aisle which encircles it, tores spring out over the aisle like branches from a weeping ash. The inner side of the arches are decorated with sculpture from the hand of Mateo, as also are the capitals of the shafts which adorn the clustered piers. The capitals round the central pier (B) are marvellously beautiful, and those round the outer walls of the edifice are every one of them worthy of careful inspection. It is so dark that without good artificial light the work cannot be satisfactorily examined, and even with a good light a couple of hours are required to see all properly.

The vaulting of the inner sides of the arches has large rosettes to join the tores together, but the most remarkable of all the rosettes are those which line the inner side of the arches over the twin naves. Never have I seen such a variety of stone flowers in so small a space. The accompanying photograph taken by limelight will give my readers only a slight idea of these wonderful rows of flowers plucked from the stalks, but the pen here is helpless. We have nothing like this in England; our ball-flower, our four-leaved flower, our trefoil are hideous in comparison. The photograph, though it only shows a part of one wall, shows twelve flowers, every one different, every one perfected with scrupulous care.

Now let us turn to the capitals; the variety of foliage they represent is simply endless. They are remarkable for the energy, the vigour of their design. Here on a side capital is a man up in a vine, cutting down the grapes with a crescent-shaped sickle: there are the real vine-leaves of Galicia, and the sickle in the man’s hand is the very one still used by the Gallegan peasants. On another side of the same capital are two persons with large bunches of grapes at their feet. On another is a man grasping a wild beast by the throat; the man’s head, which has gone, should form a corner of the capital. But perhaps the most interesting capital of all is that with the two maidens gracefully dancing with raised arms an old Spanish dance. Some have thought this represented the daughter of Herodias, and that subject has been depicted on a capital; there is one in the Toulouse Museum,[171] but others believe it to be a scene taken from the life of the day. That very kind of dancing still takes place on the village greens of Galicia.

In a niche over the chief altar is a very old stone image, supposed to have belonged to the original church built over the body of St. James. The two slender marble shafts to the left and right of the niche have capitals with Byzantine sculpture; their style is simple and elegant, and quite distinct from any of the other work. On either side of these plain shafts are a couple of shafts covered with carving in spiral bands; ugly modern capitals replace their original ones, but the pedestals are intact and worthy of note. Some think these four shafts are among the earliest sculptures in Galicia, and date from the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century. The frontal of the altar is covered with a geometrical design, a kind of diaper pattern; some of its original red and gold colouring is still preserved. The design consists of a red braid with dots (pearls and a gold border arranged geometrically on a white background), and joined by stone rosettes with gold centres. It has been suggested that this altar is a sculptured sarcophagus adapted, but it is rather too deep for a sarcophagus.

The so-called Palace of Gelmirez was not built till the end of the twelfth century, or perhaps the beginning of the thirteenth, but the style of its architecture is the same as that of Mateo’s school. It is built on to the cathedral to the right of the western faÇade. We entered it, by special permit, by way of the modern archiepiscopal library, and descended to the capilla de Gelmirez. The banded imposts on which the arches and early Gothic vaulting of this chapel rest are ornamented with remarkable sculpture, quite different from any we have noticed in the cathedral. Musicians with various quaint instruments are represented as singing the praises of the Most High: angels, birds, and rosettes adorn the groined vaults. In the adjoining refectory, separated from the chapel by a huge pier, the sculptures represent scenes from the everyday life of Santiago in the twelfth century. Here a Gallegan lady is seated at dinner with a young girl on either side of her: a servant stands close by with a dish of eatables in her hand. We see people carrying all manner of viands, bread, fruits, etc. As Sanchez has remarked, this must be the refectory, it could be nothing else with so many eatables about. All the faces wear a look of placid contentment, which centuries have not been able to obliterate. The musical instruments we see in the capilla are supposed to be representations of the ones that were used by the minstrels of the twelfth century. They are quite different from those of the four-and-twenty elders in the PÓrtico de Gloria.

There has been some dispute as to the original plan of the archbishop’s palace, and an architect of my acquaintance is devoting a good deal of study to the subject. With him I went upstairs to look through the windows of the notary’s office at the now sealed up old windows of one of the original lateral faÇades. These windows are in the Romanesque style, very like those in the transept of Winchester Cathedral, which are also eleventh-century work, only that the latter have two windows under each arch. The arches here are double, the inner arch resting on slender shafts. It is a simple and at the same time a noble style of window. We then went down into the basement to look at the long vaulted room below the capilla—probably an old Sala Capitular—and numerous bits of stone ornament, archwayed passages, all dating from the eleventh century. It was down here that Gelmirez established his mint, by the special permission of Alfonso vi. (1107)[172] in order that money might be forthcoming to meet the expense of completing the cathedral.