Iberia (126 page)

 

The right archway is a much different matter. Here the artist
is dealing not with alien Jews whom he hopes to conciliate but
with Christians who ought to know how to behave within the
body of the Church. The right half of this arch is a terrifying
depiction of those condemned at the Last Judgment. In the quaint
English which is apparently obligatory for all guidebooks in Spain:
‘To the right, small reptiles and horrible big monsters harass and
tear off the flesh of men, slaves of vice, with their claws and fauces.
It is surprising the Dantesque expressiveness of this composition.’
The left portion, that is, on the right hand of God as He and His
son sit in judgment, are the saved, and they are a happy lot. I have
studied this great arch for many hours, finding in it always
something new and compelling, but in the end I think the
excellence of the work can be reported in two facts: here paradise
seems really more to be preferred than hell, which is not always
the case in medieval and Renaissance art; and the conspicuous
aspect of this work, an aspect not before commented on by writers
but one surely planned with much care by the artist, is that we
see both hell and heaven through the eyes of little children who
share the torment and the glory with their guilty or saved parents.
The children shown in this panel are among the finest ever
portrayed in art, and I cannot praise them highly enough. In hell
they perish in dreadful agony, and in heaven they rejoice with
parents who love them, making each aspect more psychologically
believable. Spanish religion features this involvement of children
in the faith, and one of the most fearful aspects of the Inquisition
was that it insisted upon the display in the parish church of a
condemned man’s sanbenito for at least ten generations with his
name clearly upon it, the purpose being to condemn that man’s
children throughout those same ten generations. It could well be
that this harshest of the Inquisitional laws stemmed from this
righthand arch at Compostela; at least, it was an extension of the
majestic idea here represented, that heaven and hell are more
meaningful when seen through the eyes of children.

 

Again, just as the Jews were offered salvation through the
intervention of two small children, so in this panel the saved are
led into paradise by two other children who show the way into
the central archway.

 

We have now seen the six walls of this remarkable portico and
more than a hundred and eighty-five different figures, but we
have not yet come to the feature which has always been its chief
claim to artistic fame. About the four principal columns are
ranged, their feet resting at about the eye-level of the viewer as
he studies them, sixteen life-sized statues of men in robes, and
no matter how much one enjoys the twenty-four bearded
musicians or the children of the Last Judgment, he must finally
admit that this parade of splendid men is the highlight of the wall.

 

They are unbelievably well carved, tall, bending slightly forward,
extremely human in aspect and mobile of face. Tradition says
that each was modeled after a specific man who lived in
Compostela at the time, and I find this easy to accept, for this
gallery of men could not have happened by either accident of
imagination. They are so real they could speak, yet so artistically
contrived that in their silence they sing, and to have seen them
intimately, day after day and in all lights is to have shaken hands
with the Middle Ages.

 

Meet them. On the left-most pillar, below the world of the
Jews, stand long-bearded Joel and quizzical Abdias. (‘What name
do we know Abdias by?’ I ask Father Precedo. ‘Abdias,’ he replies.
‘Everybody knows him by that name.’ Back in America I would
learn that he was Obadiah of the King James Bible, Abdias of the
Douay.)

 

On the left-hand edge of the first main column stand Hosea,
who had such a miserable time with his wife, and Amos. The
remaining portion of this column contains the most famous of
the sixteen. Jeremiah is properly grave and heavy, but Daniel is a
young, beardless man with one of the most ingratiating smiles in
the history of art. Standing on one leg with the other playfully
crooked at the knee, he seems like a schoolboy about to play some
mischievous trick, and he is by far the most popular of the figures
in the procession. Since his roguish grin is directed across the
portico to the enchanting figure of Queen Esther, who faces him
on the opposite wall, tradition says that one of the self-righteous
kings of northern Spain directed that Esther be made to appear
less attractive, for she was disturbing the propriety of the
cathedral, whereupon the artist shortened her nose and made
other alterations, without much success, for Daniel still gives her
the merry eye.

 

Next to Daniel comes my favorite figure, an old, smiling Isaiah,
heavy with beard and marked by a golden cap, which none of the
others wear. To me it seems no great accomplishment for a young
man like Daniel to smile; but it is reassuring when old Isaiah with
his burden of prophecy should still be able to raise a muffled
laugh. Beside him stands Moses with the tablets, and his burden
of law is so heavy that he cannot smile.

 

On the comparable portion of the main right-hand pillar stand
Peter with his massive keys, Paul with a book, James the brother
of Jesus, and John the Divine, also beardless and with a face of
heavenly purity. He seems wide-eyed with surprise that revelation
should have been accorded him, but he is not ponderous about
it. On the smaller portion of this column, and facing the arch of
the Last Judgment, stand solemn Matthew and conversational
Andrew, while in the corner, on the last of the pillars, stand heavily
bearded Thomas and preaching Bartholomew.

 

It is a magnificent parade from which Judas Iscariot is missing.
The Middle Ages found it objectionable to picture him in such
scenes, so he is often omitted. But the others march in a grandeur
which seems the more impressive because of its compelling
simplicity. With their appearance we leave the Pórtico de la Gloria,
but not before we notice one small detail.

 

I spoke earlier of the angles who appear on the west wall of the
portico and of how the two bearing trumpets direct them down
as if playing for the delight of the observer. At each end of the
opposite wall, which contains the Gloria, appears an additional
angel so placed as to form part of both the Gloria and the end
wall, constituting a harmonic link between the two unequal halves
of the composition. They, too, point their trumpets below, and
if you look at these four figures, who form a kind of thematic
material for the whole composition, you realize that they are
trumpeters announcing the day of resurrection, and they are
summoning you to that paradise where music and joy and
laughter and winking saints and beautiful queens and the
benevolence of children abound, and you may well recall the John
Donne sonnet on this theme:

At the round earth’s imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise

 

From death, you numberless infinities

 

Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow…

What of the cathedral itself? Could any church be worthy of
such an entrance? At Compostela the interior is about what it
should be, if one thinks of this building as the spiritual center of
a religious nation. It is beautifully Romanesque and cluttered
with just enough paraphernalia to remind one that this is Spain.
In spirit it is very warm, in aspect majestic, and in its operating
manifestations devout. The first thing one encounters inside the
church itself is a statue to the man who carved the portico, for
the intricate work which I have just described appears to have
been accomplished by one man whose name is known: Maestro
Mateo (in Galician, Mestre Mateu), a Spaniard who worked in
northern Spain during the last third of the twelfth century.
Documentary records state that he finished the portico in 1188
and it is supposed that it occupied him for about twenty-five
years. His statue, which he may have carved himself, is a properly
jaunty thing whose head is covered with lively stone curls, and
through the centuries it has been the custom of all who visit
Maestro Mateo’s supreme work to bow before the kneeling statue
and to touch one’s head against his in hopes that some of his
genius may rub off. O Santo d’os Croques, he is known in
Galician, the Saint of the Bumps, and I, like many others, have
touched my head against his, hopefully. When I reflect that this
great artist is generally unknown, while much lesser figures of the
Italian Renaissance are treasured as geniuses, I wonder at the
unfairness of history, for to compare Maestro Mateo with those
lesser but more famous artists is like comparing the Himalayas
with the Poconos of my home district. The Poconos are lovely,
for sure, but to mistake them for the Himalayas is an error.

I was fortunate in reaching Compostela at the precise point in
the year when I could best witness the significance of the town
and its cathedral in Spanish life, for El día de Santiago (The Day
of St. James) occurs each year on July 25 and is the occasion for
a religious celebration of great dimension. Toward midnight on
the evening of the twenty-fourth it seemed as if everyone in the
city had crowded into the plaza before the cathedral, where for
two days workmen had been hiding the façade behind a huge
wooden imitation featuring a panel with the words ‘Al Patrón de
España.’ Now, at eleven, two large rockets were sent aloft to
explode with a force so strong that my coat was lashed by the
following blast of air. Then to constant applause one rocket after
another lifted into the air for about half an hour. I had noticed
earlier that this display, which had been publicized during the
preceding week, was to be in the hands of a firm from La Coruña,
and since the best fireworks are generally considered to come
from Valencia, I expected little, and during the first half-hour
saw nothing to make Valencia worry.

But after the regulation rockets had been fired, those that
exploded in shimmering white or red, the good men of La Coruña
let go. On a series of wagon wheels stuck on poles about the plaza
they set loose some contraptions that were dazzling, each
consisting of at least eight radically different sequences timed to
explode one after the other over a period of at least two minutes,
so that one wondered how the first charges could ignite without
detonating the others. While the crowd was marveling at this, the
La Coruña men produced their specialty: a large rocket which
climbed in a zigzag pattern to about a hundred yards in the air,
then stopped, dashed off parallel to the earth for a hundred yards,
where it died in a soft hissing sound, but when it had almost
reached the earth it gave forth a huge burst of flame, another
rocket fired, and the whole thing went back into a giant orbit that
took it higher than before, ending in a loud explosion and a blaze
of multicolored lights. It was quite a rocket, much more complex
than anything Valencia had shown, and the crowd cheered.

But there was still more! On a distant building far across the
plaza a brilliant ball of light began to blaze, and on a thin wire
that none of us had noticed before, it sped in wild flight some
two hundred yards and crashed directly into the false façade of
the cathedral, after which it sped back up the wire to the point at
which it had begun; but few saw its journey end, because when
it struck the cathedral the entire false front burst into flame and
for at least four minutes we saw such a popping of lights, such a
rain of rockets and such a confusion of colors that no eye could
possibly have followed all that was happening. The whole cathedral
seemed to be ablaze, and at the end some sixty standing rockets
were automatically ignited and these went off in all directions,
filling the sky with flaming color.

Apparently the residents of Compostela are more accustomed
to fireworks than I, because next day the local newspapers reported
that ‘the traditional illumination of the façade went off as usual
with nothing special to report.’

At dawn on the twenty-fifth, large black limousines begin to
arrive at the Hostal de los Reyes Católicos. In the early 1500s this
had been the foremost hospital in the world, a center of medical
learning reputed to be without equal, for it had been established
by Queen Isabel and King Fernando as a refuge for those many
pilgrims who reached Compostela in a state of exhaustion after
negotiating the pass at Cebrero and the bitter mountains of
Galicia. Now the majestic building, constructed around four
different courts, each an architectural masterpiece, serves as a
luxury hotel, and in its spacious lounges the early-morning visitors
munch cakes and fruit with their coffee.

They are politicians from Madrid and officers from the naval
base at El Ferrol del Caudillo, the Galician birthplace of
Generalísimo Franco at the northwest tip of Spain. Spaniards say
that if Franco had been born one step farther west, he’d have been
a norteamericano.

By midmorning the plaza is filled with army units in brown
uniforms, accompanied by a competent brass band which plays
marches. A small cannon booms out a nineteen-gun salute to
Santiago, a military greeting to a military saint, which is not
surprising in a land where in 1962 the mummified left arm of
Santa Teresa, during a grand tour of the nation, was officially
received in Madrid with the military honors due to a
‘captain-general in active command of troops.’ Additional
dignitaries appear in full morning dress, and soon one portion
of the plaza is filled with handsome-looking men in various
costumes, all prepared to pay homage to the great saint who had
led the nation to victory over the Moors, over the Incas and Aztecs
and over most of the armies of Europe.