Passing through a grand old stone gateway, we came to a kind of square formed by one side of the monastery and the façade of the church. The façade has two bell towers, and an imperial coat of arms over its Renaissance entrance, which must have been added at least two centuries after the lower walls were completed; it probably replaces the original Romanesque entrance.
The whole of the lower storey of the monastery is built in the Romanesque style, while the two upper ones belong to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and are specimens of the decadent decorative Gothic style. “In spite of the fact,” remarks Vazquez Nuñez, “that three centuries must have elapsed between the building of the ground storey and the one above it, and in spite of the fact that they belong to such different styles of architecture, the combined result, though it lacks unity, is nevertheless one of noteworthy and singular beauty.” The monastery is nothing but a ruin; its roofs are gone—or going, its floors are so shaky that it is hardly safe to tread them. Ivy covers its dilapidated walls and peeps in at its graceful windows. Bushes fill the patios of its beautiful three-storey cloisters, and everything of value that could be carried away has gone. Even the granite balustrades of its handsome stone staircase are disappearing. The upper part of the Claustro de los Obisqos (Bishop’s Cloister) is a marvel of the Flamboyant Gothic style; its buttresses, plain at their base, terminate in gabled and elaborately carved pinnacles like the petals of a foxglove bursting forth from its stiff stem. The pinnacles rise above the handsome stone lace or plateresque cornice, and wonderful gargoyles jut out at irregular intervals beneath it; yet the arcades below, with their slender double columns and their classic capitals, belong to a different age and a different style. There rises a tall stone cross in the centre of this patio, for it was used during several centuries as a burial-place for bishops. Nine of these dignitaries were buried there in stone sarcophagi before the year 1563, when the administrator of the abbey, Don Alonso Pernas, exhumed them and had them placed in niches on either side of the high altar in the church. In 1594 the abbot, Victor de Najera, had a new retablo constructed, and here he placed the bodies in two large stone sarcophagi with divisions. Finally, in 1712, these sarcophagi were placed in niches high up on either side of the altar and enclosed by iron railings. Vazquez Nuñez, to whom I am indebted for these dates, gives the full Latin inscription that Alonso Pernas copied from the original sarcophagus of Bishop Ansurio, who was buried in 925. The varied sculpture of the capitals in the lower part of this cloister is extraordinary. I noted one capital with a two-headed snake as its ornament.
The principal cloister is very much larger than the one we have been describing, and though its architecture is much simpler it also is a magnificent sight, with its three storeys, the lowest consisting of graceful arcades with semicircular arches supported by Doric columns, the next of Doric columns with single arches, and the third of graceful windows with semicircular arches. On one of the inner walls of this cloister is a curious piece of stone bass-relief representing Christ and the Twelve Apostles. Some think it must have served as a reredos to some ancient church, but the difficulty then is that the retablo was not introduced until the latter part of the Gothic period, and there are signs about this work that it is of much earlier date. Vazquez Nuñez believed it to be work of the twelfth century, but it may be even older. There is a third cloister, much smaller and plainer than the others; it is in the Renaissance style, but not in any way remarkable.
The church and its sacristy are in a state of better preservation than the monastery, for the church is in daily use as a parish church for the neighbouring villages. In the sacristy there are still some wonderful relics, such as limbs of saints, that thieves have not thought it worth while to steal, but several of the fine sarcophagi that contained the bones of the bishops have disappeared quite recently. There are eight paintings still upon the walls of the sacristy, and some handsome old carved chests.
The conventual church of San Esteban, which has three lofty naves divided by pointed arches, though begun in the twelfth century, is decorated in the style which de Caumont called ogival tertiaire. It is a remarkably elegant church, and its proportions are particularly pleasing; its tall columns, with their capitals high up under the moulding of the four-centred, or what we should term Tudor, arches, are most effective. Alas! that these, and its profusely and gracefully ribbed roof with its bosses and pendants, should all be covered with hideous whitewash, paid for, I was informed, by alms collected from the poor of the parish for that purpose! Like the Bishops’ Cloister, this church, though begun three centuries earlier,—as the date “Era MCCXXII.” on one of its pillars shows,—is a remarkably good example of the decadent period of decorated Gothic architecture. The stalls of the choir, which are said to have been covered with exquisite carving, fell to pieces from sheer neglect, and were stolen in bits, some of which have found their way into museums, and others are now part of the furniture of the houses of the neighbouring poor. I found a plain boarded gallery being put up over the vaulting at the lower end of the church in place of the dilapidated vaulting, by order of the new Bishop of Orense, who visited the place on horseback in 1906.
Statues of St. Stephen and St. Benedict adorn the chief altar and also one of the side ones. St. Stephen is always represented with a quill pen in his right hand. Massive retablos, their niches filled with statues, are still behind the numerous altars. My attention was especially drawn to a statue of the Virgin, with a black face, a gold nimbus and crown; eleven pink cherubs hover round her, all larger than the Child she holds. Both Mother and Child show the white of their eyes. This statue is said to be a copy of a famous Byzantine Virgin in a church in north-eastern Spain.
The three semicircular apses of the church are very fine; the central one is lower than the lateral ones, to let the light enter the rose window in the wall above it. All three are in the purest Romanesque style, and perhaps the most interesting part of the church. They are divided by buttresses in the form of lofty columns which reach to the cornice, and the tympana of these arches and the archivolts are all sculptured. Vazquez Nuñez observes that the sculpture of the Crucifixion on one of the tympana is remarkably full of detail for sculpture of the twelfth century.
This monastery had at one time within its precincts a thriving school of art, in which hundreds of monks were trained as painters and sculptors, and the charter granted in connection with it is still in existence. One reason why the beautiful old building is so fast going to ruin is that, after the monks had been turned out in 1836, there was no one left there to guard it; nor has there been any one ever since. Year after year the poor of the vicinity came at night to fetch away its stones and bits of woodwork to build their own cottages with; to them it was a source of wealth. Even
