Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain

by Annette M. B. Meakin

Like Buckle, many other writers of his day believed implicitly that the power of the Church during the Middle Ages was such that it destroyed all individual liberty; but now we know that though religion governed all, she stifled nothing.[97] Our ancestors were religious, they were even superstitious to a very high degree, but they loved their individual liberty with a passion that the bulk of our socialistic contemporaries would be puzzled to understand. “Our proud ancestors ignored the very idea of that unlimited power of the State which is now so ardently appealed to,” wrote Montalembert, one of the greatest students of the Middle Ages, after twenty-five years of study. “A dead level has been regarded (in the nineteenth century) as a mark of progress, and identity of yoke as a guarantee. God forbid that we should assert equality to be incompatible with liberty; but up to the present time the art of making them live together has not been discovered in any of the great countries of the great European continent.... I remain sadly impressed by the spectacle of the debasement, feebleness, and growing impotence of each individual man in modern society. Does not this stupid and servile apotheosis of the wisdom and power of the masses menace us with the extinction, at once, of every personal initiative and all strong originality, and with the annihilation, at the same time, of all the proud susceptibilities of the soul and the genius of public life?”

The study of archæology did not cease with Montalembert; since his day it has made enormous strides. We know now that he was right. The men who lived in the Middle Ages did not recognise, as we do now, the “omnipotence of numbers,” hence the glorious originality shown in their architecture, its dignity, its liberty, and its nobility. We have only to look a little way to note that “in those countries where the sovereignty of the State is most absolute, the originality of art is nearest to its vanishing point, diminished by the State, that despot who never dies, who already extends everywhere his irresistible and pitiless level, over prostrate human dust.” The music, poetry and painting, sculpture, as well as the architecture of the Middle Ages, all point with unerring finger to the individuality of the Middle Ages. The songs of the Gallegan trovadors, the Cancionero Gallego, are full of tales that bear witness to the liberties taken by individuals in those days even with their religion. Have we not already repeated in this very volume tales in which nuns and gallants freely appealed to the Virgin for her assistance in designs which they knew to be immoral!

The age of cathedral-building is not over. We see new cathedrals rising in Russia, in England, in America. Huge and massive and costly they are, but have they the spiritual and subtle beauty of the Gothic or the charm of the Renaissant architecture? Can they be judged by the same standard? No; for, to use the words of Spain’s great architect, artistic collectivism has succeeded personal art, just as personal art once succeeded symbolic art.[98] And architecture, according to the eternal laws of its being essentially an interpretative, not an imitative art, it interprets the soul-language of the human beings amongst whom it rises into existence.

Galicia of the twentieth century has inherited from Galicia of the Middle Ages poetry, sculpture, and architecture, each of which, in its own line, is absolutely unrivalled. These offer a wide and fascinating field of research to all those who seek to understand the civilisation of that period in the world’s history. The architecture of Galicia can be said to be exclusively Christian, for Moorish influence, which, penetrating into every other part of Spain, mingled itself with Christian art and produced what Spaniards cell el estilo mudejar, never gained any footing in this province. Perhaps it may be well to say a word about this style in passing, in spite of the fact that Galicia is not the province in which to study it. The Moors, it will be remembered, began to invade Spain in the year 712, and they remained in the Peninsula for the space of four hundred years. As Señor Lamperez has remarked in his interesting series of lectures, this branch of the art was the natural outcome of the mingling of two distinct civilisations, the civilisation of Spanish Christendom and that of the Oriental followers of Islam, during the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries of the Christian era. It resulted from a fusion of the art of two distinct races, and the highest point of development was reached during the period which began with the reign of Ferdinand I. and ended with that of Alfonso X. (the eleventh to the thirteenth century), and that which began with Alfonso X., and ended with Ferdinand and Isabella in the fifteenth century; it had its birth and development in the first of these periods, reached its climax, and declined in the second. Mudejar architecture, according to Lamperez, was the work of Moorish architects employed in the service of Christians: it exhibited the elements of both peoples. In some instances, indeed, it has been the work of Christian artisans superintended by Moorish architects. There still exist churches in Spain whose plan is Christian (basilical), whose structure is of the simplest, showing avoidance of all the difficult problems of equilibrium, and whose materials are of the smaller order (tiles, etc.), with much plaster gypsum and excessive subdivision of excessive and artificial ornamentation dominated by geometrical ideas. The Ordinances showing how the corporations of artisans were formed and what specifications were required of the men who took the position of alarif (skilled) and maestro-al-arif (Arabic) are still preserved at Seville.

Mudejar architecture was no mushroom style—on the contrary, it had its slow rise and fall, and it evinces a state of constant and continual transformation. The oldest edifice now in existence is perhaps the church of San Roman at Toledo. Those who would study the manner in which the mudejar architecture has been modified in turn by Roman, Byzantine, and Gothic influences, would do well to follow the advice of Lamperez, and group their researches on geographical lines. Catalonia, Castille, Andalusia, Aragon and Toledo, and so on. In Aragon are to be found the strongest and most splendid Mohammedan influences that Spain can show; while in Galicia these influences are, as it were, but momentary. Even Granada can show nothing to compare with the glories of Aragon, with its towers of Teruel, Daroca, and Saragossa, and with its churches of Calatayred.

But before Spain gave birth to her mudejar architecture, and long before the Moors set foot upon her shores, her Christian art owed more to the East than to the West, for it was as much Byzantine as Roman. Byzantine art dates its origin from the year 330, when Constantine moved his court from Rome to Constantinople, to a town on the borders of Asia and Europe. Constantinople, by its geographical position, was the natural meeting-point of Persians, Indians, Armenians, and Syrians. All these influences, as well as those of Asia Minor, were now brought to bear upon the Christianised pagan art of Rome. The result was the birth of Byzantine art.

How Byzantine art was carried to the furthest corners of the Christian world it is not difficult to see. Constantinople had become the centre of the Roman Empire. From her shores there poured forth warriors, traders, missionaries to every part of the earth.

Byzantine architecture borrowed her massive cupolas, supported by square pillars over a square edifice, from Persia, and from Syria she borrowed her floral ornamentation; while her love of colour, of brasses and mosaics, is traceable to the influence of all the Oriental centres where wealth and ostentation abounded. The greatest monument of Byzantine art is, of course, St. Sophia’s (now a mosque) at Constantinople, which the Emperor Justinian erected between 527 and 565. Here we see the decadent art of classic Rome transformed and vivified by Asiatic influences. In the seventh century, the agitation against the Iconoclasts (destroyers of images), in the reign of the Emperor Leo the Isaurian[99] (813-821), resulted in a wide diffusion of Byzantine influences throughout the western provinces of the great Roman Empire. Spain, herself a province, became affected.[100]

There are numerous indications that between the decadence of Roman architecture and the invasion of the Moors, Spain produced a phase of architecture quite her own,[101] of which the most striking characteristic was the horseshoe arch. It has been suggested that this kind of arch was introduced from Constantinople; but students of Spanish architecture have long tried in vain to ascertain with certainty either the date of its appearance or the source of its introduction. It is known to have existed centuries before the Christian era in Persia, India, and other parts of Asia, without, however, characterising any special style of architecture.

Almost until the close of the nineteenth century it was erroneously believed that the horseshoe arch entered Spain for the first time with her Moorish invaders. We now know for a certainty that Spain had it long before—that she had it already in the second century. Tombstones with Roman inscriptions have been found with horseshoe arches sculptured upon them,[102] and it has even been found sculptured on pagan tombstones whose inscriptions point unerringly to the second century.[103] As Christian architecture began to rise on Spanish soil, with it there reappeared the horseshoe arch. It is visible upon the sepulchral tomb, in Mértola, of a man named Andrew, which bears these words, “Princeps cantorum sacrosancte aeclisae Mertillane,” and the date 525. This arch has also been found in two white marble windows, the one, now in the Museum of Merida, has barbaric ornamentations; the other, with three horseshoe arches more pronounced, exists in the church of St. Martin de Nieble.[104] A church discovered in 1789, close to the ruins of Segobriga, and which contains the epitaph of Bishop Sephronius, who died in 550, has four somewhat oval horseshoe arches in its chancel. It was thought until quite lately that there were no traces of this arch having existed in Andalusia before the arrival of the Moors, but Señor Gomez-Morenno believes he has discovered three edifices in which it was used: one of these is the western entrance of the town of Cordova, which the Moors called Bibalatarin. The Arab historian relates that the Visigothic nobility and garrison escaped by it in 711 A.D., to take refuge in the church of San Acisclo; and this circumstance alone is sufficient to verify its antiquity.