But to return to our Pórtico. The hang of the drapery, the pose of the limbs, have all been the subject of the minutest care and of the profoundest study. We do not here see garments flying, as though blown by a rough wind, as if “in a frenzy,” as Taine remarked when he looked at some of the statues in St. Peter’s at Rome. Every bit of drapery here falls naturally into place.
With the exception of the slender marble columns already described, the entire Pórtico de Gloria and its sculpture is of solid granite; but the granite of the sculptures was not intended to show. The whole was most delicately coloured, capitals and fusts as well as statues. Time has carried away most of the colouring, but there is still enough left to give us some idea of what it was once like. The effect must have defied description. Christ’s mantle was saffron, bordered with green and gold, the tunic beneath being also saffron coloured, and bordered with purple and gold. The four evangelists were also in yellow; the dresses of the angels varied, some were pink, some blue, some white. Spanish painters have admired the soft blending of the colours both in the faces and in the garments of these statues. When our English architect, the above-quoted Street, had succeeded in getting a special commission sent out from England to take a plaster cast of the Pórtico de Gloria for South Kensington[163] he certainly deserved the gratitude of the English public, but the people of Santiago complained that a little of its beautiful colouring was taken off in the process. This colouring was not Moorish, as some have suggested, but Byzantine. There is a great similarity between the colouring of ancient Byzantine frescoes and icons and that of this Pórtico; the flesh tints were brown almost to a chocolate shade. The face of Judith is flushed with quite a rosy tint, but that of one of the four-and-twenty elders, the one to the left of the keystone of the arch, is still almost a chocolate colour, and several of the others indicate a similar colouring. The capitals of the marble pillars still show traces of a warm, rich red. The art of colouring stone in such a manner that the colours will remain intact for centuries is quite lost. It is one of the many lost arts. Possibly the architects of the seventeenth century feared that continued exposure might lead to deterioration of the sculpture, and for that reason closed it in.
On the inner side of the lintel of the central arch of the Pórtico is an inscription, which is believed to have been placed there by Maestro Mateo, the architect and sculptor to whom we owe this beautiful creation. It reads thus—
“Anno ab Incarnatione Domini, MCLXXXVIII, Era MCCXXVI, die kalendarum Apriles, super liminaria principalium portalium—Ecclesiae Beati Jacobi sunt collocata per Magistrum Mathaeum, qui a fundamentis ipsorum portalium gessit magisterium.”
(In the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 1188, era 1226, on the calends of April, the lintels of the principal portico of the Cathedral of the Blessed St. James were put up by Master Matthew, who superintended the said work from its foundations.)
Perhaps this date, of which none have doubted the correctness, is the most astonishing part of the whole thing.
A masterpiece like the Pórtico de Gloria, dating a century, or even half a century, later would cause less surprise, but how it comes about that such a finished and perfect chef d’œuvre could have been accomplished at so early a date and in such an out-of-the-way part of the civilised world—is a puzzle.[164] Frenchmen ply their pens with vigour to prove that Master Matthew was a native of la belle France. Spaniards are equally energetic in their assertions that he was a native of Spain, and some even go so far as to say that he must have been a native of Galicia. “There is as yet nothing to prove that Mateo was not a Gallegan,” writes Lopez Ferreiro. “He lived at Santiago, or at least in Galicia, from 1161 to 1217, to say the very least; and it is thought that he was born and educated in Galicia. He was a layman, with a wife and children.”—And as this writer is one of Spain’s greatest living historians as well as a famous archæologist, his opinion has weight. He tells us that from the end of the eleventh century there flourished in Santiago a school of artists for all branches of art—an institution which was the means of producing marvellous results. To begin with, it produced the cathedral itself, and at the same time it produced the most exquisite specimens of silver and copper workmanship. This school was enriched, in 1135, by Alfonso VII., with many privileges, which were also enjoyed by later generations of artists. There still exists a diploma given to Mateo by Ferdinand, King of Leon, on 23rd February 1168. This king, on the occasion of a royal pilgrimage to the sepulchre of St. James, granted Mateo a pension of 4200 pesetas (or francs) a year. It seems that Mateo started the work at once, and took twenty years to accomplish it; during those twenty years the Gothic style of architecture had been slowly gaining ground. We see it in the elegant vaulting of the Pórtico and in its graceful groining.
The Historia Compostelana contains not a single allusion to the Pórtico de Gloria, which does not seem to have been even planned at the time that manuscript was written.
CHAPTER X
SCULPTURED CAPITALS
Favourite subjects—Plain capitals in English cathedrals—The foliage—The trumpet pattern—Capitals in the gallery—New elements—The arcades at Vézelay—Original but not realistic—The zenith of ornamental sculpture—Lay schools—Art becomes a dead language—The abacas—Norman sculpture in England—The palace of Gelmirez—St. Joseph’s Day—The crypt church—Its form and architecture—Sculpture of its capitals—Stone flowers—Celtic dances—The Capilla de Gelmirez—Sculptured scenes from daily life—The Sala capitular