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
SCULPTURE IN THE REFECTORY OF THE PALACE OF GELMIREZ, SANTIAGO