The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Lucas Bishop of Tuy, El Tudense, as he is called, wrote a book describing how, through the intercession of the ‘Egregious Doctor’, paralytics and deaf and dumb people were cured, and in war the scholar saint had proved himself as great a Moor-slayer and Thunderer as St. James himself, for he had enabled the King and his successor, Alfonso IX, to win resounding •victories. He was supposed to have helped the Christian hosts in the battle of Las Navas, and according to some of the chronicles supernatural agency was given in the form of a shepherd, who showed the Christian kings the way across the hills, and Luke of Tuy calls him divinitus quídam quasi pastor ovium . * The Crónica General, however, considered the man a highlander who knew the by-passes, for he had been a cowherd and had snared rabbits and hares. * As Miss King shows, St. Isidore was in some miracles substituted for St. James as the successor of the native bull-god and was connected with bees, for there was a tradition that as an infant he was taken by his nurse into the garden and forgotten among the olive woods. Some days later when his father was mourning his loss in the garden he heard and saw a swarming of bees and when he approached he found his baby son lying on the ground with bees going in and out of his mouth, and others on his face and all about him. The father seized the baby and the bees flew away. The story reminds us of the Cretan Zeus, who was nourished by the bees with honey on Mount Ida, and also of the white bees that rose from the tomb of St. John of the Nettles. St. Isidore’s feasts were kept at solsticial times in the year, on July 25 and December 30, though he died in April. It is significant to note that in the thirteenth century St. Isidore produced a doppelganger in the ploughman saint, patron of Madrid, St. Isidore, whom the angels helped in his husbandry to enable him to say his prayers. *
    The Church of St. Isidore, which is a masterpiece of Romanesque art, owed a great deal to the efforts of two queens, Doña Sancha, the pious wife of Ferdinand I, and to their daughter, Doña Urraca, in the days of Alfonso VI. It was completed in the reign of Alfonso VIII. The carvings on the tympanum are primitive but dramatic and represent the sacrifice of Isaac. There are other fine carvings, of the Zodiac, and of musicians playing various instruments; these and indeed the whole church would seem to have been modelled upon Jaca Cathedral. The interior, too, with its primitive ruggedness, reminds one of Jaca and has the same atmosphere of austere meditation.
    Even still more austere is the mysterious pantheon of the kings, one of the most hallowed spots in Spain and the shrine which more than any other enables us to understand the true significance of the Jacobean pilgrimage. The pantheon, which was built between 1054 and 1067 by Sancha and Ferdinand I, the Great, consists of a narrow basilica with three naves to which a majestic portico gives access. The groined vault is supported by cylindrical columns, on which are capitals with primitive carvings showing biblical themes, gryphons, doves, serpents, and lions. The main interest in the pantheon centres in the wall paintings which, according to Post, * are the finest examples of Romanesque art in Spain. They are in tempera on a white background in sober colours adapted to the solemnity of this monument of death. There are blues, yellows, greens and crimsons, but these are harmonized owing to the prevailing tones of ochre, black and rusty red. These paintings were completed between 1167 and 1175, or, as other experts believe, in 1181 and 1188. In the vaulted ceiling of the porch we see Christ in a mandorla seated on the rainbow with a book, and at the four corners the Evangelists who have the heads of the Apocalyptic beasts; on the right vault of the same space the Angel communicates the glorious tidings of the Saviour’s birth to the shepherds: on the left vault our Lord appears as in the Apocalyptic vision of St. John with the double-edged sword handing over to the Angel the book with the seven seals, and we see the Evangelist prostrate, the seven candlesticks, and St. John receiving the Book of Revelation. In the corners of the painting are the seven churches of Asia.
    The most striking fresco of all is the central composition in the pantheon representing the Last Supper, which is a triumph of artistic adaptation to the limited space available in the vaulted ceiling. The