The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

painting of the gigantic Christ is both mystical and intensely dramatic and the grouping of the Apostles is most original. There is a pathos in the repetition here of the stylized cock which appeared in the neighbouring painting of the betrayal of Jesus, where we see St. Peter weeping. There is a touch of naïve realism in the details of St. Martial bringing wine and St. Thaddeus fish. It forms a dramatic contrast to the rustic scene painted in the porch, of the shepherds listening to the angel’s announcement, where goats are butting playfully and cows ar e quiedy grazing and a big sheep dog drinks from a cup the shepherd holds for him. I had seen a similar pastoral scene in the fields as I plodded along the road to León.
    The paintings do not strike me as being French: rather do they remind me of the Magian mosaics of Byzantine churches in East Europe or of those in the baptistry of Ravenna Cathedral. What makes them so impressive is that we see them in a diminutive enclosed space. Indeed I felt as if I had entered a cave and all at once in the dim light saw a series of visions floating up out of the tombs, like the white bees from the shrine of St. John of the Nettles. So spectral are those paintings in spite of their naïve primitiveness that they seem to be emanations of the spirits of the dead kings and queens—Ferdinand I the Great, Queen Sancha, the tragic young victim, Count Garcia, Alfonso V, Sancho I, Doña Urraca, and at the head Vardente spiro of St. Isidore himself, the supreme musician, who arranged the Mozarabic office and brought it from Seville to Saragossa, Toledo and León with the monastic rule which later was dispossessed by the Augustinian from Italy and the Cluniac from France.
    Kneeling in that silent vault, I thought of Isidore’s disciple San Ildefonso in his chair at Toledo with his pen in his hand, about to write a prayer, but suddenly wafted away on the wings of his celestial vision; then I recalled that other unearthly halting-place on my pilgrimage, the crypt and cloister under the ledge of rock at San Juan de la Peña, which was the cradle of the Kings of Aragon and the sanctuary of the Holy Grail.
    That eerie sensation of the supernatural which a humble pilgrim feels even today in the church and pantheon of St. Isidore must have been overwhelming in the twelfth century, and, according to tradition, the stones before the high altar sweated three days before the death of Alfonso VI. Forty-six years later the chroniclers relate that Alfonso VII the Emperor and his sister Doña Sancha were inspired to reconstruct the church, owing to the apparition of St. Isidore on his charger at the Battle of Baeza, and Alfonso in consequence felt impelled to establish the saint in imperial León as a rival to counteract Santiago in rebellious Galicia, just as Alfonso X, el Sabio, tried to do at Villasirga a century later. The crowning instance of supernatural intervention came when there was the mysterious knocking on the door of the Church of St. Isidore on the night before the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, and the people heard in the streets a distant, measured tread of an army marching by. The sacristan who was watching in the church cried out: “Who calls?” and he heard a muffled voice answer that Fernán González and the Cid Ruy Diaz Campeador had come to summon St. Isidore to the batde, just as St. James had been summoned at Compostella to help the hosts at Coimbra.
    What greater antithesis could there be than to walk out of the dim church and vaulted pantheon of St. Isidore into the sunlit streets and then into Pulchra Leonina, the fairest cathedral in all Spain, rising like a priceless monstrance in its Plaza de la Regia? Here, in contrast to the rugged austerity and endless chanting of saints and warriors carved in stone by the Romanesque artists, we have the airy elegance (sutileza is what the Leónese call it) and daring polyphonic patterns which Gothic craftsmen imported from France along the pilgrim road. Their spirit is divinely symbolized by Nuestra Señora la Blanca who, seated on her throne at the door of the cathedral with the Infant in her arms, welcomes us graciously into her garden within, where all the colours of the dawns and sunsets of Paradise are contained in the heart of the Mystical Rose and where we can listen to the angelic choir. As Gertrude Bone says in her imaginative description written for her husband’s wonderful dry-points, ‘the Spanish genius