The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

adopted for its own a sumptuous Romanesque and the Romanesque gives little opportunity for the magical wandering of light through painted transparencies. So that if Burgos, León, and Toledo had never been attempted, Spain would have lacked its full measure of this fragile and lovely art.’ *
    On each side of the smiling figure of Our Lady, the work of an anonymous artist about 1250, are statues of the Apostles and above the canopies are archivolts adorned with a bewildering variety of figures representing the Last Judgment, which occupies all the tympanum. The angel is weighing the souls as in the portal at Sangüesa: the elect are crowned by angels and proceed joyously towards Paradise, where they are welcomed by St. Peter, and just as in Dante’s poem there is hierarchy in Heaven, for we see people of all conditions and classes in society, from noble lords to humble vagabonds. On the other side, in terrifying contrast are the damned, who are being initiated into the torments of Hell by huge ghoulish monsters: they devour their lower limbs and gleefully dip their naked bodies into billowing cauldrons perched over flaming furnaces. Above tins Dantesque vision, in the upper part of the tympanum, appears our Saviour as universal Judge, surrounded by angels displaying the attributes of the Passion, and St. John and Our Lady sorrowfully interceding for the sinners.
    I was particularly fascinated by the southern façade, for it shows how aerial is the structure of this miraculous cathedral with its immense expanse of stained glass and its wall space reduced to the minimum. Looking at this façade, I understood the significance of the phrase quoted by Lady Bone, ‘stained glass is the greater part of Gothic’, and I blessed my stars for the golden sunlight of Spain shining upon this delicate glass house, filling it with wonder which reflects itself in the figures of the twelve Apostles conversing in pairs on the tympanum and writing at lecterns, and in the minstrel kings who play all the strange instruments described by the fourteenth-century Archpriest of Hita in his Golden Treasury of Song, the Libro de Buen Amor. Again and again I have seen these minstrel kings carved on the portals of churches along the Jacobean road, and they all seem to illustrate the canticles of the greatest minstrel king of all, Alfonso the Wise, who failed as a man of action to keep his home or his kingdom in order, but lives eternally as a dreamer, whose career reminds me of the lines W. B. Yeats wrote in Fergus and the Druid:

    A King is but a foolish dreamer
    Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream.

    One is amazed at the miracle that the thirteenth-century architect consciously attempted by building his basilica of glass on the city walls, over the ruins of the church of Santa María de la Regia which was sacked by Almanzor in the tenth century. The latter had replaced the palace of King Ordono II, constructed in its day over the thermae or baths of the seventh Roman Legio Gemina, which had given its name to the city. On this spot hallowed by time rose the cathedral, thus reminding us of Shelley’s metaphor:

    Time, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
    Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

    I stood inside the door gazing entranced at the sunlight of noon streaming through the six-light triforium windows and clerestory vibrating in colour harmonies upon the long, slender central nave and mingling with the medley of slanting sunbeams converging from the stained-glass windows above the distant high altar. The miracle is enhanced today because there is High Mass and the organ’s solemn harmony, the echoing polyphonic responses of the choristers and the chanted liturgy of the celebrants in their white and gold vestments add the miracle of sound to those of colour and form, and I feel as if the whole edifice of ancient stone had dissolved into a symphony of coloured and musical harmonies and had become airborne, bearing us all aloft into another world.
    Each chapel in the apse is in exact proportion to the general plan and the naves are devoid of any ornamentation. Nothing distracts the eye from the impression of slenderness, loftiness and light. As Miss King says: * ‘León is the only church where you move as in the heart of a jewel.’
    Some of the stained-glass windows are by artists of the thirteenth century, who worked in the cathedral, Adam and Fernán Arnold, Pedro Guillermo and Johan Pérez, such as the rose-window of the