Las voces del Románico: Arte y epigrafía en San Quirce de Burgos (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Las voces del Románico: Arte y epigrafía en San Quirce de Burgos Elizabeth Moore Willingham Daniel Rico Camps. Las voces del Románico: Arte y epigrafía en San Quirce de Burgos. Murcia: Nausícaä, 2008. Kindle 2010. 126 pp. ISBN: 978-84-96633-60-5 Daniel Rico Camps, in his second book for Nausícaä addressing Spain’s Romanesque church art, provides a creative, discursive, and passionate perspective on an intriguing and provocative set of twelfth-century stone carvings from the west door gable of the Church of San Quirce de los Ausines in Burgos (fig. 1). The author detects a telling coherence in the gable’s two-layered iconographic and epigraphic programs and asserts that the juxtapositions of sacred and obscene images and of Latin and vernacular epigraphy resonate with a plethora of sources in medieval thought and art to create diverse “audiovisual” effects. Rico Camps organizes his book into a foreword and three chapters and follows the text with a set of black-and-white photographs keyed to his art historical references. In his Prologue, Rico Camps affirms that his aim is to contextualize the figures and wording over the west entry, not only within their contemporary local culture, but as a part of the broader “sistema de referencias y supuestos intelectuales que lo hizo posible”, including those that extend beyond the intentions of the “mentor” (the designer or architect of the carvings) and the stonecutter (12). [End Page 370] The system and suppositions to which Rico Camps refers as informing the stonework are contained in a “global idea”: a written, oral, and visual tradition that is a part of “the medieval ‘stream’” (12). As an expression of this “stream”, then, the “dominant world view of the twelfth century” is realized “intuitively” in San Quirce’s west gable program, though its workmen, like its unlettered viewers, remained ignorant of the texts that shaped the art (12). Indeed, the viewer will “hear” what was not in the “voices” of those who conceived and executed the work. Rico Camps, following Justo Pérez de Urbel and Walter Muir Whitehill, for example, uses the term metopa [metope] from the Doric order to designate the visually important spaces of the gable’s ten quasi-square, bas-relief carved tablets. The tablets are fitted between stone supports (modillones) in the position of what would be the grooved triglifos of the Doric system. The modillones are also known as (Romanesque) canecillos, mensulas cortas, or canes; the latter two terms are generally translated as “corbels”. The face of each corbel bears a figure or pair of figures from Genesis, also carved in relief and responding in some way to the decoration of the metopes. The eleven corbels, their lower edges set flush with the wall, support the beams of a narrow, tiled tejaroz [overhang, awning] meant to divert rainwater from an otherwise direct path down the church wall toward the recessed doorway, thereby combining architectural functionality with moral theology. Rico Camps tends to affirm throughout his commentary the program’s “sentido general”, pronounced decades ago by Joaquín Yarza, whom Rico Camps paraphrases: “un lenguaje de formas de una increíble grosería se dice que este mundo, a partir de Adán y Eva, es una basura” (8). This view rests primarily on three “vulgar” images on the metopes: one suggests sexual intercourse, and two show a male figure defecating beside the words “mala cago” in the first instance and “Io caco” in the second. In regard to the placement of subjects and inscriptions, the author contends that the “primer plano” of the eleven corbels displays “una realidad sagrada y superior” based on the Bible and labeled in Latin, the “lingua caelestis” (8), while “los bajos fondos de la cornisa” –the metopes– depict “una realidad carnal e inferior” glossed in the “language of the world” (9); the linguistic and graphic paradoxes come close to merging, he notes, in the neighboring images of Cain’s and Abel’s sacrifices. In chapter 1, Rico Camps provides his foundational interpretations of each of the images and the text, pointing out that the exterior images over the west entrance [End Page 371] introduce...