When Romanesque Art Told Stories

Although many pass by, contemplating it with indifference and considering it a mere collection of old stones, more or less well assembled, while their soul suffers from what Hesse called a ‘thirst for communication,’ both medieval pilgrims and those who currently face the hero's test, which is, ultimately, the Camino de Santiago, knew and know that this imposing portal of the Church of Santa María continues to be, in the 21st century, one of the most extraordinary examples of what we might well consider the precursor to the modern storytelling that is all the rage on social media.

We find ourselves in Navarre, before the western portal of this spectacular Romanesque church, and before our astonished eyes, the old myths continue to educate, in a psychological struggle that used the graphic power of sculpture, like that metaphorical Trojan horse, which, over time, evolved into what was once considered part of the tools—not always controlled—that led to the increasingly lost Fourth Estate.

It is true that art and expressiveness, regardless of whether the design or execution was brilliant or crude, was the indispensable ambassador of the sovereign powers that sought to subject the society of the time to a predetermined discourse, where God, and by extension, his representatives on Earth, were the metaphorical Solomons, whose judgments mediated the mechanisms of behavior, acting as the ineffable judges of biases and virtues, and of course, as the predetermined psychologists of the supposed common good.

It could be added that, in this sense, while most medieval stonemasons followed the predetermined discourse, there were also subversive elements who, nevertheless, prioritizing their personal safety, defied the censorship of the time, masking part of their unorthodox way of thinking in sculptures whose 'innocence' was often taken for granted.

Hence, this portal, like many others along the various routes converging on Compostela, revealed, within its hermetic symbolism, other currents of information and thought that helped to quench that same thirst of the soul to which, many centuries later, Hermann Hesse alluded, not without a certain nostalgia.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and are therefore subject to my copyright.