[Illustration: WINDOW IN THE PALACE OF GELMIREZ]
[Illustration: ARCHWAYS IN THE PALACE OF GELMIREZ]
[Illustration: SCULPTURED CAPITALS IN THE CHAPEL BENEATH THE CATHEDRAL OF SANTIAGO]
find in the north transept (1079-93 A.D.) the so-called cushion capital, which Parker describes as a “plain cubicle mass with the lower angles rounded off, forming a sort of rude cushion shape.” There are plain capitals in the arcade of Canterbury, and in the crypt, but these last were evidently intended to be sculptured after they had been put into place, for some are finished and others are half-finished. At Westminster too we also find plain capitals, but it is evident that the artist who superintended the sculpture of Santiago Cathedral meant to have every one sculptured. As Lopez Ferreiro has remarked, it is very rare to find a church with such a variety of carved capitals. Counting those of the windows and side chapels, there are nearly a thousand, all completed with the most perfect work and finish. In the interior of the cathedral the capitals are almost all of the best granite, but they look like sculptured marble; some of the figures in them have eyes of jet. The foliage of many is as fine and delicate as lace work. “No epoch of architecture,” wrote Viollet le Duc, “has produced such a variety of capitals as the twelfth century.” The sculptors truly seem to have looked upon their work as a labour of love and devotion.
Lopez Ferreiro believes that the capitals of Santiago Cathedral were completed before the close of the eleventh century, and therefore before the epoch at which the French capitals attained to their fullest perfection.[165] Some of them certainly were, but I am a little sceptical about the best ones. Those which resemble the early capitals with rude volutes, such as one sees in the White Tower, London (1081 A.D.), might well date from the eleventh century, and those in the _Puerta de los Platerias_ may be of the same date. But this question is worthy of more careful study than has yet been devoted to it. Some of the capitals of the _Pórtico de Gloria_ are very Byzantine in their execution, as are those of the _Puerta de los Platerias_. Here we see interlacings, a sort of basket work ornamented with dots like pearl _passementérie_ and the trumpet pattern, which are certainly indicative of the sculpture of the Eastern Empire. There is a great deal of this work in Ireland, and for a long time patriotic Irish archæologists clung to the belief that these twistings and plaitings and spirals were of purely Celtic origin and typical of Celtic art,[166] but that idea is now exploded. “There is no doubt,” writes Miss Stoke,[167] “that in the history of Christian art in Ireland we see two currents meeting, one Byzantine the other Latin,” and she then points out that similar designs, “like regularly plaited twigs,” are to be found in the church of St. Clement in Rome, which dates from 650 A.D.; where these twigs are plaited together (a case rare in Ireland) they are intended as a symbol of the Holy Trinity, the Three in One, as the inscription _Unitas--Trinitas_ found with it in France indicates.