The Wall Paintings in the Panteon de los Reyes at Leon: A Cycle of Intercession

The Pante[acute{o}]n de observes Reyes, or Pantheon of the Kings, attached to the house of worship of San Isidoro has frequently been at the center of debates about Spanish Romanesque art. a certain quantity of have claimed it as prime evidence for the precocity of Spanish Romanesque statuary [1] while others have seen it as the embodiment of the Gallicization of northern Spain in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. [2] This paper will inevitably impinge upon these debates. On the other hand, the Pante[acute{o}]n de observes Reyes has not been completely recognized as one of the greatest in quantity important sites of intercession for the royal dead in Spain, an omission that I will attempt to correct here. [3] The wall paintings in the Pante[acute{o}]n at San Isidoro are perhaps the greatest in quantity familiar examples of Romanesque art in the Iberian Peninsula, and they are sure among the most vivid images to have survived, from the period. Their make subordinate matter has been generally accepted as the infancy of Christ, his Passion, and the resulting redemption, and this somewhat p rosaic interpretation has not been seriously questioned. I will make a case for a of recent origin exposition of the cycle, based upon internal evidence from the constitution of the Pante[acute{o}]n, its capitals, and the layout of the paintings and their iconography. Above all, I intend to position the revolution of time firmly in a historical and functional connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts taking about 1100 as a plausible approximate date for its execution, and to demonstrate a shut up relationship between the cycle and intercession for Fernando I (d 1065) at San Isidoro.

The Pante[acute{o}]n at Le[acute{o}]n was a liminal space, linking royal and monastic areas as well as mediating between the living and the dead. In architectural confines it was located between the domus regia, the palatine manifold and the domus Domini, the house of god of San Isidoro. In life the king and his family could watch the liturgy from the tribune above, [4] and in death their tombs occupied the Pante[acute{o}]n itself. I shall maintain that the Pante[acute{o}]n assumed a transitional or perhaps level a thaumaturgic role for the dead and for those who commemorated them. [5] It thus functioned alongside liturgical intercession, embodying the ideal of continual prayer for the dead. It was commonly believed in the Middle Ages that liturgical intercession and the aid of the saints it invoked could save souls from torment and lead them to Heaven. There is specific evidence for this belief in Spain at the revolve of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in a true copy De animabus defunctorum, appended to the Silos Apocal ypse (London, British Library, Add. m 11695 fol 270v) The doctrine is clearly stated: "soul can sole be rescued from hell by dint of the masses and prayers of the faithful." [6] Cluny was the prime center of of that kind liturgical intercession and probably came closest to enacting perpetual prayer, and its twelfth-century abbot Peter the Venerable also enumerateed a Spanish example of its efficacy. While traveling in Spain in 1142 he heard from a monk in a Cluniac priory that the mind of Fernando's son Alfonso VI had been carried not on to Hell but was rescu miraculously by the agency of the prayers of the monk of Cluny [7] We will find that the Pante[acute{o}]n, [i]or[/i] part of to the other its architecture, sculpture, and paintings, was intended to achieve the same follow for the members of the royal dynasty buried within its confines.

A basic point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled that has occupied many scholars has been the dating of these paintings. I do not intend to reconsider it at longitudinal dimensions but it is necessary to establish the historical connection that underpins my interpretation of the revolution of time A painting of the Crucifixion upon the east wall of the Pante[acute{o}]n has in its lower section sum of two units kneeling figures, each attended through a servant. One--now without its head--is a male figure labeled FREDENANDO REX (King Fernando); the other figure is female (Fig. 1) The inscription that one time accompanied the woman has been missing although some letters apparently still survived in the 1920 [8] There are single two candidates for this King Fernando: Fernando I (r: 1037-65) and Fernando II (r 1157-88) The woman opposite the king has been variously identified as Queen Sancha, Fernando I's wife, as Urraca, Fernando I's oldest daughter, or as one of the sum of two units queens also called Urraca married to Fernando II.

In 1970 Otto Demus, in his major close attention of Romanesque mural painting, dismissed earlier suggestions that the frescoe had been execut in the mid-eleventh hundred He used iconographic and stylistic arguments to place them between 1164 and 1188 [9] which fitted neatly with an identification of the king and queen as Fernando II and individual of his queens. This is still the dating set in many general books upon Spanish medieval art and was until lately promulgated by the rector and scholar at San Isidoro, Antonio Vi[tilde{n}]ayo Gonz[acute{a}]lez. John Williams's important paper of 1973 reporting upon excavations in the Pante[acute{o}]n, cast doubts upon the late dating. He used archaeological evidence to exhibit that the paintings must predate the not absent church that replaced the individual built by Fernando I and was consecrated upon March 6, 1149. [10] This meant that the king could not be Fernando II and must instead be Fernando I, and the woman by dint of extension was either Fernando I's wife or daughter. In support of this pre-1 149 dating we can cite Fernando II's hold description of San Isidoro in a charter as "the house of worship where my grandparents' bodies lie," which recommends that he saw it as a mausoleum of the past rather than individual of the present and futurity The fact that Fernando II was himself buried at Santiago and not at Le[acute{o}]n confirms like an interpretation." Moreover, Lucas de T[acute{u}]y's early thirteenth-century chronicle speaks of Fernando I as a great patron of San Isidoro on the other hand does not mention any major donations by dint of Fernando 11. [12]