The Apse Mural of St Climent de Taüll (c.1123)

‘Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so,  Amen. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.’

This is part of the vision of St John’s Book of Revelations. It is given artistic expression in this mural painting from the apse of St Climent de Taüll, a small church in the mountainous region of the Vall de Boí in Catalonia. As we stand before it, we are confronted by image of Maiestas Domini, the Majesty of the Lord. One moment, we regard him, static, immutable, seated on a rainbow, in the immaterial realm of the divine. But the next we imagine Him swooping down from heaven towards us, the highest authority in the universe administering the justice our deeds deserve. This is not the kindly God of modern faith, but a terrifying King, the heavenly judge, the Pantocrator - ruler of all, Creator and Destroyer, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end of things. His right hand is raised in blessing, but the blessing is also a reminder of his divine power. Vast in scale, surrounded by the energy of his mandorla, crowned with a nimbus bearing a crucifer, God is regally dressed in tunic and gem-studded mantle. He stares directly at us, his feet resting on the earth as his footstool. His left arm holds open the Book, with the reminder ‘Ego sum lux mundi’, ‘I am the light of the world’. The small, illiterate, peasant community who gazed on this in their little mountain church in the twelfth century must have felt a dread which the modern viewer can only imagine.

This image is a theophany, a vision of divine truth. It does not record any specific episode but gives visible form to the invisible truths of God’s nature. Around God on the upper register are various figures and creatures, pulsing with energy as, in counterpoint to God’s frontal pose, they twist and lean and gesture to the Godhead. Revelations helps us to decipher them:

...  and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

This is the tetramorph, the group of four beasts which medieval theologians took to represent the four evangelists. As we see it, the lion is bottom left, its feet held by an angel. This is the symbol of St Mark. The calf is on our right, again held by an angel. This is St Luke. Above these images we can read ‘St Marcus EG’ and ‘S Lucha EG’, ‘EG’ standing for ‘Evangelist’. On the row above them, we see the beast which ‘had a face as a man’ (Matthew) holding the gospel, and opposite him an angel holding an eagle, symbol of St John. The six wings are given to the Seraphim and Cherubim at the extremes of the upper image. The monks who used the church for their hours of service would have provided the chant, the processions and liturgy to make up the acts of the Church, of which this and the other church paintings formed a part. This is an important point. The images we view as ‘art’ today were only a part of the total and ongoing act of worshipping and contemplating the divine. To the monks, as they continually pondered the mysteries of the deity, the image would have held endless  levels of symbolism. Just as in their books we find annotations constantly relating one text to another, Old Testament to New, the scriptures to the patristic commentaries of the Church Fathers, so Romanesque imagery can generate multiple layers of interpretation: the four circles in which Mark and Luke are represented, for example, suggest the four wheels of the Chariot described by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel (1:5-21); and on the summit of the arches above the painting we see a Dextera Domini, the right hand of God. This pointing hand is symbol of witness, protection and power. Next, in an axis radiating out to the viewer, is a seven-eyed Lamb of God, emblem of Christ’s sacrifice. If we turn to Revelations chapter 5, we find references to seven seals, seven eyes and seven horns, representing ‘the seven spirits of God sent forth into all the earth’.  With the Pantocrator, these other images – the hand, the Lamb - make up a slightly different image of the Trinity from the one we are used to. So we have the Apocalypse, the Trinity, and an Old Testament vision all superimposed before us. We also know from remaining fragments that the surrounding arches also contained the figures of Cain and Abel and the story of the poor man and Lazarus.

Beneath the Absolute realm of the Upper register we have the Temporal realm of five apostles and Mary. They bear witness to the vision of God above, and stand, in a fully frontal pose, in a highly stylized arcade, itself symbolising the Universal Church and the Celestial Jerusalem. Mary holds a chalice, the vessel of the Eucharist, and next to her, on the other side of the window, John holds up his book. A detail to notice is that these sacred objects are held with covered hands, a detail of liturgical practice we can see elsewhere (for example, the mosaic of Justinian at Ravenna): note the covered hands of the angels bearing the gospel and St John’s eagle in the upper register. Beneath the apostles would have been a third register, representing the lowest world,  that of earthly creatures, depicted in a highly stylized geometrical form. But of this only some faint traces of zig-zag pattern remain.

The St Climent de Taüll paintings (there are some others, and the whole church was originally covered with them) are, then, rich in imagery which unlocks for us a medieval world in which just about everything was seen through the lens of symbolism. But we can also experience them in purely formal terms. We can respond to the symmetrical face of God, with its piercing eyes and dramatic arched eyebrows, to the juxtaposition of His severe, rigid posture and the ecstatic figures around Him. The bold linearity, the expressiveness of the arabesques and curves – in God’s long hair, for example – or the ‘flying folds’ of the drapery can all speak to us across the centuries. We can sense how the figures are pushed forward by the bands of colour behind them and sense how the whole composition is transforming natural elements like limbs and heads and pulling them in the direction of geometric abstraction. Scholars have identified stylistic influences from Byzantine, Mozarabic (art influence by Arabs, who still occupied much of Spain at this time) and Islamic art. At the same time, it can seem surprisingly modern. Artists such as Picabia, Breton, Picasso and Tàpies have all drawn inspiration from the anti-naturalistic, expressive resources of Romanesque art.

St Climent de Taüll itself, as we noted earlier,  is the church of a village in the Valley of Boí, up in the Spanish Pyrenees. This small area has one of the most concentrated amounts of Romanesque art in the world. Much of it was uncovered and identified in the early twentieth century and this painting, with several others, was transferred to canvas by Italian experts and moved to Barcelona. This was partly for conservation, but mainly because American collectors were already showing an interest in purchasing it, in an early, unregulated art market, and Barcelona was anxious to preserve this extraordinary art as a part of its national heritage. The expedition sent out in 1907 to make an inventory of the surviving artefacts was commissioned by the newly founded Institute of Catalan Studies and the project formed part of a renewed interest in the Catalan heritage, comparable to the study of national traditions taking place elsewhere (the movement to record English folk music, for example).  In the original church a copy was made; this has since been moved in its turn, and replaced by video mapping. Meanwhile, the original can be seen in Barcelona’s MNAC (National Museum of Catalan Art). Few viewers will wail in dread at the sight of the Pantocrator, perhaps, but it is still hard to be indifferent to this potent reminder of the intensely emotional art of medieval master artisans: the anonymous creator of this painting is simply known as The Master of Taüll. The apse of St Climent is classified as fine art today; but it is also reminder of the power of the medieval Church over the minds and imagination of the faithful.

 

Video mapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lfTMf0shJw

 

Further Reading

Manuel Castiñeiras and Jordi Camps, Romanesque Art in the MNAC Collections (2008)

The Catalan language entry in Wikipedia is very helpful and detailed.

Frederic Chordá, El Abside de Sant Climent de Taüll (Madrid, 2012). Stresses the multiple possible significations of the image.