Chaos and Antiquity

...And so, in our helplessness, we are compelled for a period to an architecture of reminiscence which sets curiously on a civilization so unctuous of its own novelty...

...With the next step, he reaches surer footing—the inception of the great cathedral of the eleventh century, product of that Romanesque vitality which flowered in the series of notable churches of the pilgrimage roads...

...Singularly unhistoriclooking streets are positively choked with the symbols of alien and irrelevant societies...

...Of this Romanesque fabric the noble interior with its splendid sweep of transept has come down to us comparatively unscathed...

...The author examines this and the subsequent phases of the architectural development of Santiago with an astonishing minuteness of research, patiently assembling and analyzing much involved and contradictory matter, developing in the process a wealth of most entertaining gpeculation and conjecture...

...No one," he says, "who has seen the building at all times of the day and in all weathers, who has paced the Plaza del Hospital at midnight beneath the mounting pointed shadows of the towers with their great quiet-lying flanking masses to either side, and made the tortuous circuit of the church in the tranquil dimness of that hour, would care to have the cathedral different...

...that an altai was erected upon the relics and that the disciples them selves, in the course of time, were interred in the tomt chamber...

...Sophisticated skyscrapers make whimsical confession of indebtedness to Gothic mediaevalism, and the latest metropolitan bank counts its dimes in the atmosphere of remote Byzantium...

...Soon after the discovery of the tomb, a small apse was added by Alphonso II, but it was the third Alphonso whose generosity made possible a structure of more worthy scale which was completed in 896 in the pre-Romanesque or Asturian style...

...It is with something akin to pity we contemplate this precisionist a century hence submitting to his cautious, discriminating analytics the shifty and heterogeneous phenomena of, say, modern New York...

...Cambridge The Harvard University Press...

...To such enjoyment Mr...

...For a perception of its exterior character, however, we depend upon the careful restorations of the author and the old drawings from the Museum of the Sociedad Economica...

...Possibly nowhere as in our premier community is it quite so deliriously revealed to us that the highways and the byways of history have been blown to smithereens and the debris is crashing about our ears...

...Kenneth Conant's story of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela,* told with copious illustrations of drawing and photograph in a volume stamped by the distinguished craftsmanship of the Harvard University Press, furnishes rare occasionTo trace the evolution of a great cathedral through the centuries from its remote beginnings, noting all its vicissitudes of fortunes, its encounters with unsympathetic hands and the disconcerting fluctuations ol national taste, is surely a fascinating exercise of scholarship...

...During the Moorish occupation the episode appears to have been forgotten, and it was not until the yeai 818 when the hermit Palayo, attracted by certain mys *The Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of San tiago de Compostela, by Kenneth John Conant...

...If the art of the renaissance in its religious associations be not of high critical repute, the arresting picturesque quality of its exploitation here disarms the purist of style...

...Noting the variety which the organism of the huge cathedral had by this time acquired through the growth of subsidiary buildings, a variety which would have yielded rare felicity in a Gothic translation, one is sensible of a regret that the tremendous process of revision to which the cathedral was later to submit itself had not synchronized with the maturity of that incomparable style...

...It was left, however, to the latter half of the seventeenth century to begin the amazing task of grafting upon the old fabric the countenance of the regnant renaissance...

...The goggles which modern science has contrived for us have opened so tremendous a vision as, for the time, to paralyze unconscious utterance...

...Conant's mediaeval sympathies are known to us and the fine architectural discrimination so active throughout his studies is, therefore, in notable relief in his admirable tribute to the metamorphosed exterior...

...Every haphazard square mile of it is filled with vivacious demonstration of the breach...

...The prodigious Gothic influence had yet to be encountered, but this swept over with almost no disturbance to the integrity of the structure...

...These reveal a spacious and rather incoherent picturesqueness, vastly interesting indeed, but from a study of which we turn at last satisfied that fate was so discriminating...

...Tradition has it that the body ol Saint James the Apostle, who was beheaded in Jeru salem in the year 44, was brought to Spain by two of his disciples and buried in Compostela in a tomb buill upon ground given by a pious woman...

...Acknowledgment of it appears in the accretion of certain oddlyrelated chapels of the chevet apse, in the large lateral chapels and sacristy off the south aisle and in the great cloister...

...It is pleasant occasionally to turn from this confusion for a backward look into a quiet and charted antiquity...

...No ancient thing is longer safe in the retirement of the dusty niche to which history once consigned it...

...Under various arcihtects and at varying intervals the work of transformation was carried on, beginning with the formalization of the apse and culminating in 1750 in the superbly exuberant transformation of the western fagade by Casas y Novoa...

...The critical instinct of the author is obviously uneasy at this conclusion which, in the absence of supporting evidence, would seem to have been largely an operation of faith...

...It is perhaps just as well to be contented with the building as it has come down to us, for it has always been to an uncommon degree a living building, and its mediaeval aspect, fine as it was, is only an episode in a life of unusual richness...

...What an odd task confronts us now between the mediaeval sobriety of the interior and the external opulence, suggesting to the fancy the ascetic soul of the old cathedral in the vestments of pontification...

...Save for the corroborating circumstance that the little building is of classical date, he finds only implication for the authenticity of the relics which motivated the artistic drama and the long centuries of pilgrimage that furnish the matter of his erudite volume...

...492 terious lights issuing from a dilapidated building in the neighborhood, made report of the circumstance to the Bishop Theodomir of Iria nearby, whose investigation convinced him that the burial-place of the Apostle was thus supernaturally revealed...

...And there is romance besides in the history of Santiago...