Frómista
"The stones of the Romanesque don't threaten, they whisper.
They want to tell you something." --Jack
Hitt
Este pueblo fue asentamiento de una tribu de los celtas, más tarde una villa romana, y
un importante centro visigótico. Hay dos teorías sobre su nombre. Una es
que su nombre latín, Frumesta, se deriva del vocablo latín,
frumentum, que significa cereal, abundante en esta zona. Por otra parte, es
posible que Frómista sea la evolución de un nombre propio
visigótico.
Tras la invasión musulmana del siglo VIII, la población, como tantas otras en
esta zona fue arrasada, y durante un siglo permaneció en la «tierra de
nadie» mantenido a propósito entre las tierras cristianas del norte de la
península y la zona musulmana que ocupaba gran parte del centro y del sur.
Frómista fue repoblado en el siglo X tardío por doña Mayor, condesa
de Castilla y esposa del rey Sancho III el Mayor de Navarra (quizás la misma que
mandó construir la puente de Puente la Reina).
En 1066 doña Mayor fundó en Frómista un monasterio del que queda
hoy sólo una iglesia, la famosísima de San
Martín de Frómista, construida en 1083 y hoy reconocida como una de
las cumbres del estilo románico en España y aún en Europa.
Estilísticamente, San Martín de Frómista está relacionada con
otros monumentos románicos del Camino de Santiago como la catedral de Jaca, la
basílica de San Isidoro de León, y la misma catedral de Santiago en
Compostela. Consta de tres naves de medio punto, cada
una con su ábside, y un cimborrio (una especie de cúpola) octagonal en el
crucero. En
su exterior se alzan dos torres cilíndricas a ambos lados de su fachada principal.
A pesar de la sencillez del edificio, en San Martín, como en toda iglesia
románica, destacan los capiteles de las columnas
del interior y los 315 canecillos exteriores que recorren
todo el alero de sus tejados. Éstas son de una
perfección y una variedad asombrosas. La aparencia de un estado perfecto de
conservación del edificio se debe a la amplia y todavía controvertida
restauración llevada a cabo en la última década del siglo pasado,
proceso que algunos calificarían más de intervención que de
restauración ya que las obras de 1893 dejaron la iglesia renovada pero desprovista
de todo rasgo del contenido explícitamente sexual de sus canecillos tallados. El
edificio actual es por eso un reflejo tanto de las sensibilidades del siglo diecinueve y del
nuestro como las de los hombres de la Edad Media.
Texto español sobre
Frómista adaptado de Millán Bravo Lozano, Guía
práctica del peregrino: El Camino de Santiago, Centro de Estudios Camino de
Santiago, León: Everest, 1993.
Para imaginar las iglesias románicas en su contexto medieval, ayuda tomar en
cuenta
los
comentarios hechos en dos obras recientes de Robert Hughes y Jack Hitt. Aunque Hughes
aquí se refiere a edificios catalanes, sus observaciones se aplican igualmente al
románico en general:
Hughes sobre la gravedad y el estilo románico:
«To know
what these inner spaces looked and felt like, one should consult Sant Joan de
les Abadesses, the monastery that Guifré the Hairy founded for his daughter Emma in
the valley of the [river] Ter, not far from Ripoll. The church was consecrated in 898. Its
physical drama is intense. But it does not come from verticality, as is the case with later
Gothic. Rather, it emerges slowly from its cavelike power. To experience this, try asking
the lay sacristan to turn off the electric lights for a while--he may do it if there are no other
visitors in the church. In the darkness, the space swins into your mind, slowly developing,
felt rather than seen. First, a high nave, whose barrel vault would have been all but lost in
darkness, since the only daylight came (then as now) from windows glazed with thin
parchment-colored sheets of resawn alabaster. Then, the apse, which closes down in a half
dome behind the altar. Gavity and darkness combine; the stone piers and the thick chamfered
embrasures of the windows seem to be built, not in defiance of gravity, but in
acknowledgement of mass; it is architecture of the most primal kind, tactile for all its
size...»
De Robert Hughes, Barcelona, New York: Vintage Books (Random House),
1993.
Hitt sobre el estilo románico y el peregrino:
«Pilgrims admire
churches because they are always cool on a hot day and because pilgrims are, in almost every
church, the star of the show. No church on the road neglects to honor the pilgrim in the
presumed eternity of stone. We are cut into the walls, carved atop the capitals, painted onto
panels, and sculpted in wood. Our image is everywhere; and our patron Santiago, in one
guise or another, looks out from nearly every wall. After a day's walk, sitting in the cool of
thick stone, it's hard not to feel a little flattered. [. . .]
Romanesque appeals to pilgrims because it is built to a scale that is especially fitting
for someone on foot. These churches are small and cozy; even the Romanesque cathedrals
are
manageable spaces. They are humble, comprehensible buildings. The columns are low. The
sculptures are visible at eye level or just above. From town to town they play out the same
themes and tell the same story. The repetition is soothing. After a while they feel like
home.»
Sobre lo románico y lo gótico:
«A pilgrim can't say that
about Gothic cathedrals. They are spacious overwhelming and impressive, and they mean to
be. I came to Europe fully schooled in the architectural propaganda in favor of Gothic and
expected to be transported by the sights. The critic Ernest Short writes that Gothic is the
"master synthesis of religious architecture." Sartell Prentice alleges that "the rôle of
the
Romanesque church was that of a prophet and forerunner, a John the Baptist in stone,
preparing the way for one still mightier to come."
The pilgrim gets a bit defensive about Romanesque after reading such remarks. We
even resent the name, a nineteenth-century coinage. That "esque" makes the style sound
derivative and second-rate, a rip-off of the Romans. It may be (some of the early
Romanesque churches did plunder Roman ruins for their stonework). But, in defense, we
pilgrims remind ourselves that the word Gothic comes from the Goths, famous
for bullying, overbearing, loud behaviour. [. . .]
A romanesque church asks a visitor to step back and make sense of what can be seen,
which is everything. Gothic can only be seen in part. It is literally and figuratively beyond
comprehension. Gothic doesn't serve the grandeur of creation; it competes with it. Gothic is
architectural braggadocio--bullying overbearing, loud. The stones of the Romanesque don't
threaten, they whisper. They want to tell you something. Romanesque has been called "the
church that speaks." The Gothic cathedral was nicknamed "an encyclopedia in stone." One
has a simple story to tell; the other one can't shut up.»
Sobre la restauración de San Marín de
Frómista:
«Many of the corbels of the Romanesque period [. . .] were quite
obscene, at least by modern standards. They can still be seen here and there in Spain and
other countries. But most of them have been removed. [. . .]
At the Colegiata de Santillana del Mar is a man and a woman splayed crotch to face, a
primitive 69 position.
At San Martín de Elines is a man exhibiting his penis
while
tightening a garrote painfully around his neck. When I left America, I had read press
accounts of teenagers strangling themselves during masturbation--autoerotic asphyxia--as a
novel way to heighten the pleasures of self-abuse. Yet it wouldn't be so new to neighbors of
Santos Cosme y Damián de Bárcena de Pie de Concha, where a corbel shows
a
man onanistically exercising while squeezing his neck.
At Santa
María
de Piasca is a beautiful corbel of a man holding a womans chin, in cinematic fashion, kissing
her lips lightly.
At San Vicente de la Barquera, a man is taking a woman
from
behind. They appear tlmost to be flying. Around the corner is a priest in robes, hiking his
skirts to show his erect penis.
At San Pedro de Cervatos, it is a pornagrapher's dream. One corbel shows a woman
with
her legs pinned behind her ears, offering for public view a finely detailed, naturally
proportioned vulva. Beside her is another corbel of a man with a hand on his chest and
another fiddling with his visible scrotum and penis. A few corbels down is a man performing
cunnilingus on a woman. Farther on is a woman with an infant dangling halfway out her
vagina. Another, stunning to see, is a couple copulating upside down. Protruding
generously toward heaven are their two buttocks, with a pair of testicles visible and an erect
penis tightly sheathed in her vagina. Yet another shows a woman in the classical position of
the Playboy foldout--on her stomach, her feet in the air, flashing her vulva at the
viewer. Farther on, a woman in showing hers and looking flirtatiously across the space of a
corner to a man who is showing his. Finally there is a man, seated, with his enormously
erect penis in his own mouth.
[. . .] The medieval world understood human nature in ways very different from us.
Clearly
[. . .] they were a bit more frank. These images weren't meant to tantalize, although they
may have. Rather, the outdoor corbels were meant to summarize the life that man and
woman suffered outside the church. Taken as a whole, the exterior of the Romanesque was
an imagistic retrospective of the human condition: the mad calling of sex, the dangers of
crazed beasts, the certainty of death, the pains of daily life, and the hardship of labor. The
opening chapter of the Romanesque story was a documentary: This is the world you inhabit.
It is chaotic and strange, swayed and tormented by appetites and yearnings no one can
understand. The beauty of the Romanesque [. . .] after you have looked at the outside, is to
step inside the church.
[. . .] Frómista is a tidy box of a church, as big as a large A-frame house.
Its exterior sculpture calls a visitor to the front door. The tour of life's madness on the
exterior changes abruptly. At the main entrance is a semicircle of sculpture called the
tympanum, a
space of carving that challenges everything else you've seen. On all Romanesque churches, it
is orderly and serene. Most often Christ sits up vertically in defiance of the horizontal chaos
and invites the visitor to step from this world of suffering and madness into one of perfection
and order.
Within, the gracious curves of those simple arches are sustained by columns, each
carved
with a scene at the top. Altogether they form three forward-moving aisles. But Romanesque
does not hasten the visitor. The invitation is to linger. It is not merely a mis-en-
scène, but a story--distinct from the chaotic images outside.
At the beginning are depictions of what gives our world a sense of order and
meaning,
images of labor and daily routine. Here are men carrying a barrel of wine. Another shows a
group of marching soldiers. Farther up the aisle the pillars advertise familiar stories. Here
are Adam and Eve kneeling before a tree wrapped with a serpent. Or, the capitals are pure
geometry--carvings of vegetation or the stone lace of chevrons, dog-tooth, twisted cable--said
to be inspired by the medieval art of illuminated manuscripts, making them literally the
translation of the word into image.
The sculptures visible on these capitals are cramped and flat and seem primitive. This
apparent crudeness is evidence not of ignorance but of restraint. "Even in its most passionate
moods," writes the French critic Henri Focillon, Romanesque "is held in check by a
discipline which forbids it to flourish and posture about the church or
to launch itself turbulently into space." Gothic architecture would end all that and pirouette
up the aisles. For Romanesque, the stone was subordinate to the story, translating the
message that the unpredictability of the world could be contained by the word. Order could
be imposed on chaos. Meaning could be heard in the cacophony of Babel.
The Romanesque church is a balance of righteousness and humility. It doesn't think
too
highly of itself. Like a pilgrim, Romanesque is not really in a position to. Humility comes
with the territory--flat arches all around.
After reveling in the place of San Martín, I am joined by a German choir.
For an
hour they sing early chants and madrigals. The director tells me afterward that he and his
choir are touring Europe and singing in every Romanesque church they can find. I ask him
why he doesn't visit the grand cathedrals in Burgos and León. "It is the difference
between rock 'n' roll and chamber music," he says. "The Gothic and the
Baroque were built for amplification. The Romanesque was built for
harmony."»
De Jack Hitt, Off the Road, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
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