The order surrounding the chaos - an interpretation of figures in stone from Sotosalbos, Spain

While I am not an art historian - and while I live and work in perpetual awe of my friends and colleagues who are - I always try to broaden my understanding of medieval art, and I love using medieval art in my teaching. When it comes to the art found in an ecclesiastical context - be it the wall-paintings of the interior church space, the illuminations of manuscripts produced for an ecclesiastical institution (a category of manuscripts that can include books not aimed predominantly for liturgical use), or the stone figures populating the church exterior - one of my favourite aspects is that this art served as a mute, often wordless, language that communicated a message to a broad audience. Moreover, this language was a lingua franca of the churches across Latin Christendom, and as the various church organisations were part of the same transregional network of tastes and impulses, we find this language in stone and vellum to be used in the same way from Spain to Scandinavia, from Ireland to Illyria and beyond, and in this way it becomes possible to note patterns and and coherences that might seem absent at first glance to the modern eye, unaccustomed as it is to the logic behind this largely-lost language. 


While I am not an art historian, I do not avoid the temptation of interpreting this language whenever I come across it, although I am always careful to defer to my colleagues who are experts in this field. Before getting to the grain of this blogpost, therefore, I will emphasise that the following is speculation from a non-expert, so do consult your go-to historian of medieval art - and if you don't have one, get one - before accepting my interpretation. 

The subject of my interpretation is a section from the exterior programme of carvings of the Church of Saint Michael in Sotosalbos, a village near Segovia in Spain. The church is a splendid romanesque structure, and was built around 1200. The gateway and its arcade - which can be glimpsed on the left-hand side of the second photograph of this blogpost - are decorated with a sequence of carvings featuring persons, representations of the labours of the months, battle scenes, animals and geometric patterns. As was pointed out by Professor Miguel Larrañaga, who was the guide for the excursion that brought me to Sotosalbos last year, the individual carvings united in a communicative totality, one that conveyed the order and structure of the Christian cosmos, and that communicated the stratification of power in ways that would have been recognisable even to a non-ecclesiastical audience. This is the general purpose of the programme of carvings, and we find this throughout Latin Christendom. However, while we know this to be the purpose of the programme, it can often be difficult to read some of its individual component, and - at least for a non-expert such as myself - it can be a challenge to understand how one particular set of images contributes to the totality. 

The other day I was talking about medieval art with a friend who is not himself academic, and I suspect this fact allowed me to speculate a bit more than I might have done if talking with one of my friends who are historians of art. One of the examples of medieval art that I presented to him was this photograph which shows a small portion of the programme at Sotosalbos. In the top row of niches, we see - from right to left - 1) a praying individual who might be an ecclesiastic, 2) a figure pruning the vines who thus represents the labour of the month for February, and 3) a figure, possibly another ecclesiastic, displaying an open scroll that might at some point have contained a short prayer that the rain has chiselled away through the centuries. 

In the row below these niches, we find corbels interspersed with stones covered in geometric patterns. While the rightmost of the corbels in the photograph is effaced by time and weather, it is possible to interpret that as some sort of fighting scene when compared with the other two, one showing a man spearing a dragon and the other showing to figures in each other's choke-hold. While the individual figures are easy enough to interpret, at least with a basic knowledge of the motifs of medieval Christian art, the geometric patterns provide more of a challenge. The purpose of each individual figure seems clear enough, but what about the geometric patterns? Is there some message in these as well? Or are they just decorative, pleasing to the eye, fulfilling that dictum that nature abhors a vacuum and every void should be filled by something?

After a while, it struck me that these patterns might serve a purpose beyond mere decoration. If we consider their placings, we see that they punctuate what would otherwise be a series of violence, and this might be the clue to their collective purpose. The individual acts of violence represented by the corbels - fighting against one's fellow humans, fighting against beasts - might perhaps be understood as the chaos embedded in the world inhabited by humankind. In medieval thought there was a clear division between the order of society and the chaos of the untamed, uncivilised, lawless world of the beasts and of devils. It was this lawless world, the postlapsarian world of sin, that showed itself in acts of violence and breaches against the social order. Against this chaos, precipitated by the devil's deceit in the garden, stands the social order and the harmonious symmetry of God. The social order is here represented by the clerks whose prayers connect Heaven and earth, as well as the farmer pruning the vines, a representative of the unbroken annual cycle of labours that presides over the social life of humankind. 

Then there are the patterns. If we consider this contrast between violent chaos and social order, the interpretation of these geometrical symmetries appear more accessible. The symmetry of these patterns might be understood as that divine harmony by which the entire universe is fashioned, and they might thus serve as a counterpoint to the aberrant, destructive violence of the corbels. If we understand the patterns in this way, they are not just beautiful symmetrical carvings, they are communicative statements that insist on the resilience of order, and which serve as a contrast against the chaos that exists in the world. In this way, we might understand these carvings as communicating to the onlooker that the church and the society - represented in these particular carvings by clerks and workers - provide a bulwark against the violent chaos of the world outside society. This might serve on the one hand as a message of comfort, as well as an implicit threat that if one does not conform to the law of the church and society, one is cast out in that outer darkness mentioned by Christ in the Gospel of Matthew. This is at least my interpretation. 

I should emphasise, however, that this interpretation is of only one section of the pictorial programme of the porch of the church, and in order to verify or falsify the validity of my interpretation, it would be necessary to see the programme as a whole. This has perhaps been done by scholars already, and if not I hope some expert will do so. Until then, I am tempted to suggest that this interpretation might at least provide some answers, and perhaps even the correct ones.