Baroque Paganisms in the Cathedral of Oviedo

juancar347 (72)in #art • 6 years ago

Hundreds of centuries have passed, it is true, since in man the innate capacity to elevate to the world of form those concepts of idea was awakened that, in the end, does not cease to be that immanent set of symbols that C.G. Jung will denominate, with much intuition, archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Hundreds of centuries of evolution, likewise, have elapsed, in which its most appropriate vehicle of expression, Art, has been molding and adapting that form to new fashions and needs, although, nevertheless, conserving, sui generis, the the primordial essence of the idea, as a key to open the doors of the spirit. This is something that we can perfectly verify, whatever the cultural destiny towards which we direct our steps and in which we possess our gaze.

Of course, it becomes even more evident, even if it is possible, in this monumental historical-artistic complex that are our sacred precincts. And it can be seen, either by accessing the humblest of temples, or by trespassing on the threshold of the grandest of cathedrals.

It is true, on the other hand, that it is extremely difficult to get an idea, even approximate, of what was originally this great work so closely linked to the Jacobean beginnings, which is, nevertheless, the always surprising cathedral of San Salvador de Oviedo -modelo that was lent, apparently and by express real desire, to the neighboring cathedral of Lugo, and what original message touched the spirits of those first faithfuls and pilgrims who, visiting first the Lord, solemnly crossed their mysterious main portals, preparing them to continue their journey towards Compostela.

It is paradoxically human, by default, to discard the old as a propitiatory victim for sacrificial altars of the new, forgetting, after all, that universal axiom that that great physicist who thought that God did not play dice with the Universe , Albert Einstein, reminded us, at the beginning of the 20th century, as one of the great laws of matter: that matter is neither created nor destroyed, since it only transforms. One of the artistic styles that most treacherously fell, to the point of hiding previous styles, being particularly damaging to the Romanesque, was the Baroque style.

With the introduction and the taste for this style, overloaded in excess and subordinated to a more than expresses adoration of opulence, the Romanesque-Gothic temples, not only lost one of their main qualities, as perfect resonance machines that they were, but that In addition, they saw deliberately censored and concealed for posterity an endless number of magnificent paintings that, apart from their singular aesthetic attraction, constituted, in addition, a compendium of archetypes whose symbolism would delight any mythologist or hermeneutic. This applies, above all, as far as the large altarpieces are concerned: those that completely cover the headwaters of the temples.

Goethe, the brilliant German poet, already put in the mouth of Mephistopheles that unforgettable phrase, which could well serve as a suitable introduction to the purpose of the present entry, when he said that from the cradle to the grave no man can digest the old leaven. Part of that old yeast, had its roots in a confrontational carnality, where the mythological confrontations of Eros and Logos had their arbitration court in a Christian misogyny whose repression can be considered brutal over the centuries, but that Art mocked , sometimes, in a very subtle way.

The Baroque, observed from a general point of view, offered a disproportionate cult to opulence, abundance and also, as is shown in many representations of obscenity, perhaps as a preventive or moralistic argument, of that excess of libido or uncontrolled passions. that the Catholic Church had always tried to condemn and subject.