What Spanish And Latin American Altarpieces Can Tell Us About The Mass
By JAMES MONTI
We all rightly think of the Book of Revelation as a book of prophecies concerning the end times, as indeed it is. Yet numerous commentators have seen it likewise as a book of liturgical revelation, a revelation of the liturgy of the court of Heaven and also of the liturgy here upon Earth. For those who perhaps find it difficult to understand how the lavish splendor of Catholic liturgy across the centuries does indeed befit the loving, gentle, and merciful Lord who came to us in such poverty, humility, and simplicity as “the carpenter’s son” (Matt. 13:55), they need look no further than the Book of Revelation to find the answer.
The Apostle St. John knew “the human side” of our Lord as well as anyone. Yet John does not hesitate to present to us what was revealed to him concerning the totally unbounded adoration and worship given to Christ “the Lamb” as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity Incarnate, the Son of the Living God, in the court of Heaven. The liturgical language of Heaven that he records for us is shamelessly effusive and gloriously repetitive, heaping praise upon praise, a torrent of lavish superlatives:
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing!…To him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever!…Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen” (Rev. 5:12, 13; 7:12).
The “choirs” who offer these praises are vast beyond imagining — “myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands” of angels (Rev. 5:11), and beyond this, “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all therein” (Rev. 5:13). It is therefore, quite fitting, that this joyous “extravagance” of the liturgy of Heaven should be echoed by the liturgy here on Earth.
Recently I have had the opportunity to peruse a number of books, articles, and other documentation concerning the architectural phenomenon of the Spanish “retablo,” the epic wall-like altarpieces that Spanish artists and architects conceived and constructed especially from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, a phenomenon that was also carried to the New World and comparably flourished across Latin America from the 1500s through the 1700s. It began as an effusion of Gothic splendor and subsequently transformed into an effusion of Baroque splendor.
Looking through color photographs of these masterpieces is an overwhelming experience. Immediately one is struck by the shimmering gold with which almost every surface of these architectonic structures has been gilded. Gold is a substance heavily laden with timeless symbolism, an expression of “the perfect, the incorruptible and the eternal,” as Manuel Gonzalez Galvan observes in his study, “El Oro en el Barroco” (“The Gold in the Baroque”) (Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, n. 45, 1976, p. 73). In Byzantine art, a gold background represents Heaven, something to be seen quite often in Western art as well.
The biblical associations of gold with the glory and worship of God in the Bible are numerous. From the divine instructions to Moses regarding the construction of the Temple of Meeting and the Ark of the Covenant to Solomon’s erection of his temple for the Lord, we see gold used copiously for almost everything employed in the liturgy of the Old Covenant, both pure gold and gold gilding. We read of gold for fashioning or gilding cherubim and the mercy seat for the Ark, candlesticks, snuffers, lamps, censers, vestments, bowls, dishes, cups, mortars, bells, chains, hooks, pillars, poles, and even door-hinges. The Ark of the Covenant itself was overlaid with gold on the inside and outside, with gold likewise applied to its table and to the altar of incense.
In the New Testament also, in the Book of Revelation, gold appears again as a substance for the dwelling place of God amid the citizens of Heaven, employed for the Heavenly Jerusalem: “. . . the city was pure gold . . . the street of the city was pure gold” (Rev. 21:18, 21). At the beginning of the revelations John tells of Christ appearing to him walking among “seven golden lampstands” (Rev. 1:12). And as every child knows, gold was one of the three gifts brought to our Lord by the Magi.
It is in the great cathedral of Seville, one of the largest churches in the world, that the Spanish retablo achieved its most stunning proportions, rising to a height of 113 feet, with a span of 54 feet. Begun in 1481 and completed in 1565, it remains over four and a half centuries later the largest wooden altarpiece ever constructed, with forty-four relief panels depicting scene after scene of the life of Christ and the life of our Lady, and two hundred statues.
Enshrined at the center of its base is a thirteenth-century silver-gilt image of the Madonna and Child, the “Virgen de la Sede,” and at its summit, a polychrome crucifixion scene, with a Pieta directly beneath. This retablo is to the eye a veritable wall of gold, gilt with gold from top to bottom.
The scenography of Seville’s retablo was typical of Spain’s Gothic altarpieces and goes to the heart of what these retablos were really all about. For they are above else an expression and artistic amplification of what transpired each morning on the altar itself, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The Mass, each and every Mass, is so cosmic an event, so great a gift and manifestation of the infinite goodness, mercy, omnipotence and majesty of Almighty God and the unfathomable riches won by Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, that it in essence surpasses anything else on Earth. The retablo is man’s attempt to express this infinitude.
The presentation of visual cycles of the life of Christ on these retablos likewise reflects the theology of the Mass as an encomium of the life of Christ; as St. Thomas Aquinas explains, “…the whole mystery of our salvation is comprised in this sacrament” (Summa Theologica: First Complete American Edition in Three Volumes, tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York, Benziger Brothers, 1948, part III, q. 83, art. 4, volume 2, p. 2517). The imagery of the retablos, which also often include scenes regarding the saints and the glory of our Lord and our Lady enthroned in Heaven, also serve to express the linkage between the liturgy transpiring on the altar and the liturgy of Heaven.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the new art movement of the Baroque Era, inspired in large part by the “New Evangelization” first set in motion by the Council of Trent a century earlier, led to a new wave of creativity in the construction of retablos both in Spain and in Latin America. Leafing through a study of the retablos from this era in Colombia, I was utterly amazed to see so many churches graced by these splendid wonders of art and devotion. In these Baroque retablos as was often the case in their late Gothic forerunners, the focal point of these structures is the tabernacle, the throne of the Pearl beyond Price.
In so many of the Spanish Baroque retablos there appear time and again spiral columns known as “Solomonic columns.” We have all seen in photos the distinctive spiral pillars of Bernini’s baldachin for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. These pillars were modeled upon spiral columns of this nature in the original St. Peter’s Basilica erected by the Emperor Constantine, which according to a venerable tradition were said to have come from the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, first brought to Rome as booty following the fall and destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. The very wide use of such spiral pillars in Spanish Baroque retablos and other sacred structures was consciously intended to evoke the memory of the Temple of Solomon, and hence came to be known as “Solomonic columns.”
Although the historicity of the claim of spiral columns in the Temple of Solomon can’t be proven and has been disputed, these Solomonic columns certainly lend a mystical grandeur and at the very least the spirit of the Temple of Jerusalem in its proverbial splendor to the retablos that feature them.
God’s Handiwork
On one occasion in October of 1984, nature provided its own grand counterpart to these Solomonic columns in a place of great awe, the eye of a typhoon. During an aircraft reconnaissance flight into Super Typhoon Vanessa on October 26, when its intensity was at its height, with sustained winds of nearly 180 miles per hour, an Air Force crew observed thunderclouds in the form of spiral pillars of cloud lining the eyewall, with each thundercloud forming a double-helix from top to bottom — Solomonic columns crafted by the handiwork of God!
Many Baroque retablos formed the setting for the enshrinement of a very realistic polychrome statue of Christ in His Passion, with examples ranging from Christ being scourged to our Lord carrying His cross. The beholder is struck by the stark contrast between the destitute appearance of Christ in His sufferings and the glowing splendor of the gold gilding of the surrounding retablo.
This contrast echoes the mystery of the Incarnation. Our God comes to us very humbly, in the poverty and dereliction of His Passion, in the tininess and fragility of the Sacred Host of the Eucharist. He comes to us not unlike the poor man Lazarus who lay at the gate of the rich man’s home, “full of sores” (Luke 16:20). Are we to leave Him like the rich man did? Should we not instead raise Him up to a throne of glory and surround Him with every treasure we can offer Him? The artists and architects of the Spanish retablos knew the answer to this, and put their answer into action. May we go and do the same.