John Fleming Award 2010 - Report
The recipient of the 2010 JFTA, Amanda Dotseth (PhD Candidate, Courtauld Institute of Art), shares her experiences of her trip.
The rural monastic church of San Quirce in Spain is recognized by scholars, if only briefly treated, for its role in the development of Romanesque art in Iberia. Its exquisite sculptural program bears evidence of a shared aesthetic with other twelfth-century churches of the St. James pilgrimage road, including the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. However, its singular combination of profane and religious imagery with unusually detailed inscriptions begs further investigation. Before now, San Quirce has not been the subject of a monographic study, due in part to its prohibitive accessibility: it is privately owned, located within a hunting reserve some 30 kilometers from the nearest town, and visitable by appointment only. My thesis will be the first to focus on this site as a whole, taking a broad approach to its history by addressing its relationship to other Benedictine monasteries, the meaning of its enigmatic sculptural program, and its treatment in later periods, including its modern privatization.
Thanks to the John Fleming Travel Award, I traveled to Spain for the month of July 2010 to undertake archival and on-site research on San Quirce. There I visited and examined that Romanesque church for the first time, identifying and documenting distinct building phases as well as the relative placement of sculpture. Moving through the space of the building was crucial in shaping my understanding of how the iconographic program functions as a whole. I noticed for instance that much of the sculptor’s delicate carving on the exterior, especially of the heads and faces of figures, has not survived. A notable exception is the expressive face of John the Evangelist on the north façade (see photo), which exemplifies beautifully the quality and personality of sculpture. As I approached the portal from the west, St. John’s face and gaze were clearly visible in profile, suggesting that the sculptor’s technique (of sculpting heads and faces of figures nearly in the round) engaged viewers from all angles as they passed through the cloister. This stands in contrast to the seeming dominant frontality of the façade as it appears today and as it appears in photographs.
Complementing the first-hand examination of architecture were many hours spent in the archives in Burgos. In particular the cathedral archive proved a treasure trove of information about late-medieval San Quirce, thanks to the kind help of its archivist, Padre Matías Vicario Santamaría, to whom I am very grateful. I also worked in two other Burgos archives, which proved crucial to my study of the modern treatment of San Quirce, thanks to their conservation of early photographs of the building and documentation pertaining to its disentailment in the nineteenth century. These are the municipal archive and province of Burgos’s historical archive, the staffs of both I thank for being so welcoming and accommodating.
Of the modern sources, in particular perhaps the photographic evidence led to especially insightful discoveries. Photographs and prints from the early twentieth century bear evidence of a restoration of San Quirce’s apse in which an awkward tiled roof was added (and later removed). The intervention evident in these photographs helped explain anomalies I saw in the masonry of the exterior of the apse on site. Another charming series of photographs suggests that in the fifty or so years after the site’s disentailment and sale, it had ceased to function either as a site of religious significance or as working farm but rather had become a place of recreation and retreat, a role it maintains to this day. The photographs, from around 1910, depict a group of smartly dressed gentlemen enjoying picnic (complete with table, chairs, dishes and cutlery) in the field to San Quirce’s south.
My visits to San Quirce were paired with excursions to influential Romanesque sites nearby including San Pedro de Arlanza, now in ruins and undergoing restoration, and Santo Domingo de Silos, both of whose historical and stylistic relationships to San Quirce I now believe more than ever worthy of further investigation. One tantalizing historical connection between the sites was revealed in my archival work: all have foundation legends, forged in the twelfth century, which associate the monasteries with the mythologized count of Castile, Fernán González (d. 970). Smaller and not obviously involved in the power struggle of its influential Benedictine neighbors, San Quirce’s legend suggests a fruitful point of comparison with Arlanza, Silos, as well as a third monastery, San Millán de Cogolla (La Rioja). Like those monasteries, San Quirce was likely an older foundation that rewrote its history in the twelfth century. Further study of the circumstances surrounding the creation of these foundation legends mark a point of entry from which to better understand constructions of identity and manipulation of memory in twelfth-century Castile.
Two exhausting, exhilarating weeks in Burgos were followed by an additional two in Madrid for further archival work and invaluable conversations with specialists of medieval Burgos and Romanesque architecture. There I consulted the most recent scholarship and some excellent nineteenth-century sources treating San Quirce only available in Spain, at the National Library, National Historical Archive and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). The latter two proved particularly useful for documentation and treatment of San Quirce in the modern period, including restoration, conservation and the aforementioned disentailment.
Most things about my trip went to plan: San Quirce was as beautiful and intriguing as I had expected; and I found all I sought and more at the archives I visited. However, there were also unexpected pleasant surprises as well. In particular, driving and walking through the landscape around San Quirce and in Burgos province gave me a new understanding of the primary sources I encountered in archives, which frequently refer to places and geographic features previously unknown to me. The experience impressed upon me more than ever the importance of first-hand knowledge of a place and has re-shaped and broadened my approach to the thesis as a whole. For this, I am particularly grateful to Laurence King Publishing for making this rewarding adventure possible.
Among those others I wish to thank for their intellectual and logistical support are John Lowden, my supervisor at the Courtauld, Therese Martin and Julio Escalona of the CSIC and José Luis Senra of the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Finally, particular thanks are due to San Quirce’s owners and their staff for so generously accommodating my visit to the site.
