Travel and Culture: Orense, The monastery of Santa María de Melón

juancar347 (72)in #art • 6 years ago (edited)

He affirmed in one of his guides of Magical Spain that great globetrotter that was Juan García Atienza, that generally, the great monasteries were far from the official routes that attracted thousands of pilgrims to the tomb of the Apostle, in Compostela. This assertion, although true in many cases, is not so in some others.

One of the most obvious examples, also located on this Camino or Vía de la Plata and practically next to the highway of the same name, is this emblematic and at the same time immeasurable monastery of Santa María de Melón, which we have to place in Orense, not much distance from another medieval village, not without beauty and interest, which still retains its old Jewish quarter, as well as interesting traces of the presence of military orders in medieval times: Ribadavia.

Although, the last time I was there, some rehabilitation work was being carried out in the church, which did not seem, in principle, to be combined with the restoration of its badly damaged cloisters - at least, one Gothic and the other Renaissance -, the visit, discounted, it did not leave me indifferent at all and yes, on the contrary, it attracted my attention, find me with architectural conceptions worthy of admiration, which are also found in other monumental places of Galicia, which stand out for their art, its beauty, its mystery and, of course, its interest, such as Oseira, Carboeiro or the church of Santa María de Cambre in Coruña.

I refer, to the rotunda form of its head, that surely follow the model of the anastasis of certain sublime Hierosolimitanos temples, where the most appreciable would be the one of the mosque of Al-Aksá or Dome of the Rock of Jerusalem. But in Melón, and referred to art, there are many keys that are not only limited to those first Benedictine diapers that ended up having as a nurse to those splinter and austere Cistercian monks who remained in the place, at least until the Disentailment of Mendizábal.

While it is the rule of the Camino that everyone notices and apprehends the keys that will influence their personal history -as Coelho would say, a pilgrim and a writer whom he had not mentioned for a long time- it is worthwhile, however, to review some of them. For example, the two stone lions that guard the access to the temple; the pyramid that tops the base of the belfry, a hermetic symbol that will be observed in many Galician temples; the period figures, beautifully made, representative of saints bearers of unique archetypes, such as San Antón, San Roque, San Sebastián or perhaps San Bernardo himself, with the symbol of primitive Christianity, the fish, in his hand.

The Holy Christ, whose long natural hair follows the painful but traditionally miraculous patterns of this type of representation, where it stands out, as every pilgrim knows, the Holy Christ of Fisterra. The sepulcher of a mysterious Dona in the vicinity of an altar that shows some relatively modern paintings - perhaps from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries - that show a disconcerting symbolism but not lacking intentionality: composed of three tables of medium size, the table Central shows a Virgin holding the Child in her left arm and a long thin candle lit in her right hand; the tables on the sides represent two angels carrying trays-donkeys, in the stories of the Holy Grail-with two pigeons offering the angel on the left and a hermetic and primordial element on the right: a snake that bites its tail or ouroboros.

And of course, some brands and inscriptions, that remember the hermetic that has always accompanied the brotherhoods of stonemasons. Some brotherhoods that, observing the absidiolos that compose the head of the temple, perhaps developed also their prodigious and titanic work in not too distant places, like the zamorano monastery of Santa María de Moreruela.

Monastery of Melón: enigmas and keys in the Road of the Stars.

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