Cathedrals and Museums

A seminal thought for me is about the issue of what we see when we are in a cathedral-- in a way, how it is actually a museum for the time in which it was constructed, and the very best art and architecture available at that time.  I thought about the stone masons and the wood carvers-- they would have arrived from all over Europe, to contribute their skills to the building of the cathedral.  The Leon cathedral was built in 50 years, in the early 1300s.  That probably also meant about 3 generations of artists.  I tried to see the faces of the characters labelled as different saints and characters in the old Testament, and think about who decided, and who modelled these different people.  I think maybe some were important townspeople, or merchants, but also someone's father or mother, or sister.  Also, it is so interesting to see how a few centuries later, the exact position of the pose would be used, but the sculptural or painterly detail was more vivid, more life-like.  In Burgos, there were a lot of remodels, with chapels getting lavish upgrades as the centuries went by.  Powerful bishops were buried in sarcophagi in the walls or even in the middle of these remodelled chapels.  El Cid and his wife are buried under a big piece of polished marble in the central nave.  I think this was not so polished when we were there in 1965.  I remember the light in the Burgos cathedral-- it seemed a mostly grey and lavender space in my memory of it.  This time, there was much more color.  I remember about Chartres that the cleaning of the windows made a tremendous difference, in how much light came into the building, and how easy it was to see the actual details, not just bits of colored glass in the windows.  I remember the whole medieval theology lesson those windows were meant to impart-- but also the little symbols of the guild who built a chapel, or who donated a window.  In Chartres, there is a labyrinth in the center of the nave, in stone of different colors, laid into the flooring.  In Leon, there is not a labyrith.  One wonders when it became important, who knew about it, how many people shared an interest in that sacred geometry.  One of my friends went to southern France a few years ago, and brought back a book about the black Mary of Le Puy.  That looked remarkably similar to one of the earliest Mary statues here.  I think once an artist had been in one town, and seen one, he could probably copy it to a certain extent-- from memory-- rather like someone would later copy gowns they had seen at a fashion show in Paris, once they got back to New York or Philadelphia.  Some embellishments, and new themes arose, but a lot was rehashing known material. 
We had the audio-guides for the cathedral in Burgos, and for the one in Leon.  We also got one for the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.  This modern structure is so pleasing, and so resonant with the theme of looking at cathedrals as museums.  It was very interesting to see the David Hockney show-- with the landscapes from Yorkshire, so resonant with the rural landscapes we had just been walking through in Spain.  And to feel at home-- the big panels of Half-Dome and El Capitan in Yosemite!  The guide mentioned that Mr. Gehry wanted to elicit the feel of a swimming carp, with the outer form of the museum.  In the Museum of Human Evolution, in Burgos, the architecture is very modern, steel and glass, and square.  It doesn't look so interesting on the outside, and the entrance is impersonal and formal.  But the light and space on the inside is inviting and well-suited to the material they are presenting.  It was another space with a lot of reverence for the material being presented, although so completely secular.  There was a complete copy of the boat the Beagle, which Darwin used to explore the Galapagos islands, which led to the book "the origin of the species".  There was a huge structure made of twine and brambles to simulate the brain,  with electrical laser signals criss-crossing it-- so that the person entering it could feel how the communications flow from one center to another inside the cranium.   It was as detailed in the showing of the tribal societies as the religious cathedrals had been in demonstrating the medieval concepts of heaven, hell, and the place and way of things and people in this cosmology.  The whole concept of how we look and see things in a cathedral was made more illuminated by those two museums, for me.