Before tucking in to the sucking-pig take a look at this
Behind Segovia’s Roman aqueduct, scenes from the Apocalypse have been discovered on the walls of an ancient church
26 Sep 2015
Something seldom seen by tourists who come to Segovia (and are astonished by the towering Roman aqueduct and the ancient city on the hill above it) is a mysterious medieval wall-painting in the church of St Justus.
The church, with its Romanesque arcaded bell tower, is on the other side of the aqueduct from the Mesón de Cándido, where visitors enjoy sucking-pig, though I prefer the good local lamb. The wall-painting is little known partly because it was only rediscovered within living memory, during restoration works in 1963 that stripped away Baroque additions.
The stone apse and barrel vault above the altar are covered with paintings, focused on the figure of Christ in majesty, shown in a stylised way, large-eyed, enveloped in robes, bare-footed, his hand raised in blessing with the book of the Gospel held to his body. Outside the heavenly mandorla (the almond-shaped frame) around him is a harder-to-discern crowd of smaller figures, within a secondary mandorla.
These are the Elders of the book of Revelation: “The four and twenty Elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying: Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things.”
This scene is both the second coming of Christ in power, and of his eternal reign in heaven. Such scenes are fairly common in Romanesque doorways in Spanish churches, but this was the first associated, by its placing above the altar, with the liturgy of the Eucharist going on below, day by day.
The historian Daniel Galindo Jiménez, of the University of Santiago de Compostela, has linked the iconography of the mural with the ritual for the dedication of a church. The church of St Justus and its wall-painting were made shortly after the re-establishment of the diocese of Segovia in 1115. At the time, the so-called Mozarabic liturgy in Spain was being supplanted by the Roman rite. (It is worth noting that the Mozarabic rite was not in Arabic, but in Latin, as developed by the Visigothic culture that began the long reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from its Islamic occupiers.)
Dr Galindo looks at the liturgy found in a late 12th-century missal named after the church of St Giles in Segovia (destroyed in 1690), as a key to the meaning of the paintings. The rite of the dedication of a church supplied an iconographic plan suitable not only for a new church (as St Justus was), but also for the new beginnings of resettlement and liturgical innovation.
The Missal of St Giles contains two extra metrical chants or tropes that mention items seen on the walls of St Justus. They speak of the wedding feast prepared by God, represented by the Lamb of God, whose mystical marriage to the universal Church is mentioned in a subject of the Book of Revelation. The Lamb is prominent on the vault of St Justus, with the Last Supper on one side and the Passion of Christ on the other. A verse sequence in the Missal of St Giles calls the new-built church the place where the male Lamb is slain for the salvation of Israel.
The Elders (painted in the frame next to the Lamb) hold musical instruments, thus representing the heavenly liturgy with which the liturgy on earth (as in this church) is united.
At first sight the murals of St Justus may appear alien, obscure, in some ways barbaric. But in their chosen idiom they convey a deliberate theology carefully related to the liturgy and the Bible.
Behind Segovia’s Roman aqueduct, scenes from the Apocalypse have been discovered on the walls of an ancient church
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