Catalonia & the Balearic Islands: an historical and desciptive account — John Shaqi
Catalonia & the Balearic Islands: an historical and desciptive accountCalvert, Albert Frederick
History
Catalonia & the Balearic Islands: an historical and desciptive account
Calvert, Albert Frederick
Balearic Islands (Spain) -- Description and travel; Catalonia (Spain) -- Description and travel
Barcelona, it will have been seen, abounds in ancient and interesting
churches. San Pablo del Campo was founded in the first decades of the
tenth century by Count Wilfred II., who was buried in it, as his epitaph
on a Roman tablet attests. Destroyed by Al Mansûr, the church was
rebuilt on the same plan in 1117 by Jinbert Jintardo and his wife
Rotlandis. The west front has retained much of its primitive Romanesque
character. The symbolical sculpture is crude and curious. The interval
is very striking in its simplicity. The cloister is more ornate and the
decoration is considered by some to mark the transition from the
Romanesque to the Moorish style. More eastern in character is the
venerable church of San Pere de las Puellas, believed to date from the
tenth century. It is so called from the nuns who formerly inhabited the
adjoining convent and who, at the time of Al Mansûr’s invasion, cut off
their lips and noses to avoid the amorous attentions of the Moors.
There remain to be visited the old chapel royal of Santa Agueda, now
converted into an archæological museum, where Alfonso el Casto was
baptized, where the order of Montesa was established, and where the
claims of the candidates to the crown of Aragon were discussed in 1410.
Santa Ana, built in 1146 in imitation of the church of the Holy
Sepulchre (as it was then), with a curious fourteenth-century cloister
placed at an angle to the main building, and the simple graceful arches
of the chapel of Montesion, where are hung the Turkish ensigns won by
Spanish valour at Lepanto.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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