San Isidoro de Leon - Puerta del Cordero - Tympanum BW
by RicardMN Photography
Title
San Isidoro de Leon - Puerta del Cordero - Tympanum BW
Artist
RicardMN Photography
Medium
Photograph
Description
The Basílica de San Isidoro de León is a church in León, Spain, located on the site of an ancient Roman temple. Its Christian roots can be traced back to the early 10th century when a monastery for Saint John the Baptist was erected on the grounds.
The carved tympanum of the Puerta del Cordero is one of the basilica's most notable features. Created prior to 1100, this romanesque tympanum depicts the sacrifice of Abraham.
Depicted on the sculpture above the doorway is the Old Testament narrative of the Offering of Isaac.
On the tympanum of the Puerta del Cordero, opposite Isaac and Sarah are Ishmael and Hagar. Hagar with her skirt raised in the licentious pose associated by the Christians with the Saracen race and Ishmael, an archer as recorded in Genesis, wearing the attributes of a contemporary Saracen cavalry warrior, a turban and the short stirruped saddle.
Above the patriarch Abraham, a pair of angels hold aloft an image of the Lamb in a pose of apotheosis.
The Lamb is both that of the Eucharist, signifying the New Covenant and Apocalyptic in fulfillment of the prophetic context of the Genesis story and the medieval conception of the war between Christianity and Islam as part of the eschatological working of history towards the End of Time.
Although historians have not been able to give a definitive dating for the Puerta del Cordero, the decade of the 1140’s is often favoured. This coincided with the reign of Alfonso VII and the escalation of the Reconquista into a contest for the whole of the Spanish peninsula and the visit of the abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable who had begun the institution of an ideological war against Islam. (Description form Wikipedia and compostela.co.uk)
Uploaded
June 27th, 2019
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