Discursos y poéticas en la escultura gótica leonesa del siglo XIII

Resumo

This aproach to the imaginery of the southern and eastern façades of Leon cathedral restores their original topography, their several liturgical functions, their intended audiences and the particular historical and cultural circumstances that surrounded their carving. In the portal of Saint Froilán is seen a celebration of this local saint's main liturgical Feasts; the choice of an Apocalyptic program for the south central portal is justified by a Castilian tradition of decorating the cathedral entrance near the bishop palace with ecclesiological discourses; and Bishop Martín Fernández's great expectations can be shown in the wedding of the Castillian heir Fernando de la Cerda and the French princess Blanca commemorated in the south western portalts heraldic decoration. St-John the Baptist portal baptismal imaginery is related, instead, with the parish function of the chapel located in the ground floor of the northern tower; and the scatological discourse in the Last Judgement and the Coronation of the Virgin portals adequate to the medieval use of the parvis as cemetery, and is discussed in the frame of mid-thirteenth century theological controversies on the nature of the resurrected and glorified bodies. Finally, the different stylistic trends that converge in León are examined as sculpted counterparts of vernacular pastoral rhetorical devices: the more "narrative styles" of the portal of Saint Froilán and Saint John, as opposed to the "expressionistic naturalism" of the Last Judgement and Apocaliptic portals, intended to express the ambiguous notion of "spiritualised bodies".