To celebrate the start of the Santiago de Compostela Jubilee Year (Xacobeo 2021), the Complutense Foundation publishes an open-access digital edition of the book ‘The Portal of Glory: Architecture, Matter, and Vision,’ which is the first publication of the A. W. Mellon Program for the study and conservation of the Portal of Glory.
The essays in this volume explore the constellation of images and creative processes that originate at the intersection between built architecture and imagined architecture, offering a unique vision of the Portal of Glory in its material reality, its constructive techniques, its scenographic design, its symbolic dimensions, and its phenomenological effects. In their totality, and in their individual contributions, the articles reveal yet-unknown aspects of Master Mateo’s intervention in the cathedral of Santiago, from the time he took over the direction of the works around 1168 to the moment of the temple’s consecration in 1211 – a long period that also witnessed the construction of two additional related projects: the magnificent stone choir, and the west façade. The book offers complete new architectural and digital reconstructions of both the stone choir and the west façade, with the restitution of all the displaced sculptures to their original locations and the analysis of the “avant-garde” enveloping scenography they were part of.
You can read the book here: https://issuu.com/fundacioncomplutense/docs/el_portico_de_la_gloria_b_150
Medieval Art Research 