For almost 500 years, the arch that connects the largest Gothic cathedral in the world with its Renaissance sacristy has offered visitors a sumptuous, if little glimpsed – and even less studied – vision of religious bounty.
The 68 beautifully carved plates of food that adorn the archway in Seville’s cathedral offer rather more than bread and wine.
There are pigs’ trotters and wild strawberries, aubergines, clams and oysters. There are peaches, radishes, a skinned hare with a knife by its side, a squirrel served on a bed of hazelnuts and a plate of lemons across which a small snake slithers. There are also cakes and biscuits and, more exotically, a dish of peppers newly imported from Mexico, which had fallen to Hernán Cortés and his men just over a decade before the carvers set to work.
The plates, which are all too often obscured when the huge wooden doors of the sacristy are open, are the subject of a new book by a Spanish art historian who has spent the past 11 years trying to unpick the secrets and meanings of the cathedral’s stone buffet.
“People don’t really see the carvings because of the doors and because they’re too busy looking at the sacristy dome,” said Juan Clemente Rodríguez Estévez. “But the carvings have been there for 500 years and have never been properly studied. They’ve gone unnoticed apart from being seen as a bit of a novelty.”
The arch, which was carved between 1533 and 1535, provides what Rodríguez calls a “snapshot of a seminal moment”. Its still-life carvings, he suggests, are chapters in the social, religious, economic and cultural history of both Seville and Spain as a whole. » | Sam Jones in Madrid | Monday, July 26, 2021
