The gargoyles of Santiago de Compostela deserve a pedestal in art history

Monsters, demons, beasts, metamorphic, lustful and mocking creatures loom over the heads of the citizens of the 21st century who believe they have seen it all in a world taken over by video games, social networks and the offering of series. until exhaustion. But from the top of the oldest buildings in the cities, these bugs that lurk almost always unseen make small and naïve any terrible beast that tries to terrorize the viewer from a screen.

Gargoyles, the vast majority of which come from the imagination of anonymous stonemasons, are the most ignored sculptures, but they deserve a pedestal in the history of art, even if they are so high up that their fierceness and beauty can barely be appreciated from the ground. . This is how the journalist Benxamín Vázquez González (O Carballiño, Ourense, 1943) understood it when he had the idea of ​​claiming those of Santiago de Compostela with a first catalogue, back in 1993, the Xacobeo year that triggered pilgrimages to the city as a mass phenomenon. .

That compilation of 35 drains carved with all kinds of symbolic beings since the 14th century to provide an architectural solution to the persistent Compostela rains was called Gargoyle chirps and it saw the light when, the author explains, “there was nothing published in Spain” about these forgotten artistic creations.

Thirty years later, and with this newspaper editor Already and The Galician Ideal retired, in Santiago tourist routes focused on gargoyles are beginning to be offered and among the attendees you can see people carrying the book under their arms Gargoyles of Compostela (Alvarellos publishing house, trilingual edition in Galician, Spanish and English). It is the new work by Benxamín Vázquez, with photographs by Xaime Cortizo, and today it continues to represent one of the few publications on gargoyles in the country. In the volume, the author selects 30 of the “most expressive” among the 300 that he has counted in monumental buildings in Santiago, dating back seven centuries.

Among these “quarrier whims” there are contortionists, boys riding on beasts, gorgons, exotic animals, abyssal creatures, beings with hair, scales and feathers, others who howl in pain after being castrated, beautiful mermaids, mythological gods in this mecca of the Christianity, manticores, griffins, basilisks and dragons.

But for tourists and natives, when they finally free themselves from the slavery of the screens, look up and manage to adapt their untrained eyes to long distances, the gargoyle that leaves them speechless is almost always one of the Hostal dos Reis Católicos (16th century ). In this building in the Plaza del Obradoiro, which today is a Parador, right on the main and plateresque façade, on the right hand side if viewed from the front, a little naked man shows his buttocks and genitals with infinite impudence. It is the same thing that is seen in some protests or the same thing that certain gangs of friends do who drop their pants on a night of partying to take a photo for posterity. This stone gargoyle, this amazing image that no one notices if they do not know it is there, challenges all mortals who arrive at such a sacred square with its eternal baldness.

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