San Baudelio de Berlanga: A Mozarabic Church in Spain
Site at a Glance
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- Spain
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval
- Civilizations
- Kingdom of León
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page15 sections
History
San Baudelio de Berlanga is an 11th-century church at Caltojar in Soria, Spain, built in a frontier zone between Islamic and Christian territories during the final consolidation of the Christian kingdoms in the region. Its unusual architecture and painted decoration make it an important example of Mozarabic art and architecture, a medieval Christian tradition in Iberia shaped by contact with Islamic culture.
Frontier foundation and religious tradition
The church is dedicated to Saint Baudilus, or San Baudelio, a Christian martyr associated with Nîmes. Its foundation was probably connected with the spread of his cult in Spain, although the direct relationship between the saint and the chapel remains uncertain. Saint Baudilus was traditionally associated with an axe, recalling his execution, and with a palm tree, a symbol of martyrdom that may also have influenced the church’s interior design.
A hermit may have lived in the cave beside the hill before the church was built. Around the cave and a nearby freshwater spring, a small monastic community may have developed in the late 10th century. The existence of this community and its precise relationship with the church remain hypothetical. Local inhabitants continue to pilgrimage to the spring on May 20, the feast day of Saint Baudilus, and earlier traditions associated the saint with miraculous cures.
Christian consolidation and medieval jurisdiction
The church’s setting was shaped by the expansion of Christian rule into a contested borderland. Around 1060, Ferdinand I of León took several settlements, including Berlanga, as part of the consolidation of the Christian kingdoms in the region. The construction of San Baudelio is best placed in the later 11th century, although comparisons with earlier buildings have encouraged other proposed dates. Dendrochronological and radiocarbon analyses of construction elements support a later-11th-century chronology.
A document from 1136 transferred jurisdiction over the hermitage and monastery to the Diocese of Sigüenza. Relics associated with Saint Baudilus may have travelled from Nîmes through Hispano-Visigothic centres and Toledo. One relic may possibly have reached the site during movements caused by the Islamic invasion, although the connection cannot be established with certainty.
Murals, changing use, and dispersal
The church’s murals probably date from about 1125 or more broadly from the 12th century. Their authorship is debated, but they are generally attributed to three anonymous local painters: the Master of Maderuelo, also called the First Master of Casillas; the Master of San Baudelio; and a less accomplished artist responsible for paintings in the choir. The decoration combines scenes from Christian scripture with hunting, falconry, vegetation, textile-like patterns, and exotic animals.
Islamic or Andalusi elements in the paintings have been related to the church’s frontier setting and to the influence of Mozarabic craftsmen. The arrangement of the painted program may reflect the work of an older painter familiar with Islamic themes and a younger artist more accustomed to Romanesque Christian imagery. Romanesque art was the leading European artistic tradition of the 11th and 12th centuries.
Worship at the hermitage was suspended for a long period, and the building was later used to shelter sheep. Neglect and water entering through the walls loosened the plaster and damaged the tempera paintings. The interior was whitewashed around the 17th century as the murals deteriorated.
In 1917, San Baudelio de Berlanga was declared a National Monument. In 1922, when the hermitage belonged to several residents of Casillas de Berlanga, twenty-three paintings were sold for 65,000 pesetas to the dealer Leone Levi on behalf of Gabriel Dereppe, an American art dealer working for Demotte and Company of Paris. Specialists removed the paintings from the walls for transport. Protests temporarily halted their movement, but the Spanish Supreme Court ruled on February 12, 1925, that the sale could not be annulled. The paintings then left Spain under legal authorization, probably passing through London before being transferred onto canvas and sold to museums in the United States.
The Lázaro Galdiano Foundation acquired the church in 1949 and donated it to the Spanish state. In 1957, the government exchanged some of the removed paintings for the apse of the Romanesque church of San Martín de Fuentidueña. The recovered paintings were placed in the Prado Museum in Madrid rather than returned to San Baudelio. A prolonged restoration, including treatment of paintings removed from the walls and conservation work in specialist workshops, helped preserve the monument. Paintings that remained in the church were also restored in 1965. San Baudelio is now an annex of the Numantino Museum of Soria.
Remains
Building and interior structure
The hermitage consists of two adjoining rectangular bodies, a larger single nave and a smaller, nearly square apse on the east. It is mostly square in plan. Rough native-stone masonry rests on ashlar blocks, and the walls are about one metre thick. The exterior is plain. Differences in ground level produced projecting ashlar socles along the northern side. The roof is tiled today; until 1894 it was made from ashlar slabs.
Nave and central pier
A small horseshoe-arched entrance in the north wall opens directly into the nave. A second doorway leads to the gallery or choir. At the centre, a strong stone pier rises toward the vaults. Eight horseshoe arches spring from it like palm leaves, meeting supports at the four corners and midway along the nave walls. A horseshoe arch curves inward beyond the vertical sides of its opening. Corbels and small squinches, which support the corners of a square space, help carry the arches and vaulting.
Above the pier is a small chamber or lantern. One interpretation regards it as inaccessible, while another sees it as a former repository for church treasures, sacred texts, or a relic possibly associated with Saint Baudilus. Six intersecting ribs form a small domed cupola inside it. The arches, supports, lantern, and double rows of structural elements give the interior a pronounced Islamic architectural character. Their intersecting forms and rectangular framing have been compared with the extension of the Great Mosque of Córdoba under Al-Hakam II and with the church of San Millán de la Cogolla.
Gallery, oratory, and cave
A gallery spans the inner side of the west wall. Its two rows of horseshoe arches create an elevated choir area with five narrow aisles, giving the space a small mosque-like appearance. The upper choir is reached by a stairway built into or attached to the south wall. A small barrel-vaulted oratory, a room intended for limited or private worship, projects from the gallery into the nave and rests directly against the central pier. It has a window on each side and is approximately the size of a pulpit. The most damaged group of paintings that remains in place is inside this oratory.
A small cave lies beneath the hill and is entered through a doorway below the gallery on the south side of the interior. Its position is associated with the possible residence of an earlier hermit. The church’s natural lighting originally came through the open north doorway, a north-wall window that is now closed, and a small west-wall window. That west opening was converted from a doorway that may once have provided an alternative entrance to the oratory.
Eastern apse and burial ground
Apse
The eastern apse is reached through a horseshoe-arched opening and stands about four or five steps above the nave floor. An apse is the terminal chamber of a church, usually at the eastern end and commonly associated with the altar. This one is square, has a straight rear wall without mouldings, and is covered by a barrel vault. A small horseshoe-shaped window in the rear wall once admitted morning light, while another small window is set in the opposite wall. A small stone altar remains inside.
The apse decoration includes Saint Nicholas and Saint Baudilus on either side of the window. An inverted dove representing the Holy Spirit occupies the centre or apex of the window area, and a palm motif is also associated with the decoration. In the lunette, two seated figures appear beneath arches. Inscriptions identify Saint Baudilus and Saint Nicholas. Saint Nicholas wears a white tonsure and beard, an alb, a red mantle, and sandals. He holds a bishop’s crozier and raises his other hand. Beneath the window is a long-legged, long-necked bird, probably an ibis, beside a partly preserved inscription.
Rock-cut necropolis
Outside the apse is a rock-cut burial ground containing more than twenty roughly carved human-shaped tombs. The graves run east to west and were covered with stone slabs. Their initial excavation or formation may date to around the 10th century, and they may have remained in use successively until as late as the 16th century.
Painted decoration
Materials and surviving biblical scenes
The interior was originally covered with tempera painting on plaster or gypsum, including the walls, vaults, columns, and ribs. Tempera uses pigments bound with a medium such as egg. Although these paintings are commonly called frescoes, the surviving descriptions concern tempera applied over plaster rather than paint placed directly onto wet plaster.
Fragments on the north wall show two scenes divided by a tree. One probably represents Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Christ in a garden, although the precise episode is uncertain. The vaults contain fragments that depict, or may depict, the Adoration of the Magi, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Circumcision of Christ, the Flight into Egypt, the Annunciation, and the Presentation in the Temple.
The south wall includes Christ’s miracles, such as the Healing of the Blind Man and the Raising of Lazarus. In the latter, Lazarus is wrapped like a mummy in a black sarcophagus. Christ touches him with a staff that becomes a cross, while two women lift the covering and a possible Saint John holds a green book.
The Wedding at Cana occupies part of the west wall, where a doorway and a column interrupt the composition. Christ, the bridegroom, and the bride sit at a feast before a white-covered table bearing circular loaves and bowls of fruit. Another western scene presents the Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness through several episodes. The horned, winged, and animal-like devils confront Christ near stones and on the pinnacle of a small gabled temple with circular windows.
The north wall shows the Entry into Jerusalem. Christ rides a donkey accompanied by a foal, while two boys carry olive branches and seven apostles follow. Peter leads and John walks behind him. Jerusalem appears as an open-doored structure with crenellated walls and windows. The remaining part of the north wall contains the Last Supper, with Christ seated centrally behind a white-covered table bearing bread and fish. The disciples raise their hands and hold knives. John sits beside Christ, Judas is placed toward the front, and Peter and Paul have white hair and beards.
Secular and exotic imagery
The lower west wall contains a wounded deer fleeing from a hunter with a loaded crossbow. Nearby, a mounted hunter assisted by three dogs pursues hares through woodland. On the north wall, a falconer holds a bird of prey in a victorious, knight-like pose. The gallery includes a warrior with a spear and shield, an elephant carrying a three-towered castle, and a bear. A camel appears elsewhere, together with vegetation, circular textile-like designs, two greyhounds, and a two-faced bovine near the eastern stairway.
The elephant and camel draw on Muslim motifs, while the hunting and falconry scenes connect the decoration with secular life. Christian symbolic meanings have been proposed for the elephant carrying a castle and for several animals, but some of those readings remain conjectural. The Crucifixion is no longer visible. It may have eroded, or it may once have occupied the eastern wall near the Roman soldiers, but that placement is uncertain.
Removed and dispersed paintings
Twenty-two compositions were removed from the church and transferred to museums in Spain and the United States. The scenes included the Dromedary, the Healing of the Blind Man, the Raising of Lazarus, the Temptation of Christ, the Three Marys at the Tomb, the Last Supper, the Wedding at Cana, the Entry into Jerusalem, and the Falconer. The Three Marys at the Tomb, with its angel, frightened guards, and three haloed women carrying large vessels of ointment, is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Paintings associated with the Prado include the Hunting of the Deer, Hare Hunting, the Warrior, the Elephant, the Bear, and the Hunter, together with works recovered through the 1957 exchange. Sections of the Entry into Jerusalem and the Wedding at Cana are in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Healing of the Blind Man, the Raising of Lazarus, and the Temptation of Christ are divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Prado.
The surviving decoration is regarded as one of the better-preserved Romanesque painted interiors in Western Europe, despite the loss of much of the original program. Large biblical compositions and much of the vault decoration were removed, while the smaller and more damaged group inside the gallery oratory remains in place.
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