In the panorama of Romanesque art, of which we have such a precarious knowledge , any finding of new works or documents relating to the artists is celebrated among scholars and amateurs. The history of Maestro Esteban's work is punctuated by discoveries that time and again have made him a shining star in the firmament of European Romanesque art.

The first took place in the mid-nineteenth century, when art lovers travelers from Madrid found several capitals of exceptional quality on the vault of the Barbazana Chapel, some from the cloister and others from the façade of the disappeared Romanesque cathedral of Pamplona.

Almost a century later, around 1930, Onofre Larumbe and José María Lacarra made known the documents copied in the Libro Redondo of the cathedral that named the artificer. The oldest, from 1101, specified that a certain Esteban, "master builder of the work of Santiago", was rendering "good service" to Bishop Pedro de Roda in the building of Santa María de Pamplona. In return, the bishop offered him houses, an oven, vineyards, barley, wheat and wine, of which his wife Marina and his son would also be beneficiaries, which is evidence of his lay status. In 1107 he still received goods from the prelate, specifically part of some mills.

It was the great art historian Manuel Gómez Moreno, author of the successful book El arte románico en España ( 1934), who found similarities between some capitals found in 1846 (fig. 1), now in the Museum of Navarre, and several sculptures from Compostela, which led him to identify Esteban with the so-called "master of the Platerías", who also worked in San Isidoro de León. In his passage through Navarra he would have left at least one disciple, who would have worked on the western doorway of Leire. Thus, Esteban disembarked in the artistic historiography as a great sculptor, something that the documentation neither specified nor denied.

Gómez Moreno's disciples magnified Esteban's artistic personality by attributing new works to him and praised in him "the coexistence (...) of the definitive organizer of the most complex Romanesque Structures and the most complete Romanesque sculptural genius". His influence would have dominated the art of the north of the Iberian Peninsula throughout the first two thirds of the 12th century (Camps Cazorla, 1945).

Gómez Moreno had also wondered about the role that Esteban played in the works of the cathedral of Santiago. He could not have been the designer of the building, since the famous Codex Calixtinus quotation lists "Bernardo the Elder, admirable master, and Roberto, with fifty other stonemasons" as its initiators. Was Esteban his successor or a relative? Which bishop did he work for? All the hypotheses have been defended and none has been ratified. According to some, he worked for Diego Peláez, great promoter of the business; according to others, he intervened after this prelate was removed in 1088, or later, in the service of Diego Gelmírez. It has even been proposed that he would have simultaneously directed both cathedrals, despite the more than seven hundred kilometers that separate them and the difficulties of travel in the distant twelfth century. The perception of the Way of St. James as the main means of transmission of cultural and artistic novelties in the 11th to 13th centuries, a theory still unproven despite its numerous defenders, seemed to be reinforced by the itinerancy of this master.

There is no doubt about the similarities between the Galician and Navarrese cathedrals. Specifically, the design of the main entrance to the Pamplona cathedral, known thanks to the plan drawn by Ventura Rodríguez at the end of the 18th century (fig. 2), has specific links with Platerías, the famous southern doorway of the Compostela cathedral (fig. 3). In both cases the doors are flanked by eleven columns, issue unusual in Romanesque doorways. If we add to this the presence of common decorative motifs, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that the designer of the Pamplona doorway was inspired by the Galician one, and even that the designer of both was the same person.

After some time, doubts began to arise about an artistic personality apparently omnipresent in the north of the peninsula and somewhat protean. Some doubted that Esteban had come to Pamplona from Compostela, arguing that the accredited specialization "master of the work of Santiago" could refer to any other church dedicated to the saint in any other city. Others wondered whether it was appropriate to attribute to the architect of a great Romanesque church all of its capitals and reliefs. Did Esteban really carve the dozens of capitals inside the Pamplona cathedral and also its doorways? It is not plausible. The scarce sculptural remains that have come down to our days accredit the participation of more than one sculptor. Which of them would be Esteban? The one who carved the cobbler or the sculptor of the heads of wild beasts on the door corbels? The author of the capital with interlacing or the one of the birds pecking at their feet? Can it be proved that he was still in Pamplona when the cathedral doorway was built?

Since 1990 new findings have helped to define the artistic personality of Maestro Esteban. Particularly noteworthy is finding of the foundations of the Romanesque cathedral of Pamplona thanks to the excavations carried out between 1990 and 1994, the results of which were published in 2021 by María Ángeles Mezquíriz and Mercedes Unzu. The cathedral, of large dimensions, had three longitudinal naves and a transverse one. The chevet had three separate chapels. A crypt was found under the southern one. The numerous lapidary signs prove the intervention of a considerable issue of stonemasons.

The peculiar design of the main chapel provided a valuable clue that confirmed the link of project with Santiago de Compostela. While the exterior face of the wall draws a seven-sided polygon, the interior traces a semicircle. The semicircle-polygon combination is a constant in the Galician cathedral: it is in the apsidioles open to the ambulatory (some semicircular and others polygonal), as well as in the main chapel of Compostela, whose exterior is polygonal, as can be seen perfectly from the tribune. Another feature that stands out is the presence in the Compostela Romanesque and in the Navarrese (Sangüesa, Irache) of the window-ocular combination that exists in the Galician ambulatory, although also in other churches such as San Saturnino de Toulouse.

The second finding, totally unexpected, took place in 2020, when in the course of an intervention directed by the architect Leopoldo Gil Cornet, a sarcophagus supported by three Romanesque capitals was discovered outside the transept of the Pamplona cathedral. Two are vegetal and follow a repertoire of schematic cleft leaves common in the South of France and the north of the peninsula. The third, of exceptional quality, sample female figures holding their hands to their heads (fig. 4). It is undoubtedly the best of the capitals of the Pamplona church found so far (I do not include here, obviously, the fabulous capitals of the cloister). Its forms, with fleshy cheeks and hair whose locks are grouped in threes, are powerfully reminiscent of works from Toulouse, in the area around the Miègeville Gate of Saint Saturnin. As happened with the capital of the birds pecking at their feet, it was also copied on the western doorway of Leire and in the crypt of Sos del Rey Católico. Did Esteban himself carve it? It is impossible to verify.

The verifiable data allow us to conclude that Esteban was the architect who designed and directed, at least in the early years, the Building of the Romanesque cathedral of Pamplona. He would have come from Santiago de Compostela, although it is not possible to attribute to him a specific phase of work on the Galician temple. Under his direction, several sculptors would have collaborated in Pamplona, who would have begun by executing the capitals of the columns and the windows of the chancel, to culminate with the doorway at the foot. They can be grouped under the common denomination of "Esteban's workshop", although we do not know if Esteban was still alive and in Pamplona at the time the western doorway was designed and executed. Likewise, we do not know if he carved any capitals or reliefs with his own hands.

But it does not end there. In 2015 a novel hypothesis was published, which aims to explain the refinement of the urban planning of the burgh of San Saturnino in Pamplona, whose beautiful layout is evidenced by aerial photographs (fig. 5). It is an irregular Hexagon Building whose streets unfold forming two tridents, one next to the parish of San Cernin and the other next to San Lorenzo, with a water well for public use in the axis of the main street (the famous "pocico de San Cernin"). The geometric rigor and the wise adaptation to the orography suggest an exceptional planning mind, capable of going far beyond the simple grid applied in other urbanizations of the Romanesque period, such as those of Puente la Reina or Santo Domingo de la Calzada.

The documentation of the cathedral of La Rioja shows that in Santo Domingo it was the architect of the late Romanesque cathedral himself, by the name of Garsión, who directed the distribution of streets and the distribution of plots of land. Something similar may have happened in Pamplona around 1100. Since the new neighborhood was born on the initiative of Bishop Pedro de Roda and the layout was probably conceived and laid out on the ground while Esteban was in his service (it is recorded that the "burgo nuevo" existed in the time of King Pedro I, 1094-1104), it does not seem risky to attribute design to him. If so, Esteban would not only be the first known great architect of medieval Pamplona, but also the urban planner of its best-designed neighborhood. Isn't it about time the city honored his report?