BRINGING HERITAGE CLOSER. OLITE, ROYAL SEAT

August 28, 2007

The mural paintings of Olite during the gothic period
Ms. Carmen Lacarra. University of Zaragoza

The church of San Pedro de Olite has a chapel, the so-called Virgen del Campanal, located in the bell tower attached to the right side of the church, which during the Gothic period was decorated on its walls and vault with mural paintings, although these paintings are now kept in the Museum of Navarre.

Originally, in the three walls of the chapel the decoration was distributed in two superimposed zones separated by the impost from where the vault starts. The painting also occupies the four vault panels and the intrados of the entrance arch to the chapel.

These paintings reveal the arrival of the neo-Byzantine trend in the Kingdom of Navarre, as happened in other Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula during the 13th century, and their stylistic kinship allows us to ascribe them to a large workshop active in different localities of Navarre in the second half of the 13th century.
 

Mural paintings from the chapel of the Window of the parish of San Pedro de Olite. Museum of Navarra

In this same chapel of the Virgen del Campanal de San Pedro de Olite, years after the aforementioned decoration, another mural painting was carried out in the lower part of the chapel that partially hid the primitive decoration. Also conserved in the Museum of Navarre, it is the work of an unidentified painter known as the "Second Master of Olite" to differentiate him from the first. The scenes represented, arranged in the form of an altarpiece, were dedicated to narrate passages from the life of the Virgin Mary, the chapel's patron saint, distributed on two floors, each in turn subdivided into houses by means of very refined Gothic architecture. In spite of their deterioration, they denote the hand of a very qualified painter, connoisseur of the French-English miniature of the second third of the 14th century. 

Mural paintings from the chapel of the Window of the parish of San Pedro de Olite. Museum of Navarra
 

In Olite there is another church that also houses Gothic mural painting, the parish church of Santa María la Real, whose mural decoration frames the Gothic axial window and is distributed vertically in streets and horizontally in floors, in the form of false stained glass, tapestry or altarpiece.