July 19, 2007

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

AROUND THE EXHIBITION FITERO: THE BEQUEST OF A MONASTERY

Secular devotions and the arts in Fitero

D. Ricardo Fernández Gracia
Dept. of Art. University of Navarra

The abbey church of Fitero became a parish church in the 16th century, when the families and settlers of the place increased considerably and formed a town with its town hall and other municipal institutions. In the abbey church, not only was a baptismal font placed in 1540, but it was dressed with numerous altarpieces, paintings and images, tremendously suitable for indoctrinating the new parishioners who would eventually fill its naves, especially the one on the epistle, which was destined to become a parish church. The people, for the most part illiterate, had in those representations a means of learning and catechesis.

The first brotherhoods that had an altar inside the temple date back to those times. There is only the one of Santa Lucia, having disappeared others like that of San Miguel, founded in 1529 and that grouped the harquebusiers and crossbowmen. For the celebration of the feast of the latter, honors were paid to the sculpture of the archangel imported from Valladolid workshops in the second decade of the seventeenth century.
 

Castilian School, "San Miguel", c. 1614
 

The Counter-Reformation brought with it the development of an unprecedented worship of the Eucharistic mystery. Visitors and abbots ordered the cult for singular days such as Corpus Christi and its octave. The 17th century gilded bronze monstrance responds to one of those mandates from visit. Along with the religious feast, there were also other more profane celebrations.

The main altarpiece (1587-91), with panels by Rolan Mois and many other collaterals, paid for by the monastery and its abbots, placed before the simple people real graphic sermons in which to learn the lives of saints, their miracles and martyrdoms, at final, the examples that the Church set for the faithful as models to imitate and follow.
 

"True portrait of the miraculous image of Nª Sra. de la Varda that is venerated in the town of Fitero."
Portabella, Zaragoza, XIX century.
 

The first patron saint voted by the town was the Immaculate Conception (1643), although it is true that the Marian image that enjoyed greater popularity was the one that presided over the parish chapel since the early seventeenth century: the former patron saint of the monastery, a Gothic image from the late thirteenth century, known as the Virgen de la Barda since the late fifteenth century. Her feast was instituted in 1785 by a decree agreed by the municipal regiment and endorsed by the abbot and monastery.

The different guilds celebrated their patron saints with bonfires, music and dances. The farmers to San Isidro, the tailors to the Virgen del Rosario, the espadrille makers to Santa Teresa, the carpenters to San José...etc. Other religious festivals had to do with the monastery itself. Thus the celebration of the day of San Bernardo in plenary session of the Executive Council month of August, or that of San Raimundo in the month of March, from the eighteenth century, marked moments of special solemnity within the walls of the temple and also in the streets of the town. Finally, other celebrations must be related to the presence of distinguished relics in the abbey, as was the case with San Blas, which brought together devotees from Castile, Navarre and Aragon, from the beginning of the 17th century, or with the very scapula of San Andrés, kept in a magnificent silver ostensory, carved in the second third of the 18th century, in the Aragonese capital.

Images, ornaments, musical scores, prayers and prayers form an important set to reconstruct the past of the town and the monastery of Fitero, at a time when the religious phenomenon was inseparable from the very evolution of the people and social groups of the town.