The Romanesque cloister: southern and western galleries

In the capitals of the southern gallery, attention is focused on the last moments of the Virgin's life and the lives of the saints. The burial of Mary is followed by her resurrection, which is materialized in the vision of the tomb filled with rows of flowers, and the Assumption, with the crowned female figure framed by a waved mandorla carried by angels. Next come hagiographic themes. The cycle of St. Paul includes the scenes of the fall and conversion (without horse) and the healing of blindness by Ananias. After an unpreserved capital comes the one centered on St. Lawrence, with the scenes of the trial and martyrdom on the grill (the gesticulation makes visible the well-known dialogue between the victim and his executioners). In the one of St. Andrew we contemplate, on the one hand, the appearance before the authority and, on the other, how the saint contorts himself so that each limb is tied to a different arm of a normal cross, not an aspired one. In that of St. James, a brief cycle is developed with his trial, beheading and transfer by boat to Compostela. Finally, that of John the Baptist offers the view of Herod's banquet, the dance of Salome in a long-sleeved dress and sounding the cymbals, and the beheading.

The western gallery is less systematic. There are capitals with animals and plants whose meaning probably did not go beyond the decorative, while the complexity of others has led us to suppose that they obeyed a symbolic or moralizing intention. We see animals facing each other, bear hunting, a pair of lions subjected to a central male figure holding them by means of ropes, birds pecking at four-legged animals, etc. The gallery is completed with a few historical scenes: a possible representation of David and the musicians; on the central pillar, two dedicated to St. Martin (with the submission of average cloak to the poor man and the subsequent appearance of Jesus Christ who in a dream sample the shared piece of cloth); and the parable of the rich man and the poor Lazarus, so common in Romanesque funerary environments (we know that the Tudela cloister was one).

Marisa Melero, the most conscientious scholar of Romanesque sculpture in Tudela, considered that the work progressed in the direction in which we have described the galleries and that the main sculptor would have provided the drawings that served as the basis for carving most of the baskets, but he would not have personally carved all the capitals, but, after having carved some of the highest quality ones (in the northern and eastern galleries), he would have entrusted other baskets to collaborators while he took on another large commission: the tympanum of the church of San Nicolás in Tudela, combining the direction of the sculptural ornamentation of both groups. The same researcher was of the opinion that the main nucleus of the sculptors who worked on the cloister came from the Portico de la Gloria in Santiago de Compostela, where she identified capitals reminiscent of the Tudela's way of composing, as in the case of the Temptations of the central mullion. Other compositional and formal links have been described with the sculpture of the chevet of the seo of Zaragoza. This link, as well as the news about the consecration of the church in 1188, lead us to situate the construction of the Tudela cloister in the last years of the 12th century.