The archivolts

The figures of the archivolts do not respond to a coherent and unitary program, but can be ascribed to different thematic groups more or less related to each other, and their arrangement does not conform to any logical outline but is completely arbitrary. Moreover, in some cases there are difficulties in giving them an identity, due to their ambiguous character or the average quality of the carving or poor preservation, which has given rise to varied and even contradictory interpretations.

A first group seems to represent Humanity, on which the Judgment carved on the tympanum falls, through the three basic social classes of the Age average, distinguishable by their attributes: the clergy -a bishop with crosier and mitre, two abbots with tau staff-, the military -carrying various weapons- and the workers -with their tools of work-, among which we find a blacksmith, a falconer, and several shoemakers and slaughterers.

However, most of them make reference letter to the dual and opposite results of the Judgment. On the one hand we would have the saved, among which we can distinguish saints in prayerful attitude, prophets carrying a phylactery or a book or pointing to the Christ of the tympanum, and elders of the Apocalypse showing scrolls. On the other side are the sinners and the damned, represented by the sins most frequently depicted in Romanesque art: greed and lust. Greed appears only once, represented by a character carrying a bag of coins around his neck, a typical attribute of this sin. Of lust instead we find several examples that sometimes show the characteristic iconography of this vice - a naked woman bitten by snakes or toads in very significant points of her Anatomy-, but in others they follow more unusual and therefore more interesting formulas - a masturbator and an exhibitionist-. With them should be connected another group of sculptures, composed of musicians, dancers and acrobats, given the negative concept that the Church had of their activities.

Other figures can also be linked to the Last Judgment. Thus, St. Peter with the key, an attribute alluding to his function as custodian of the gates of heaven, granted by Christ (Mt. 16:19), or the angel carrying a soul in his lap, which would represent the angelic bosom, equivalent to Abraham's bosom and symbol of paradise.

It is also worth mentioning a series of men and women that we have not been able to classify or classify in any of the previous series, although some of them seem to be associated with the groups of the blessed and the damned. Finally, there are the animals, most of them real -carnero, dog, bull-, but also some fantastic -griffin-.