The monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes is a unique monument for the study of Romanesque art. Its unusual contemporary history, marked by abandonment, destruction, Romantic admiration and the recovery of heritage and memory, has turned it into a myth. Standing on Cap de Creus, on the slopes of the Verdera mountain, marking the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, it is one of the most successful examples of the relationship between architecture and landscape. Manuel Brunet described its environment, Alt Empordà, as ‘an amazing axis’. The most brilliant, unclassifiable and international sculptor of the Catalan Romanesque style, known as the Master of Cabestany or often as the Picasso of the 12th century, worked here.
At Sant Pere de Rodes he undertook his most ambitious project: the west doorway (c. 1160–1170), now destroyed, which is the centrepiece of this exhibition. His work, which imitates the sarcophagi of late Antiquity and reuses old pieces of marble, was made to serve the prestige of the Empordà abbey that had been built with an ambition to make it a second St Peter’s in the Vatican. Initially, at the end of the 10th century, Sant Pere de Rodes was a substitute for pilgrimage to Rome and later, in the second half of the 14th century, a Jubilee was established in imitation of the Roman Holy Year.
In the Early Middle Ages, the monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes amassed considerable assets in the region thanks to generous donations by Gausfred, Count of Empúries, between 945 and 974. The core of its domains corresponded to the current municipalities of Port de la Selva, Selva de Mar and Llançà. It also held fishing rights over Castelló lake, which began to dry up from the 18th century onwards. Although the abbey’s decline began in the 15th century, it was accelerated by the wars with France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The plunder it suffered led to important losses, such as the theft of the Rodes Bible, now kept in the French National Library. Moreover, when the Benedictine community moved to Vila-sacra (1798) and, later, to Figueres (1818), the monument and its treasures were left unprotected. At this point the Master of Cabestany’s doorway was vandalized, dismantled and dispersed. The monastery became a Romantic ruin and did not begin to receive effective protection until it was declared a national monument in 1930, with the support of figures like Joan Subias Galter. More recently, the Government of Catalonia’s archaeological digs, research and restoration programmes at the end of the 20th century led to the recovery and safeguarding of the monumental site.
The first abbot of Sant Pere de Rodes, Hildesinde, established very close links with the Holy See. He obtained papal bulls to protect the monastery against lay and other ecclesiastical authorities (974) and ensured that it became a place of pilgrimage (979). Based on this, the monastery developed a narrative of its own which, through art, ceremonies, relics and legends, demonstrated the sacred nature and antiquity of the place and its links with St Peter the Apostle and the Eternal City. Pilgrims who could not go to St Peter’s in the Vatican could obtain the same indulgences at Rodes. It was said that the ‘Petrine’ relics kept at the abbey had arrived miraculously by boat from Rome at the beginning of the 7th century. And, from the mid-14th century, a Jubilee was established, in imitation of the Roman Holy Year, when the feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross (3 May) fell on a Friday. In the modern period, this celebration included the opening of a holy door to the galilee or atrium, inside which the Master of Cabestany’s doorway stood (c. 1160–1170).
Through the reuse of ancient pieces of marble, the leading role of St Peter and the presence of boats as a metaphor for the Church, this doorway expressed the same desire to look to Antiquity and adhere to Rome. Meanwhile, the fact that the galilee was a ceremonial and funereal space explains why many images and inscriptions publicized these Easter rites and other purification rituals in line with Cluniac Benedictine customs.
The figure of the Master of Cabestany was created by the Catalan historian Josep Gudiol i Ricart. In an article published in 1944, he presents him as an extraordinary Romanesque sculptor, characterized by a taste for monstrous figures and deformation, with an outlandish canon in his art and disorganized compositions. Catalan and international historiography attributed to him, as an anonymous itinerant artist, a set of works spread across a Western Mediterranean arc from Tuscany to Navarre, passing through Languedoc and Catalonia. The direct inspiration for his work in late Roman sarcophagi, allowing him to create original art that has earned him the nickname ‘the Picasso of the 12th century’, has also been highlighted.
The mysteries surrounding his training and career, his presence at Rodes reusing ancient Carrara and Proconnesus marble, and the doubts some authors have expressed over the very existence of this master sculptor and his radius of action have helped feed his myth further. In this way, both the Master of Cabestany and Sant Pere de Rodes have become two of the most universal themes of Catalan Romanesque art.