In 1494-1495, Cartographer and Physician Hieronymus Münzer and three friends from Nuremberg made a trip through Spain and wrote about it. Follow us as we make their journey in the 21st century. We will post Münzer's observations, then our own, with photos of what is there now and how things have changed. We begin the quest on July 5!
Sunday, July 11, 2010
What Münzer could have seen in Girona
Girona Cathedral's Retablo Mayor is from the 14th century, and is made of silver with enamel and gold (we showed a photo of it in an earlier post. This is the only large medieval altarpiece of such precious materials that is still in its original place and still serving its original purpose, though it has had a turbulent history (a full description of it and the cathedral by a later traveler, Julian Street [1911] gives some idea of its place and impact (see link). Perhaps the reasons that Münzer doesn't mention it is that it was already 150 years old and therefore out of fashion, and that there were still many others in precious materials to be seen.
In Münzer's time, there were numerous others of gold and silver; perhaps that is why he doesn't mention this one. The side chapels and those in the ambulatory also housed numerous altarpieces, ordinarily covered by curtains when mass wasn't being said in them. The Cathedral certainly had a treasury; Münzer mentions no tour of it, as he does in later church visits.
Münzer could have walked on the narrow streets of the call, or Jewish quarter, which by 1494 would have been devoid of Jews.
Picture: Girona's "Call."
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