In the Beginning

This blog concerns an extensive project to commit the pilgrimage roads to Santiago de Compostela to film. The project title is “The Joining of Heaven and Earth”. The name comes from the phrase used by Peter Brown in his book “The Cult of the Saints” and is used to describe the relationship between the relics of a saint on earth and their soul in heaven and the belief that there was a conduit between the two which could be used by men.

In broader terms it seems an appropriate title for a work on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela which, as well as linking so many reliquary shrines along its highways and byways, was also the source of numerous legends of a mystical nature so that the terrestrial road itself, was invested with an inherent and immanent sacred character. This is perfectly expressed in the legend of the Milky Way, wherein the road to Compostela could be traced by following the course of the stars of that galaxy across Europe to its furthest edge in northwestern Spain.

This work limits itself to the eleventh and twelfth centuries when the pilgrimage reached its flowering point, coinciding with the high medieval Romanesque period.

The Joining of Heaven and Earth will take us back to that time by presenting the old roads, bridges and landscapes which the medieval travellers used and passed through, and perhaps more importantly to show the Romanesque churches associated with the pilgrimage.

We see, essentially what a pilgrim travelling in the mid twelfth century would have seen.

The churches of the pilgrimage roads were full of sculpture, inside and out. In fact the Romanesque is the first European art form to create monumental stone sculpture since the decline of the Roman Empire. There was a gap of six hundred years between the Classical sculpture of Late Antiquity and this period. As a result, Romanesque Sculpture was extremely eclectic, representing the slow accumulation and assimilation of influences and cultures that had been mixed together during that long period.

Romanesque Sculpture is highly sacred art. Can it still be meaningful today? The Joining of Heaven and Earth has no remit on the question of faith, but whether one believes in the same way the medieval pilgrim did or not, it is hard not to be filled with awe in the presence of such images. The intention is to convey that sense of awe.

View the split screen multi-image presentation clip.



Music for the Joining of Heaven and Earth is composed and produced by Martin A Smith
http://www.martinasmith.co.uk/