Francisco de Asís García García, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Espagne)
As it was common with many sanctuaries located between the mountains, tradition places the origins of the Aragonese monastery of San Juan de la Peña in a miraculous event: a knight was saved from rushing into the void and built a monastery where an eremite had lived. These mythical origins, nurtured in later centuries, are a good example of the legendary traditions that surround numerous religious foundations erected or renovated in Romanesque times. They usually referred to a hermitic past and to the presence of holy bodies or miraculous images. These features, easily recognisable in many other holy places across the Christian West, took on a special significance in the Iberian context when linked with the experience of the frontier with al-Andalus and the consolidation of Christian spaces in the north of the peninsula. To what extent was this mythical aura enhanced by the abrupt and hidden locations of rock architecture? And, how much does it owe to a tradition distant in time from the narrated events and the materiality of these buildings? Nature excited the imagination of those who related the origins and the development of these places, just as it inspired travellers and writers in more recent times. In this lecture, the conjunction of landscape, architecture and legend will be assessed through a selection of cases from the Hispanic north.