Reconstrucción del Coro Pétreo del Maestro Mateo

Abstract

This is the story of the thirteenth-century stone choir stalls in the cathedral at Santiago in Galicia in north-west Spain. The stalls were constructed under the supervision of one 'Maestro Mateo' and completed in about the year 1200. Four hundred years later the stalls were demolished and replaced with a wooden version when liturgical changes demanded new seating arrangements. Fragments of the decorative stonework were then re-cycled, dumped, buried and dispersed and largely forgotten until 1900 when excavations began in the cathedral. New discoveries enabled small sections of the choir to be reconstructed in the 1960s and 1970s. The major group of stonework was then recovered in 1978 (photographs of excavation work in progress reveal this to have been a robust operation [see figure 1]). This was followed by publications and the financial support of the non-profit-making Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza in 1995. By 1999 the process of consolidation and restoration of 17 'seats' was complete, new pieces in the possession of the cathedral combining with the old to 're-create' the original. The results can be seen in the museum of the Cathedral of Santiago. The CD-ROM reviewed here is spin-off from that reconstruction project.