Title

Capital with Samson and an Attendant Fighting a Lion

Generic classification

Object

Date

Century

Cultural context / style

Dimensions

Material

Technique

Iconography / Theme

Provenance

Current location

Inventory Number in Current Collection

Object history

It is believed that this capital, as well as another with which it is paired, where a Centaur is represented fighting with a man, also belonging to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, would come from the province of Palencia. However, its original location is unknown. The antiquarian Charles Dikran Kelekian sold the work to the museum in 1921.

Precisely in that decade of 1920 there was a singular interest in peninsular Romanesque art in the United States, to which contributed the studies of Georgiana Goddard King, author of The Way of Saint James (1920); Arthur Kingsley Porter, who contributed the fundamental works for the diffusion of Romanesque art in the United States: Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads,(1923) and Spanish Romanesque Sculpture (1928). Also very interesting was the contribution of Mildred Stapley Byne, who together with her husband, the architect Arthur Byne -both wellknown not only for their work as scholars but also as dealers-, traveled around the country photographing and studying capitals, in this case for a publication that would see the light in 1926: The Sculptured Capital in Spain. A series of examples dating from the sixth to the sixteenth century, a work profusely illustrated with photographs, which was published in New York by W. Helburn and in Spain by Editorial Voluntad under the same title in Spanish: La escultura en los capiteles españoles . This book was prefaced by A. K. Porter, who noted in its pages: "Many of the capitals come from little known rural monuments; not a few are published for the first time". Certainly, such a lack of knowledge of many of these works of art, the abandonment of some temples and monasteries after the ecclesiastical confiscation of the 19th century, and their location in places far from the large population centers, facilitated the sale of some of these artistic treasures. The attention received from North American historiography and the extensive photographic repertoires that accompanied such studies played an interesting role, as they contributed to the diffusion of Romanesque art in Spain, and at the same time encouraged the appetite of dealers, antique dealers, collectors and museums.

Description

In the capital is carved the scene of Samson fighting the lion, two men assist the hero in the fight with the beast, one carrying a mace and the other with a knife. The faces of the figures are of great simplicity, a detail that contrasts with the careful relief that describes the fur of the animal.

Locations

• Unknown date

  region

  Possibly from the province of Palencia, Palencia (Spain)

• 1921

  private collection

  Charles Dikran Kelekian, New York (United States) *

• 1921 - present

  museum

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (United States)