The Romanesque cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos has long merited a scholarly study on the scale of Palace of the Mind: The Cloister of Silos and Spanish Sculpture of the Twelfth Century. Housed in a Benedictine monastery whose own history is deeply entwined with that of the Castilian kingdom, the cloister holds an enduring place in modern narratives of the genesis of Romanesque art. Its importance is owed both to the precocious, if somewhat controversial, documentation traditionally associated with it and to the exceptional sophistication of its sculpted capitals and pier reliefs, especially those of the cloister’s first campaign. These early sculptures, famously identified as a touchstone of the emergent Romanesque in Meyer Schapiro’s 1939 Art Bulletin article “From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos” (21, no. 4 (1939): 312–74), continue to be invoked in the historiography of Spanish Romanesque art. This discourse is to some extent still inflected by competing nationalist claims over the primacy of certain French or Spanish monuments and the desire to assert Castilian centrality in the emergence and dissemination of the Romanesque in Iberia. The sculptures of the cloister’s second campaign are more conventional than those of the first, but their extensive interconnections with sculpture produced throughout Spain’s northern kingdoms in the latter half of the twelfth century, including such canonical monuments as the Pórtico de la Gloria of Santiago de Compostela, have yet to be clearly elucidated.

To study the Silos cloister as a total work, as Palace of the Mind sets out to do, has the potential not just to refine current understanding of the monument, but also to clarify its place within a dynamic phase of northern Iberian history in which the making and meaning of art were revolutionized by war and territorial expansion, religious and cultural redefinition, and newly intensified engagement with Europe north of the Pyrenees. The first monograph in English on the Silos cloister, Palace of the Mind approaches its topic with a thoroughness and gravitas appropriate to its subject and reflective of Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo’s decades of research on the site. The book’s generous twelve-by-ten-inch dimensions and its 302 illustrations, three appendices, and lengthy bibliography provide a sound framework for the methodical, detailed presentation of the cloister sculptures around which the book is built. Its structure is quintessentially monographic: after a very brief introduction sketching out the treatment of the monastery and its cloister by past generations of scholars, it presents the cloister’s two major sculptural campaigns in successive parts, each broken into chapters on history, construction, style, iconography, and artistic character and context.

Part 1, treating the cloister’s first sculptural campaign, opens with an account of the monastery’s earliest history: it describes its foundation; its reform under Abbot Domingo, who would quickly be canonized and enshrined as the patron of the abbey now bearing his name; and the construction of a new church and other monastic buildings under the series of abbots who followed. The first two chapters and the first section of chapter 3 also lay out del Álamo’s relatively early dating for the first cloister campaign, which assigns the capitals of the north and east galleries and three of the cloister’s four pairs of pier reliefs to a period of consolidation under the abbacy of Domingo’s immediate successor, Abbot Fortunius, between 1073 and circa 1100. This chronology is based largely on monastic tradition describing Santo Domingo’s burial in the cloister after his death in 1073, and on a consecration in 1088, assumed by del Álamo to pertain to the Romanesque upper church adjacent to the cloister.

The validity of this dating, and the scholarly disagreements that surround it, remain a point of emphasis throughout Palace of the Mind, governing many subsequent lines of argument even on points to which it does not seem essential. To some extent, the preoccupation with chronology is understandable, since an early date has been central to Silos’s claim to primacy in the rise of Romanesque art in Spain. Yet given this, and especially because so much of the evidence deployed in its support seems open to interpretation, one might have hoped for a fuller assessment of the evidence for and against it. Instead, the argument turns habitually to authors, such as Walter Muir Whitehill and Isidro Bango, whose scholarship promotes an early date, but glosses fairly lightly over others, such as José Luis Senra, who have attempted to make a case for a later one (Walter Muir Whitehill, “The Destroyed Romanesque Church of Silos,” The Art Bulletin 14 (1932): 316–43; Isidro Bango Torviso, “La iglesia Antigua de Silos: Del prerománico al románico pleno,” El románico en Silos. IX centenario de la consagración de la iglesia y claustro, Santo Domingo de Silos: Abadía de Silos, 1990, 317–76; José Luis Senra Gabriel y Galán, “El Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos y la secuencia temporal de una singular arquitectura ornamentada,” Siete maravillas del románico español, Santander: Fundación Santa María la Real, 2008, 193–229). A book review is not the place to weigh in on the fine points of this debate; suffice it to say that a heavy emphasis on chronological disputes that are in some ways unresolvable risks overshadowing the other, arguably more consequential questions that are profitably explored in this book.

One such aspect, also examined in the substantial third chapter, is the preponderance in the cloister’s early galleries of imagery that appears to have been chosen in order to emphasize themes and practices associated with specific locations there. Thus in the north gallery, the traditional location of Domingo’s first burial, del Álamo reads the birds, lions, harpies, and sirens on the capitals not merely as fantastical imagery, but as polyvalent, symbolic creatures whose allusions to resurrection and protection from evil were consistent with their funerary context and intensified by their juxtaposition with the themes of death and resurrection found in the framing pier reliefs of the Deposition and the Journey to Emmaus. In the east gallery, she interprets a wider range of creatures, including chained apes and battling riders as well as animals restrained by interlace, as evoking themes of discipline and self-control, a moralizing tenor consonant with their location near the chapter house.

These arguments are well articulated and erudite, though also somewhat hermetic, relying primarily on time-honored medieval texts like the Physiologus and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies without extended reference to comparative and contextual evidence that might further reinforce them. Such arguments have emerged in recent scholarship on cloister design—the essays in Peter Klein’s Mittelalterliche Kreuzgang (Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2003) come to mind—but as models they seem to have had little impact here. That said, del Álamo’s overarching claim that the cloister’s animal and interlace capitals are in their own way as meaningful as the Christological narrative reliefs that flank them is important for understanding both the sculptural program at Silos specifically and the design of other Romanesque cloisters.

Del Álamo also gives thoughtful treatment to the cloister’s six early pier reliefs, which contain scenes of the Passion and the Resurrection. Building on the article by Schapiro (whose tutelage and example she acknowledges more than once), as well as on work by more recent scholars such as Karl Werckmeister (Otto Karl Werckmeister, “The Emmaus and Thomas Pillar of the Cloister of Silos,” El románico en Silos. IX centenario de la consagración de la iglesia y claustro, Santo Domingo de Silos: Abadía de Silos, 1990, 149–72), she mines biblical and liturgical texts to show how the reliefs reflected local monastic ideals, including the shift from the Visigothic or “Mozarabic” rite once in force at Silos to the Roman liturgy that was gradually imposed throughout the Spanish kingdoms at the end of the eleventh century. Her presentation of this shift as adaptive and inclusive, especially in its preservation of familiar elements not expressly obviated by the Roman reform, intelligently updates Schapiro’s argument, which presented the dichotomies of indigenous/international and sacred/secular in more absolute terms.

Chapter 3 ends with a section titled “The Art of the First Cloister Sculpture,” which aims to elucidate the production dynamics and artistic roots of the sculptors involved in the first campaign. The formalistic approach that predominates here is well supported by crisp description and precise analytical language in suggesting the cloister’s potential stylistic ties both within Spain and in Languedoc and Burgundy, or what del Álamo describes as the “polyglot” (150) culture surrounding the cloister’s production. Although extended perhaps more than needed by periodic returns to chronological issues, this section makes a good case for the Silos artists’ awareness of local and international artistic currents, an aspect well deserving of further study.

Part 2 presents the sculpture of the cloister’s second campaign in the context of architectural additions made to the monastery over the course of the twelfth century. Here, the drive to promote an early date for this workshop’s sculpture lends tension to the analysis, requiring similarly early dates to be assigned to the structures adjacent to the cloister and the most important document potentially connected with this second campaign, a budget dated 1158, to be read as concrete evidence of very early construction. Del Álamo interprets this document’s reference to “disorder” (232) within the monastery and the resultant intervention of outside authorities to confirm numerous monastic expenditures—including some for “the works in the cloister and monastic buildings” (232)—as a sign of the probable disruption of work on the cloister. She concludes that the south and west galleries and sculptures were completed largely before this point and the cloister’s upper story completed after it.

The chief consequence of this conclusion, which dates the second campaign earlier than many scholars have suggested, is to place this work in a position of primacy, reorienting its relationship to the network of monuments with which it traditionally has been compared. For example, the Infancy cycle of the west gallery is described as “probably contemporary” (243) with those on the west portal of Chartres, while the Tree of Jesse pier becomes a precursor to the Jesse trumeau of the Pórtico de la Gloria at Santiago de Compostela. It is not that the early date for Silos is impossible, but rather that the inconclusive evidence on which this chronology is based is insufficient to risk distorting the representation of the cloister’s relationships with other monuments.

Chronological questions aside, much more is accomplished in the 122-page fifth chapter. Attributing the sculptures of the second campaign to between two and four primary artists, del Álamo documents this workshop’s efforts to create a smooth transition between campaigns by intermixing abaci and baskets and by repeating motifs from one campaign to the next. The extensive iconographic analysis in this chapter suggests that this atelier shared the sensitivity of the first campaign’s artists to the selection and placement of imagery. In this case, the atelier introduced apostolic narrative scenes reflective of monastic life and ritual into the west gallery and emphasized Marian themes both here and in the reliefs on the southwest pier. Some of these arguments might have benefited from fuller comparison with other Iberian cloisters in which Benedictine ideals appear to have shaped imagery in similar ways, but overall they offer much to consider regarding the relationship between cloister imagery and monastic ideology.

A welcome addition to this study is the careful analysis of monastic sculptures from less-studied areas of the cloister, such as the capitals of the cloister’s upper story, discussed toward the end of chapter 5, and the sculptures surviving from the monastery’s lost north porch, addressed in chapter 6. Analyzing the iconography of both ensembles as specifically reflective of their monastic and ritual settings helps to resettle them into the history of the site and offers significant insight into their potential reception and meaning.

Chapter 7, “The Artistic Ambiance of the Second Cloister Style,” closes both part 2 and the book, exploring the second workshop’s stylistic and iconographic roots in classical, Byzantine, and Burgundian traditions before turning to its relationships with sculpture produced at other sites throughout northern Iberia in the second half of the twelfth century. The monuments surveyed here range widely, from those in the monastery’s home bishopric of Burgos to others as far away as southwest Navarra and Galicia; even without reconciling the chronological picture, the discussion offers an excellent sense of the fertile interconnections that linked Silos with other sculptures of the late Romanesque tradition in Spain.

Palace of the Mind offers much to the student of the Spanish Romanesque: abundant, informative photographs (many taken by the author); precise, descriptive formal analysis; and thoughtful discussion of the linkages between cloister iconography and monastic belief and practice. It provides a sound foundation for continued study of this important Iberian monument and a substantial contribution to the scholarship on Romanesque art in Spain.