Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

Romanesque ornament celebrated all living things—animals, fish, men and women of the day at their work; plants of the earth in branch, leaf, fruit, as well as figures of the Passion and the personification of the demonic unseen which thus became as real as the rest. Anywhere, from the capital of a double column, or the base of a font, or the frontal of an altar, or the almost hidden groin of a twining stairway, suddenly one could recognize a common face in stone gazing forth as an angel, a fiend, a saint, one of the Holy Family, in constant reminder of how the world went, and how in his own essence one carried these, containing all: the capacity for the divine; for evil; for safety, either through imitation in prayer and act, or perdition through mortal caprice. The powers of piety were inescapable, whose ideal persisted in familiar expression from the times of the earliest religious pilgrimage until, eight centuries later, interpretations of the essential forces of life would take a new turn through the physical sciences.