“Visigothic Art”: San Juan de Banos
Although I focused on representational art in this survey class, the Visigothic material provided an occasion to look at and describe architecture and ornament. With this end in mind, we turned to the church of San Juan de Banos. An inscription on the arch above the chancel area permits the precise dating of this monument to 661. In the introductory essay to his translation of Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae, Joaquin Martinez Pizarro translates the inscription (page 38, with the Latin in footnote 82). You may find another translation at Arte Preromanico Espagnol.
Flickr has mostly exterior shots, but also some details of the ornamental friezes. A Spanish site, El Romanico en Palencia, offers some good medium-sized photos. But only one photo on Flickr shows a fuzzy image of the chancel arch with its inscription.
