Construyendo la Casa de dios. la metáfora arquitectónica y El Arca Mística

In "The Architectural Metaphor in Western Medieval Artistic Culture: From the Cornerstone to The Mystic Ark," I identify and analyze the source texts for the use of architectural metaphor in medieval culture, and trace their use up through the twelfth century to most ambitious use of architectural metaphor anywhere in the West up until that time: Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark. Despite the widespread use of architectural metaphor, no one has ever written on the subject before, to the best of my knowledge. The earliest appearance of architectural metaphor in the Bible is a strictly literary one. That is, it is highly unlikely that it was part of any broader contemporary artistic culture, that it affected the conception, creation, use, or understanding of works of visual art and architecture of its time. It was only the Christian tendency toward sermonizing that brought about the ever-increasing elaboration of the architectural metaphor from the simple to the complex, from the cornerstone to The Mystic Ark; and that allowed the architectural metaphor to permeate the boundaries of Scripture and scriptural writing to become a visual image itself; as, for example, in The Mystic Ark. This visual state of the architectural metaphor is, perhaps, more effective than the verbal state in exercising the intrinsic dynamic of the metaphor in that it goes beyond the literal reference or exegetical reading to engage the reader/listener/viewer and compel him or her to actively participate in the intellectual exchange of the artistic experience. This is because the mind of the participant must commit itself to a further level of engagement in the dynamic of the metaphor by the very necessity of identifying the metaphor as such in the first place. The paper concludes by asking if architectural metaphors were operative in such medieval works of art as the image of Francis holding up the church in The Dream of Innocent III in the church of San Francesco in Assisi, the piers of the cloister of the monastery of Moissac, the eighth canon table of the Ebbo Gospels, the House of Heaven and in the House of Hell of the tympanum of Sainte-Foi at Conques, certain scenes of the Tower of Babel, the façade of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, and the main east-west axis of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, from the Infancy Window to west central portal.