A patristic and medieval view of the Litanies of Loreto on the doors of the Main Sacristy, the Prayer Room and the Chapter House of the Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza

Abstract

The doors of the Main Sacristy, the former Prayer Room (now the Pilarista Museum) and the Chapter House (1866-1868) of the Basílica del Pilar form a sculptural group of six doors, the work of four artists: the sculptor Antonio Palao, the carpenter Manuel Sarte and the painters Bernardino Montañés as the ideologist of the iconographic programme and Dolores Pinós as the delineator of the traces. The purpose of this article is to study the rogations of the Litany of Loreto represented on the aforementioned doors from four perspectives: the divine Maternity of Mary, her virtues, her capacity for assistance and mediation as Coredemptrix, and her superiority over the rest of earthly and heavenly creatures in agreement with her condition as Queen as a direct effect of the patristic and medieval exegesis of metaphorical expressions through the use of Mariological and Christological symbols present in the bas-reliefs of the Pilarista doors. Thus, despite the High Renaissance origin of the iconography of the bas-reliefs, this study recovers the original symbolism of the emblems captured in these sculptural compositions in order to offer a study of the symbolic development of each of them.