CISPAC researcher and University of Santiago de Compostela professor Francisco Prado-Vilar presents a new interpretation of the so-called Column of Ulysses, a Romanesque marble piece from the former Porta Francíxena, currently preserved in the Cathedral Museum. The research, published in Románico Digital, reconstructs the literary and iconographic sources employed by the Compostela workshop in the 12th century and allows the column to be understood as a Christian reworking of the Odyssey, created to relate the journey of the Greek hero to the experience of pilgrims arriving in Santiago.
The presence of Ulysses on the Cathedral façade was not intended as a literal illustration of Homer’s poem. In the medieval tradition, the hero could be interpreted as omnium peregrinus, the traveler who crosses a world of dangers and seductions without losing sight of the return to his true homeland. His journey thus became an image of the pilgrim’s spiritual condition and could be associated with the Apostle’s own Atlantic journey to Compostela.
The central band depicts Ulysses’ encounter with the sirens, but the sculptor abandons the conventional formula of the hero tied to the mast. The scene concentrates its meaning in a gesture in which Ulysses places his arms around the head of one of his companions and covers his ear to protect him from the deadly song. Wax, identified by Christian tradition with the Gospels, becomes the instrument that enables resistance to deceptive voices. Around the sailors appear different types of sirens and a figure with features of Scylla, associated in medieval moral interpretation with the violence of desire. The scene also entered into dialogue with the figure of King David on the former façade, who overcame another siren through his music.
The study’s main innovation is the identification of the episode of Circe in the upper register. Here, a warrior and his fallen horse are beset by birds, animals, and hybrid creatures surrounding a female figure. Comparison with texts by Isidore of Seville and Boethius, as well as with 12th-century manuscripts, makes it possible to interpret the scene as a representation of the power of the passions to degrade human nature. The sculptor transformed Ulysses’ escape from Circe’s dominion into a combat featuring a medieval knight and also inspired by models derived from Roman sarcophagi.
The spiral arrangement of the reliefs is an integral part of the work’s meaning. The viewer must walk around the column and follow with their gaze a narrative that rises from the vessel at its base to scenes of temptation, metamorphosis, and combat. This physical journey embodies Ulysses’ polytropos nature—the man of many turns and transformations—and activates an experience involving sight, touch, sound, and the movement of the viewer themselves.
The research is complemented by The Atlantic Odyssey. An audiovisual journey through the Column of Ulysses in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral , a video essay created from a digital twin of the piece. The model was generated through photogrammetry using numerous high-resolution images and subsequently processed and optimized by Alexandre González Rivas at the multidisciplinary KosmoTech_1200 laboratory (USC-CISPAC), under the scientific direction of Prado-Vilar. The virtualization makes it possible to control the lighting, camera movements, and the sculpture’s relationship with space, freeing it from the static contemplation imposed by its current location in the Cathedral Museum.
The video transforms the exploration of the column into a journey by water. The camera moves through the water and follows the spiral course of the reliefs, from the vessel at the base to the sirens, the metamorphoses associated with Circe, and the upper register. The undulations of the marble become waves from which bodies, animals, and monstrous creatures emerge, recovering the poetics of metamorphosis and the immersive dimension of the work.
You can find further information in the explanatory dossier accompanying the video and the iconographic research dossier.