They have been blessed first with a mass and then illuminated at sunset. From now on, the four white marble figures that have crowned four of the towers of the Sagrada Família since October, will form part, with all the honors and necessary liturgy, of the expiatory temple, conceived by Antoni Gaudí as a kind of biblical stone writings. The figures represent the evangelists John, Matthew, Mark and Luke as described in the Apocalypse.
An eagle represents John, a lion is the iconic image of Mark, a bull refers to Luke and, lastly and most confusingly, a winged being is the figure placed in honor of Matthew, a being that, according to theologians, should not be mistaken for an angel.
After the blessing, the figures have been illuminated, but The play of lights that neighbors and visitors will be able to see every night is not what was initially planned when the works are completed. of the temple, on an uncertain date before 2030. The figures are mounted on a polyhedron. The purpose is that a beam of light emerges from the inside of each of these pedestals to illuminate the cross that will crown the central tower of the Sagrada Família, dedicated to Jesus.
The tetramorphs contemplate the city from 135 meters high. The central tower will reach 172.5 meters high when it covers waters.
The origin of the four figures
The inclusion of the eagle, the bull, the lion and the winged being among all the sculpted figures of the Sagrada Família and, above all, the fact that they are located in a preferential place deserves a brief look back at the history of art.
Its description appears in a very dreamlike way in the different versions of the Apocalypse, the last of the books of the New Testament. They are sometimes described as beasts with dozens of eyes. When a canon of the Bible was finally established in the 4th century, the ban was somehow opened for its use in sacred art.. You can follow its trail through late medieval art. The four evangelists appear in their animal forms in the Merovingian sarcophagus of Bishop Angilberto, in Jouarre, and also in the Carolingian evangelary of Godescalco. Therefore, the Romanesque arrived, and it was customary to include them in the heavenly court that accompanies Jesus Christ.
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With the arrival of Gothic art, this type of iconography declined. and gave way to other types of scenes, with a heavenly court full of angels and, also, with some more effective and intimidating scenes of the Last Judgment. The Sagrada Família, one could say, echoes that Romanesque tradition a bit, but when it comes down to it, the temple’s achievement is that it practically leaves out nothing sculpturally, since there is so much that it narrates that all the symbols of sacred art are found throughout it. throughout history.
The figures were blessed at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday in a ceremony open to the believing public, but from the most panoramic perspective of the history of religions they even have more possible routes. The bull, the lion and the eagle are recurring images in Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythology.to such an extent that some academic theses maintain that the different authors of the Apocalypse did nothing more than make use of these traditions, so that John would be a reformulation of the falcon that represents Horus and the lioness Sekmet would have been reborn as Mark.