Quotes
“In the Cathedral of Majorca, nothing gets in the way. Your eyes can see from anywhere the whole of its immensity. In the majority of other cathedrals the columns can disturb you, they are an obstruction; you always have two in front of your eyes. When you come out from the Cathedral of Majorca, you can hardly remember if you have seen any!...”.
Joan Rubió i Bellver
“Every monument usually has a distinctive quality that is shown as predominant amongst all the others. This characteristic quality in the Cathedral of Majorca is its proportion, the harmonic relation between the dimensions, inside or outside... And it is manifested and well known that the intention of this Cathedral to be brilliant and full of light was the main idea of the person who first thought of it”.
Antoni Gaudí
“1230. They entered the city and it was conquered. To place in front of all the things that honour God and his divine worship the Lord King ordered the building of the Church-Cathedral. The necessary land was given in front of his Royal palace, under the invocation of Our Lady, whose image was brought by the king and was given for the major altarpiece”.
G. Terrassa
“The result of 400 years of work has been extraordinary. The Cathedral, which is one of the biggest cathedrals of Europe, has a rectangular shape with three naves, eighteen side chapels, thirty-two windows and seven rose windows. The feeling of verticality is generated by the buttress that holds it. It occupies an area of 6.600 m2. It can house about five thousand people. The expanse of the fourteen octagonal columns is only surpassed by the Duomo in Milan”.
Bernat Julià
“Seen from the historical castle Bellver, Jovellanos – who was there in captivity for more than five years – thought about a great admiral nave between little corvettes. Lavedan used to compare it with a monumental stone organ, and some writer has called it a sumptuous amber forecastle anchored in the coast... the result is a building of enormous proportions in its length and width and a predominance of vertical lines, different from the ordinary medieval temples. Its originality starts with its angular floor, it has few lines, no curves, all the angles are straight from the ground level and it has three elements that go from East to West: the Trinity chapel, which is rectangular and small; the wide main altar or Royal chapel and the huge block of naves”.
Pere Antoni Matheu
“If in the general idea of the gothic gender you can fit excellence, refinement, luxury and elegance, the side entrance called Mediodia or Mirador has all these characteristics, which gives value and renown to any name”.
Pau Piferrer i Josep Maria Quadrado
“From the first impression one has, the effect that causes its immense volume increases because of the fact of being able to contemplate the impact. At the beginning it seems rather empty, but this point gives greatness and majesty... H.C., with his vast knowledge about these matters, was completely astonished. First of all I thought that I was going to burst forth in exclamations of admiration, but fortunately the reaction that this marvel produced was the opposite; he was astonished”.
Ch. W. Wood
“The visitant will see in the Cathedral the best works of Christianity. The affirmation will seem a bit exaggerated to those that do not know or have never heard of it; but to those that have been there this affirmation will be an established truth because this cathedral from the architectural point of view is one of the first ten churches of the whole world. Cram, the great American architect, creator of the cathedral of New York, declared, after serious technical studies, that it is one of the three or four first ones”.
Chamberlin
“With the time the stone, specially the part exposed on the sea side, has acquired a pretty shining golden-yellow colour which gives a delightful glow to the whole building; particularly when it is illuminated by the sun a charming hot and light shadow is lit that can only be given to the stone by the weather and the south”.
Arxiduc Lluís Salvador
“If you enter very early in the Cathedral one day, have a look at it reflected in the font of holy water, like the Cathedral of Madame Bovary. The high naves are terrific. All the inside is mixed and supported by weak columns like lanes. Going down the four steps from the Almoina entrance, involuntary one frowns and shrinks as in fear. The greatness seems untenable, unstable, a kind of balance that cannot last.., and it has been standing there for seven hundred years. The problem of closing up a big space with less stone has been solved by the humble imagination and masters of the work of the Cathedral”.
Miquel S. Oliver
“This temple is a great flower from the garden of humanity. Very few times have men used material to spiritualize it so much. They are joyful moments of the world. Moments where mysticism is crystallized in a work of art where thought is confined and the soul takes shape. The Cathedral of Palma is an island that has been born in the heart of another island. So much so, that one can find oneself in Majorca as well as in the Cathedral. The isolation is so enormous and peace is so definitive that listening to the murmur of the sea you can imagine that you are on a marvellous island navigating as in a boat”.
Santiago Rusiñol
“When I had finished breakfast I was on my way to the Cathedral of Palma to hear the organist practise. I was inspired with that gothic interior, evoking beautiful architectural forms. The light broke through in the darkness from the windows, like a red flame. At that time the cathedral was still in silence. Music of diffusive light from the windows inspired my vision with a diversity of forms”.
Joan Miró
“More impressive than airy, more moderate than majestic, more severe than rich, more magnificent than delicate, the title has made it deserve the most beautiful victory over the spirit in stone that has ever been seen during the Middle Ages. Its privileged location, on the front line, on the border of the city’s Roman wall; the pale colour of the stones; the rhythm of full and empty spaces created by the vigorous buttresses; the outstanding constructive audacity of its fabric; the never seen height of its vaults; the audacious thrust of its arches and the rush of lightness of its columns; the beautiful effects of the light of the rose and stained glass windows and – paradoxically – the greatness of the bareness of the surfaces give the building, according to the opinion of some critics, the category of one of the three or four temples most interesting from in the whole world”.
Baltasar Coll i Tomàs
“The Cathedral bells
have sung the Hail Mary
seven, eight, nine times or ten:
Nobody knows how many.
The road was calling me
To see if my love was to be”.
Joan Pons
CATEDRAL
The waves kneeling down
The muscles of the wind
The vertical towers like hats
The Cathedral hanging from a bright star
The Cathedral which is a great field of wheat
With wheat as prayers
Far away
Far away
The mast
The masts tacking the horizon
And in the ingenuous beaches
The new waves sing matins
The cathedral is a plane made from stone
That pushes up to break the thousand mooring lines
That imprison it
The cathedral resonant with an applause
Or like a kiss
Jorge Luis Borges
“It is the most beautiful victory of the spirit in material that the Middle Age has contemplated”.
Pierre Lavedan
“The Cathedral of Majorca is the gothic building with the most spacious naves and the one that has the highest and most slender columns, and this is the reason why the Cathedral enclosed with less quantity of materials seen from the inside produces a greater volume of useful space. From all the gothic churches with three naves, this is the one that has the most high side nave possible without absorbing light or height from the central nave”.
Joan Rubió
“One of the peculiarities of the Cathedral that makes it unique alongside other similar buildings is its location and that it is raised in a privileged historical enclave; it is where the core of the city has been since the Roman colonisation”.
Catalina Cantarellas
“It emerges as a gigantic stone nave on the medieval walls reflecting its splendid foundations over the blue latin sea. Presiding over Palma’s bay it looks like a welcome and reception extended from the inhabitants of the island to all who approach the city from the coast”.
Francisco Suárez
“… this feminine ship is the Cathedral, which is a gothic model of the Mediterranean, one that has the highest columns in the world and the largest rose window of all the gothic churches of the world, also… enter, stand in the middle of the central nave and look upwards: you will feel a reversed sense of vertigo…”.
Maria Antònia Oliver
