Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar
— eleven domes above the Ebro.
Not only on a wall.
“The basilica stands along the Ebro in central Zaragoza, eleven cupolas and four corner towers above a long baroque façade. Inside, the pillar Mary is said to have left for Santiago in the year 40 is set into the Holy Chapel, dressed each day in a different mantle. Two unexploded civil-war bombs hang from the roof. — from the studio
Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar stands on the south bank of the Ebro River in the centre of Zaragoza, capital of the Aragon region in northeastern Spain. The present church was begun in 1681 under Felipe Sánchez, expanded across the eighteenth century by Ventura Rodríguez, and finished in stages into the early twentieth. The basilica is 130 metres long and 67 metres wide, with eleven cupolas and four corner towers reaching about 80 metres. It carries a long tradition as the first Marian shrine in the Christian world.
The exterior is built in brick and stone in a sober baroque idiom, with white-and-azure tile sheathing the eleven cupolas. The four corner towers were finished later, between 1907 and 1961, completing Ventura Rodríguez's eighteenth-century plan. Inside, Francisco de Goya frescoed two cupolas: Regina Martyrum, painted in 1772 when he was twenty-six, and Adoración del Nombre de Dios. The pillar of the Virgin sits within the Holy Chapel, a temple-within-a-church designed by Rodríguez in jasper, marble, silver, and bronze, completed in 1765.
The calendar centres on the Fiestas del Pilar from 6 to 15 October, closing on 12 October, the patronal feast of Our Lady of the Pillar and the national day of Spain. The Ofrenda de Flores on the feast morning brings hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and townspeople in regional dress to lay flowers building a mantle around the Virgin in the Plaza del Pilar. The Ofrenda de Frutos follows the next day. The pillar itself, by tradition, dates to the apparition of Mary to Saint James in the year 40.