Palma Cathedral
— — the morning the rose window lands on the wall.
Not only on a wall.
“La Seu sits on a sandstone bluff above the bay, where a mosque stood before it. Construction began in 1229 under James I of Aragon and finished only in the seventeenth century. The west rose window is one of the largest in Gothic Europe, and twice a year, on the second of February and the eleventh of November, the sun lines up so the rose lays itself on the wall above the opposite window. Gaudí worked on the interior. Miquel Barceló did the chapel. The light does the rest.
Palma Cathedral, 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.
Palma Cathedral, known in Catalan as La Seu, is the Roman Catholic cathedral of the Diocese of Mallorca, set on the seafront of Palma de Mallorca above the Parc de la Mar. James I of Aragon ordered the cathedral after the 1229 Christian conquest of the island, on the site of the main mosque of Medina Mayurqa. The nave stands about 44 metres high, among the tallest of any Gothic cathedral in Europe. Work continued through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the principal facade was rebuilt after an earthquake in 1851.
The west rose window measures about 12.5 metres across, set with around 1,200 pieces of stained glass, and is sometimes called the Gothic Eye for its scale. On the second of February (Candlemas) and the eleventh of November (Saint Martin's), the sunrise aligns so the projected rose lands directly beneath the smaller rose on the opposite wall, briefly stacking the two as an eight of light. The phenomenon, known locally as the Festival of Light, draws crowds before dawn.
The cathedral is built almost entirely of golden Santanyí sandstone quarried on the south of the island. Between 1904 and 1914, Antoni Gaudí remodelled the presbytery, moved the choir stalls, hung a wrought-iron canopy over the altar, and added wrought ironwork and ceramic detail. A century later, the Mallorcan painter Miquel Barceló completed the ceramic intervention in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, completed in 2007, with reliefs of loaves, fishes, and tidal forms in fired clay.