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The picture shows Prophets and other figurations on the Portico de la Gloria, in the narthex of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Influenced by French art and still impregnated with Romanesque elements, the Portico de la Gloria belongs at the very beginning of Spanish Gothic art. Conceived and carried out between 1168 and 1188 by Master Mateo, it combines Spanish traditions with a new conception of the church portal. The figures decorating its piers are column statues. Modelling in the round asserts itself, sculpture frees itself from the architecture. The short, thick-set figures adopt conventional attitudes, but the surprising realism of the faces breaks with the Romanesque type. Master Mateo inaugurated for the prophets a physical type that was to spread up to the time of Sluter.
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