Inside Cádiz Cathedral: An Art Nouveau Vintage Travel Poster from Our Own Photograph
Stand low in the nave of Cádiz Cathedral and look up, and the building arranges itself around one point: the honey-coloured stone dome over the crossing, coffered all the way to a small bright oculus at the top. Below it the apse arch opens onto the high altar, the pulpits face each other across the nave, and a star of coloured marble lies on the floor at your feet. This poster keeps that view and finishes it the way a Belle Époque sheet would: ivory, teal and gold, white lilies, and a name in large letters across the top.
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A photograph, held as a poster. The vintage travel series takes a real view and gives it the manners of an early European railway sheet. Here the source is a photograph of the interior of Cádiz Cathedral by Sapiens Verbum. The poster is the interpretation. It is not the photograph, and it does not pretend to be.
Location: Cathedral of the Holy Cross over the Waters (Catedral de Santa Cruz sobre las Aguas), Plaza de la Catedral, Cádiz, Andalusia
Built: 1722 to 1838
Subject: Nave, dome, apse arch and high altar seen from low in the nave
Photograph: Inside Cádiz Cathedral
Poster: Sapiens Verbum
Work: Art Nouveau travel poster
A cathedral that took 116 years
The cathedral was begun in 1722 to designs by the architect Vicente Acero. Acero left the project, and the work passed through other hands, Gaspar Cayón, Miguel Olivares and Manuel Machuca, before Juan Daura completed it in 1838. A building that takes 116 years cannot keep one taste. It was planned as a Baroque church, it picked up Rococo along the way, and it was finished in the Neoclassical style. The money came from the trade between Spain and America, which is why it was known as the Cathedral of the Americas.
The dome that the poster puts at the top of the sheet is the one over the transept. Outside it is covered in yellow glazed ceramic, the golden dome that shows over the roofs of the old city. Inside it is stone, with sculptures by Cosme Velázquez. Below the church lies the crypt, built around 1732, where the composer Manuel de Falla and the writer José María Pemán, both born in Cádiz, are buried. The cathedral has been a Bien de Interés Cultural since 1931.
The Art Nouveau travel poster
The photograph stays as the bones. The dome stays at the top, the apse arch and the high altar stay on the central axis, and the two wooden pulpits, the brass finials of the railings and the star in the marble floor are all where the lens put them. What the poster adds is what a sheet for a station wall needed and an interior photograph did not: a frame, period lettering, and a palette of antique ivory, deep teal, sage green and golden ochre.
The lettering is CÁDIZ in large deep-teal capitals on an ivory cartouche, with CATEDRAL beneath it and ESPAÑA in red. White lilies climb from the upper corners, green stems run down both sides, and along the foot of the sheet a teal band of waves meets a golden scallop shell at the centre. The view itself sits inside an arch, so the poster loses the very top of the vault and some of the side walls, and it also leaves out the red and green banners that hang on the piers in the photograph. The stone is warmed toward gold. Cádiz is still Cádiz. The border is the only fiction.
The photograph behind the poster
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The source is that view, taken with a wide lens from low in the nave and built on symmetry. The dome and its oculus close the top of the frame, the apse arch frames the shrine of the high altar, and the two wooden pulpits answer each other on the left and right. A red banner and a green one hang on the piers, brass finials cap the railings in the foreground, and the star-shaped marble floor leads the eye in. The light does the rest: warm lamps on the stone against the cooler light of the windows. It is not a survey plate and not a library record. It was taken by Sapiens Verbum, who also made the design and the interpretation. A buyer of the poster is not getting the photograph. They are getting the travel sheet made from it.
Seeing it for yourself
The cathedral stands on the Plaza de la Catedral in the old city. Go down to the crypt, where the round, low space under the church is a complete change from the height of the nave, and then climb the clock tower, which is open to visitors and looks out over the roofs of Cádiz and the bay. From outside, the same building is the subject of other photographs on this blog: sunset over Cádiz Cathedral from the Levante tower, the full moon over the cathedral from the Campo del Sur, dramatic skies over the Campo del Sur and the Plaza de San Juan de Dios at dusk.
The series continues with other posters made from photographs: Redes, Ares, a Galician fishing port and Ferrol and the Juan Sebastián Elcano, and with the European cities, Prague, Old Town Square and the Týn Church, Amsterdam, Dam Square and the Nieuwe Kerk and Vienna, The Staatsoper and the Ringstrasse.
Bring the dome of Cádiz Cathedral to your wall as a vintage travel poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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💬 Over to you: The photograph records the nave. The poster sends you there. Which one would you hang? Tell us in the comments.
More from the city in the Cádiz series, and more posters in the Vintage Travel Poster series.
Sources
Wikipedia — Cádiz Cathedral
Fascinating Spain — The golden dome that guards the charming Cádiz
Inside Cádiz Cathedral
Sapiens Verbum — Cádiz Cathedral interior Art Nouveau travel poster
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