New Bronze Doors for Burgos Cathedral: Six Years of Work and a Large Team

Antonio López, author of the new bronze doors for the Cathedral of Burgos, has described his work as a mix of the everyday, depicted on the two side doors, and the supernatural, which presides over a relief of God on the double-leaf central gate. It is a bronze work of impressive scale that, despite its size, is worked down to the last detail. The artist, constantly smiling and satisfied with the work done, joked about the ease of opening and closing the doors, despite their enormous size. At the inauguration of this work commissioned by the Cathedral Chapter for the VIII Centenary of the Cathedral, celebrated in 2021, the artist from Tomelloso avoided commenting on the fact that the doors will not be installed on the façade of Santa María of the temple for which they were designed, but will be exhibited in the Cathedral Museum. 'Relief is a very complicated technique in bronze and, above all, the largest door has pushed us to the limit of our capacity,' said Antonio López. Workers from several workshops, including the foundry where the bronze was worked, have also collaborated for months. These images are accompanied by vegetation, several animals, including a flock of starlings representing the Holy Spirit, and a relief of the Cathedral of Burgos. The central space is dedicated to the Creation, with a great face of God, a man and a woman on a two-leaf door that weighs four tons and is six meters high. A team of ten people, led by Antonio López and Gonzalo Jiménez, who was for years the secretary general of Las Edades del Hombre, worked on its creation. In fact, he has made several demonstrations for the media to show the effectiveness of the roller system that supports them. Their placement will be in the Cathedral Museum for an indefinite time, although the Archbishop of Burgos, Mario Iceta, has insisted on his desire to 'see the reception they have and, when the time comes, to carry out a project with a heritage impact assessment to request the authorities to install the doors in the place for which they were designed, but without haste'. In fact, no one has asked for anything other than authorization from the Junta of Castilla y León to install the doors in the Chapel of Santiago, in the cathedral museum, where they can be visited for several weeks free of charge. One of the architects who worked on the project, José Manuel Álvarez, explained that for its installation in what they consider a 'provisional location', it has been necessary to resolve anchoring, support, and transfer issues, given the large size and weight of the pieces, in a particularly delicate placement process to avoid causing any damage to the temple. The Burgos prelate, 'a magnificent creation' Antonio López himself, who has defined himself as a 'not very religious man, although deep down we all carry something inside us that has to do with religion', has referred to the Cathedral of Burgos as 'a magnificent creation of man dedicated to God' and has acknowledged that 'reaching that level is difficult, but it can be attempted and then it will be up to others to decide'. This Saturday he reaffirmed this by remembering that the marbles of the Parthenon are not in the Parthenon, but are distributed between London, Paris, and Athens. In fact, the coordinator of the team of ten people who worked with Antonio López on the creation of the bronze doors over the last six years, Gonzalo Jiménez, recalled that when the controversy began about changing the wooden doors for bronze ones, which had been projected a year earlier, the artist told them 'we are going to make the doors the best we can and the rest does not matter'. 'If the work is good, the place does not matter so much, and if it is not good, either,' he said yesterday before the official presentation of his work. The current wooden doors were installed in the 18th century in a new neoclassical façade, a style that has little to do with the original Gothic of the temple. About to turn 90, Antonio López has said that he continues to work daily in his workshop. In the mornings, a granddaughter in a basket; in the afternoons, a crucified Christ. Regardless of its final destination, the doors are intended to be in the future a reminder of the eighth centenary of the laying of the first stone of the temple that has been accumulating elements of different architectural and artistic styles over the centuries. In this case, the result is two side doors, each weighing two tons, with reliefs of the Garden of Eden; one of them with the Child Jesus and the other with the adolescent Virgin Mary.