This is the original design by the French-Flemish artist Guiot de Beaugrant for the main altarpiece of the Santiago (Saint James the Great) Cathedral in Bilbao.

It is known that Guiot de Beaugrant settled in Bilbao around the dates when the Bilbao Council commissioned him with the creation of the cathedral’s main altarpiece, and that the artist signed the final design on 14 September 1533.

“This is the drawing made by Maese Guiot de Beogrant for the altarpiece he is to build for the church of Lord Santiago of this city of Bilbao, that he committed himself to undertake today, the fourteenth of September of 1533, in the presence of myself, Pedro Martines of Bilbao / the Old, scribe of Their Majesties and of the noble city of Bilbao...”, signed by the above-mentioned Pedro Martines and Guiot de Beaugrant.

The project underwent some transformations, as reflected in a new contract signed two years later, in 1535, by which the episodes dedicated to St James the Great were reduced to just two (the Beheading of St James and The Transfiguration); and again in 1543, in which a Fifth Sorrow with “seven or eight characters” was added to the attic of the altarpiece, also including the figures of the “two thieves”. That would explain why the final result is different from this original design kept in our collection. The altarpiece was finished three years later, around March 1546, when there are records that its price had been evaluated and also that around eight hundred ducats of the three thousand the work cost were still owing to the artist.

In any case, either because its aesthetic did not fit in with the new Neo-classical taste, or because it was in danger of collapsing, the altarpiece was disassembled in 1805 and the images were subsequently dispersed. This means that the design in hand is the only remaining testimony recording the approximate appearance it must have had.

In the original design, the altarpiece consisted of five vertical rows separated by four narrower piers. Horizontally, it could be divided into a lower frieze, three tiers and an attic. The central row was twice as wide as the side rows and its central compartment was also twice as high as the other tiers. The intermediary piers between the rows were divided into shell-shaped niches and framed by pilasters decorated with grotesques and banistered columns, except for the lower tier, which had Corinthian shafts decorated in the bottom third. The central body was conceived as a large round chapel, that abutted forward in relation with the rest of the altarpiece and whose entablature was decorated with garlands of intertwined fruits. The second tier was divided into three compartments rounded off at the top by a semicircle and crowned by a dome with the cross on top.

Based on the annotations contained in the design, the iconography was probably as follows: in the frieze, the State of the Church, the Last Supper, the Temporary State and four saints of popular worship in relief. In the first tier, the four Evangelists, four scenes of the life of St James (altered in the contract from 1535) and the main scene, representing St James the Moor Slayer. In the second tier, the four Fathers of the Church and the four stories of St James (altered in the contract from 1535). In the third tier, St Sebastian, the twelve Apostles, St Roch, and a figure of the Saviour at the centre. In the attic there were angels, reliefs depicting the crowning with thorns and the carrying of the cross, and everything topped with a cross with Mary Magdalene at its foot. The attic underwent some alterations in the 1543 contract with the incorporation of the two thieves and theFifth Sorrow at the centre, forcing the cross to be raised and the dome to be suppressed.

Several images still exist from the altarpiece dismantled in 1805, all of them coloured at a later stage. In the same church we can find the four sculptures of the Fathers of the Church with their characteristic attributes (St Hieronymus, St Ambrose, St Augustine, and St Gregory the Great), originally placed in the second tier of the entablature, and currently in the Sacristy, and the so-called Cristo del Amor (Christ of Love), that would have topped the structure. The Museo Vasco (Basque Museum, former Archaeological Museum) possesses a figure of Christ whose dimensions would suggest that it could have been part of The Transfiguration, an angel—possibly from the attic—and another two images from the group of the Fifth Sorrow, as well as twelve saints that would in fact correspond to the twelve apostles located in the third tier of the ensemble, whose current location is the Luno Church, where they would have ended up after the dismantling of the altarpiece.

The plan Guiot followed to create the altarpiece is related with the main altarpiece of the Constables chapel in the Cathedral of Burgos and with the one at the Cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada (made between 1537 and 1539 by Damián Forment (ca. 1480-1540).