Oviedo

A discovery in 1968, in a back wall of the presbitery annex in the church of the former Benedictine convent of San Vicente, also known as Santa María la Real de la Corte, in Oviedo capital, brought to the light two baptismal fonts, one inside the other, during the renovation work being done in this church. The then parish priest, don Ramón Iglesias, released the finding in a separata of the Boletín de Estudios Asturianos (BIDEA, 1970: 429-434). There he identifies the two objects: 1)a "conventional" baptismal font of red stone, consisting of a hemispherical basin with a single floral motif and a side drain, and a plain cylindrical pedestal base; the second object, 2)a rectangular box-like font of polished marble, ornamented around the rim with a stylised floral pattern. Further information on this font has been made available by the current parish priest, don Laurentino Gómez Montes in the parish' own website [cf. infra]. He informs that the font was made accessible -as of March 29, 1999, Palm Sunday- and includes the expert opinion of several people on second, the rectangular font. He cites Emilio Olavarri Goicoechea and his idfentification of the ornamental motif as "kymation lesbico", which would date the font to the time of emperor Augustus [† 14 A.D.], and that, lacking a cover, it would not have been a sarcophagus but rather the trough or basin of a fountain ["pila" as well in Spanish], what the Romans called a "carda". Don Laurentino also cites the opinion of Helmunt Schlunk, specialist in the pre-Romanesque art of Asturias and director of the Instituto Arqueológico Alemán of Madrid, who thinks that it is indeed a baptismal font that would have been used in the Visigothic period, 6th or 7th century, although the ornamentation is 4th-century. Regarding the possible origin of the object, don Laurentino cites expert opinion that identifies the pink marble as Portuguese, which would probably located the origin of the font in the town of Mérida, having arrived in Asturias, as did other such materials, in the 4th-5th century. [WEB site: www.terlecable.es/personales/arpucorte/Corte/indexcorte.htm]. [We are grateful to Ana Belén de los Toyos de Castro, of the Biblioteca del Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos for bringing this font to our attention and for supplying all the documentation on it]