Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity

Keywords: Keywords: Alfonso X, Architecture, Art, Cantigas de Santa María, Middle Ages, Music, Poetry.

Harmonious as a song, the Galician-Portuguese poetry, systematized by the zéjel metric, was the basis of the poetry of Cantigas de Santa Maria, a compilation that contains reports of miracles and praises to the Virgin performed in the second half of the 13th century at the request of the castilian king Alfonso X (1221-1284), creator, sponsor and supervisor of the work. In Cantigas, reality is overcome by imagination without limits and the relation of poetry with two other artistic forms (Music and image) makes it literary support in which the themes of the songs to the Virgin were formed. Music and image share with the poetry a sensitivity capable of expressing in different ways certain reports of miracles or praise. For this article, I present to you the Cantiga 276 of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. From iconographic and architectural analyzes, I realized the association between church bells, the architecture of the sanctuary towers where they are housed and the melody of the Angelus (The Virgin's Touch).