13th-Century Panels of Twin Bishops Peláez and Urtx Debut in Urgell Museum

Two 13th-century wooden panels depicting twin-like bishops from the Diocese of Urgell are now on display in the chapel of La Pietat at the Diocesan Museum of Urgell, which is undergoing renovation.

The panels portray consecutive bishops Abril Peláez and Pere d’Urtx, dressed in full pontifical vestments, complete with croziers and mitres. One wears a deep bottle-green chasuble, the other a vivid red one. Nearly identical in appearance—differing only in clothing colour and the condition of their wooden supports—the figures were salvaged from wooden tombs just before destruction during early cathedral restoration works around 1915.

Abril Peláez, invested in 1257, holds historical significance as the first known Galician bishop of Urgell and the first imposed by the Roman curia. He arrived to resolve tensions from his predecessor Ponç de Vilamur’s deposition amid scandals—whether real or fabricated by agents of the Count of Foix—which had divided the canons and drawn support from Viscount de Vilamur’s troops. The dispute even forced the prominent Dominican Ramon de Penyafort to seek refuge at Castellciutat castle under the Count of Foix’s protection. As an outsider unaligned with local factions, Peláez ushered in a more peaceful pontificate.

His successor, Pere d’Urtx, is renowned for signing the Pariatges—two arbitrations in 1278 and 1288 that ended renewed conflicts with the Counts of Foix and laid the foundations for Andorra’s co-principality. In 1284, six years after the first Pariatge, he commissioned the Chapel of Sant Salvador at the base of the cathedral’s north transept tower in La Seu d’Urgell. Two years later, he made a pious donation for the souls of himself and Peláez, with whom he shared strong rapport. Their remains were interred in separate tombs there, now the cathedral baptistery. Peláez’s granite monolithic tomb stands at the museum entrance, marked with his death date, though empty.

Some 250 years after Peláez’s death, the Urgell canons commissioned new wooden tombs to honour both bishops. They hired Joanot de Pau, a deaf-mute painter from Cervera whose wife handled negotiations—despite her own scandal running an unlicensed barret house. Active in Segarra, Solsonès, and Vansa valley, Pau painted the panels so identically that experts today cannot distinguish which depicts which bishop.

The panels, recovered in extremis, highlight the bishops’ pivotal roles in Urgell’s history and Andorra’s origins, now preserved amid the museum’s renewal.