IV. SALAMANCA--ZAMORA--BENAVENTE
The long dreary road which leads over the corn-growing plain from Medina del Campo is at last relieved some two or three miles before Salamanca is reached by the view of its imposing group of steeples and domes, which rise gradually over the low hills on the northern side. The long line of walls round the city still in part remains, but seems daily to be falling more and more to decay, and indeed generally all its grand buildings speak rather of death than of life. Few even of Spanish towns seem to have suffered more at the hands of the French during the Peninsular war than did Salamanca, and we ought not perhaps to be surprised if its old prosperity comes but slowly back again to it.
The public buildings here are generally grandiose and imposing; but almost all of them are of the period of the Renaissance, and there are no very remarkable examples of this bad age. Still when they were perfect there must have been a certain stateliness about them, befitting the importance of a great university.
The main objects of attraction to me were the two cathedrals, the one grand and new, of the sixteenth century, by whose side and as it were under whose wing nestles the smaller but most precious old cathedral of the twelfth century, fortunately preserved almost intact when the new one was erected, and still carefully maintained, though, I believe, very seldom used for service. The remarkable relative positions of these two cathedrals will be readily understood by the accompanying ground-plan,[88] in which, as will be seen, the vast bulk of the later church quite overwhelms the modest dimensions of the earlier. I know indeed few spots, if any, in which the importance, or the contrary, of mere size in architecture can be better tested than here. Most educated artists would, I dare say, agree with me in rating size as the lowest of all really artistic qualities in architecture; and here we find that the small and insignificant old church produces as good an effect as the large and boastfully ambitious new one, though its dimensions are altogether inferior. This is owing to the subdivision of parts, and to the valuable simplicity which so markedly characterizes them. On the other hand, it would be wrong to forget that from another point of view mere size is of the primest importance, for we may well feel, when we compare, for instance, an extremely lofty church with one of very modest height, that in the former there is on the part of the founders an evident act of sacrifice, whilst in the latter their thoughts have possibly never risen above the merest utilitarianism; and it would be a spirit entirely dead to all religious impressions that could regard such an act of sacrifice otherwise than with extreme admiration.
The foundation of the first of these two cathedrals may be fixed, I think, with a fair approach to certainty, as being some time in the twelfth century. It was at this time, soon after the city had been regained from the Moors, in A.D. 1095, that Bernard, Archbishop of Toledo, himself a Frenchman, brought many other Frenchmen into Spain, and through his great influence procured their appointment to various sees--a fact which I may say, in passing, suggests much in regard to the origin of the churches which they built. Among the French ecclesiastics so promoted was Gerónimo Visquio,[89] a native of Périgord, who was for a long time the great friend and close companion of the Cid Rodrigo Diaz, and confessor to him and Doña Ximena his wife. On the Cid’s death he brought his body from Valencia to the monastery of Cardeña, near Burgos, and there dwelt till Count Ramon and Doña Urraca made him Bishop of Salamanca. Gil Gonzalez Dávila[90] says that at this time the church was founded, and Cean Bermudez adds some documentary evidence as to privileges conceded to its chapter for the works about this time by Count Ramon.[91] In A.D. 1178 a priest--Don Miguel of San Juan, Medina del Campo--made a bequest to the Chapter of his property for the work of the cloister, and we may fairly assume, therefore, that before this date the church itself was completed. The new cathedral was not commenced until A.D. 1513, and of this I need not now speak; but in an inscription on it, which records its consecration in A.D. 1560, the first mass is related to have been said in the old cathedral four hundred and sixty years before, i.e. in A.D. 1100.[92] This probably was only a tradition; but it may fairly be taken to point to the twelfth century as that in which the cathedral was built.
This early church is, it will be seen,[93] cruciform, with three eastern apses, a nave and aisles of five bays, and a dome or lantern over the crossing. There is a deep western porch, and I think it probable that there were originally towers on either side of this. The church has been wonderfully little altered, save that its north wall has been taken down in order to allow of the erection of the new cathedral, and at the same time the arch under the northern part of the central lantern or dome was also underbuilt. In other respects the church is almost untouched, and bears every mark of having been in progress during the greater part of the twelfth century.
There is no provision in the plan of the main piers for carrying the diagonal groining ribs, and it may be, therefore, that when they were first planned it was not intended to groin the nave. The groining-ribs are now carried on corbels, in front of which were statues, only two or three of which, however, now remain in their places.[94] The vaulting throughout is quadripartite in the arrangement of the ribs; but the vaults of the three western bays of the nave, of the south transept, and of the aisles are constructed as domes, with the stones all arranged in concentric lines, but with ribs crossing their undersides; the two eastern bays of the nave have quadripartite groining, planned in the common way. The apses have semi-domes. The main arches everywhere are pointed, those of the windows semi-circular, and the capitals throughout are elaborately carved, either with foliage or groups of coupled monsters or birds, a very favourite device of the early Spanish sculptors.
The most interesting feature in this old cathedral still remains to be mentioned: this is the dome over the crossing. The remainder of the original fabric is bold, vigorous, and massive, well justifying the line in an old saying about the Spanish cathedrals, “Fortis Salmantina;” but still it is merely a good example of a class of work, of which other examples on a grander scale are to be met with elsewhere. Not so, however, the dome; for here we have a rare feature treated with rare success, and, so far as I know, with complete originality. The French domed churches, such as S. Front, Perigueux, and others of the same class, Notre Dame du Port, Clermont, and Notre Dame, le Puy, have, it is true, domes, but these are all commenced immediately above the pendentives or arches which carry them. The lack of light in their interiors is consequently a great defect, and those which I have seen have always seemed to me to have something dark, savage, and repulsive in their character. And it was here that the architect of Salamanca Cathedral showed his extreme skill, for, instead of the common low form of dome, he raised his upon a stage arcaded all round inside and out, pierced it with windows, and then, to resist the pressure of his vault, built against the external angles four great circular pinnacles.
The effect of his work both inside and out is admirable. It is divided into sixteen compartments by bold shafts, which carry the groining ribs; and three of these divisions over each of the cardinal sides are pierced as windows. The other four occur where the turrets on the exterior make it impossible to obtain light. These arcades form two stages in height between the pendentives and the vault. The vault is hardly to be called a real dome, having a series of ribs on its under side, nor does the external covering follow the same curve as the internal, but with admirable judgment it is raised so much as to have rather the effect of a very low spire, with a considerable entasis, than of a regular dome. The exterior angles have lines of simple and boldly contrived crockets, and the stones with which it is covered seem all to have been cut with scallops on their lower edge. The stonework of the exterior is much decayed, but otherwise the whole work stands well and firmly.
My drawings explain better than any written description can, the various details of the design; but I may well call attention to the admirable treatment of the gables over the windows on the cardinal sides of the dome. No doubt they answer the same purpose as the circular turrets at the angles in providing a counterpoise to the thrust of the vault, and the change from the circular lines of the angle turrets to the sharp straight lines of these gables is among the happiest efforts of art. So again I ought to notice the contrast between the shafted windows, with their springing lines definitely and accurately marked by sculptured capitals, and the openings in the turrets, with their continuous mouldings. The value of contrast--a treasure in the hands of the real artist--is here consciously and most artistically exhibited; and it was no mean artist who could venture to make so unsparing a use of architectural ornamentation without producing any sense of surfeit on those who look at his work even with the most critical eyes.
I have seldom seen any central lantern more thoroughly good and effective from every point of view than this is: it seems indeed to solve, better than the lantern of any church I have yet seen elsewhere, the question of the introduction of the dome to Gothic churches. The lofty pierced tambour, and the exquisite effect of light admitted at so great a height from the floor, are features which it is not, I believe, vain to hope we may see emulated ere long in some modern work. But in any such attempt it must be borne well in mind that, though the scale of this work is very moderate, its solidity and firmness are excessive, and that thus only is it that it maintains that dignified manliness of architectural character which so very few of our modern architects ever seem even to strive for.
From all points, too, this lantern groups admirably with the rest of the church. My sketch was taken from the west end of the nave roof, in order to show the detail of the work to a fair scale; but the best view on the whole is that from the south-east, where it groups with the fine exterior of the eastern apses, with their engaged columns and rich corbel-tables, and with a turret to the east of the transept, which has been carried up and finished rather prettily in the fourteenth century with a short spire, with spire-lights on each side of its hexagonal base.
The old corbel-tables under the eaves remain throughout the east end; but the wall has been raised above them with a line of pierced quatrefoils, over which the rough timbers of the roof project. No doubt here, as we shall find in some other examples, the original intention was to have a stone roof of rather flat pitch. The space between the eaves of the chancel and the lower windows of the lantern would admit of no more than this; and though there is a good deal of piquant effect in the line of dark pierced traceries under the eaves and the rough tiled roof above them, one cannot but regret very much the change from the original design in so important a part of the work. The eaves-cornices are carved with a very rich variety of billet moulding, and carried upon corbels, some of which are carved and some moulded. The walls generally have flat pilasters at short intervals, finishing under the eaves-cornices, and the principal apse has the common arrangement of three-quarter engaged shafts dividing it into three bays. The window-arches are boldly moulded and carved, but the lights are narrow, and those in the main apse are remarkable for the delicate intricacy of the contemporary iron grilles with which they are guarded--genuine laborious smith’s work, utterly unlike the poor modern efforts with which in these days men earn fame without using their hammers! The effect here of the intricate curved lines, relieved by the dark shadow of the window opening, is charming. It may fairly be doubted, I think, whether these windows were ever meant to be glazed. In the transept pointed relieving arches are built over the windows, and one of them is a good example of the joggling of the joints of stonework, not uncommonly seen in early flat arches, but the use of which is not very obvious in a high pointed arch. The smaller apses have only one window, and are lower in proportion to the principal apse than is usually the case.
There are some fine monuments in the south transept, all of them adorned with elaborate bas-reliefs of scriptural subjects. One, of the thirteenth century, has a tomb supported on lions, and a death-bed represented on its side; a little apsidal recess above is groined with a semi-dome, with ribs. Another has sculptures of the Crucifixion, the Entombment, the Maries going to the Sepulchre, and the “Noli me tangere;” and a third has another representation of a death-bed. The effigies are all slightly tilted outwards, and those in the east wall have their feet to the north. The most remarkable features in the decoration of the church are, however, the Retablo and the painting on the semi-dome above it. On the vault the Last Judgment is painted, our Lord being drawn much in the famous attitude of St. Michael in Orcagna’s fresco at Pisa, and without drapery. The Retablo is a work of the fourteenth century, of wood, and planned so as exactly to fit the curve of the apse wall. It is divided into five panels in height and eleven in width, so that there are fifty-five subjects, each surrounded by an architectural framework of delicate character. The subjects are all richly painted on a gold ground, and seemed to me to be well drawn. The coloured decoration of the whole is very effective, and owes much to the white ground of its traceries. Generally speaking, a Retablo is placed across the apse and cuts off its eastern portion, which thenceforward becomes a receptacle for all the untidiness of the church; and when so arranged, if it reaches the height common in Spain, it almost, and in some cases altogether, destroys the internal effect of the apse. Here, however, the exact fitting of the Retablo to the curve of the wall is free from this objection, and its effect is unusually good.
The cloister on the south side is almost all modernized, though one or two old doorways remain. That into the south transept has spiral shafts, with the spiral lines reversed at regular intervals. It has also some very good carving of foliage, with birds and naked figures, and on its jambs are some memorial inscriptions of A.D. 1190, 1192, and 1194. On the south side of the cloister is a richly decorated little chapel, which retains in one corner a very curious mediæval organ, with shutters. On the east side and close to the transept, what was no doubt the original Chapter-house still remains, though it is now called the Mozarabic chapel, and was formerly used for the Mozarabic ritual. At present the boy who had the keys said it was not used; but the proper books were all there. It is a very remarkable chamber, square in plan below, and brought to an octagon above by arches thrown across the angles, and finally roofed with a sort of dome, carried upon moulded and carved ribs of very intricate contrivance. The interlacing of these ribs gives the work somewhat the effect of being Moorish, and there can be little doubt, I think, that it owes its peculiarities in some degree to Moorish influence. It will be seen by reference to the plan, that the groining ribs are arranged in parallel pairs. The ribs go from the angles to the centre of the opposite side instead of from angle to angle, and the sixteen ribs form a star-shaped compartment in the centre. This coupling of ribs in parallel lines is a feature of Moorish work, and is seen in the curious mosque, the Cristo de la Luz, at Toledo, and in the somewhat Moorish vault of the Templars’ church at Segovia. But whether Moorish or not, it is a remarkable room, and deserves careful study. The diameter is but a little over twenty-six feet, and the light is admitted by small windows in the upper stage. I should be inclined to attribute this room and its vault to the architect of the lantern of the church, and I regret that the only part of the outside which I could see was so modernized as to render it impossible to ascertain the original design. I call this the Chapter-house, because I find that it opened originally into the cloister, with three arches, that in the centre a doorway, the others windows of two lights--the almost invariable arrangement of all Chapter-houses at this time.[95]
A considerable number of masons’ marks remain on the exterior of the early part of this church; and if they are the marks of the men who erected so complicated a piece of stonework as the vault of the Chapter-house, they well deserve to be preserved. Throughout this church, indeed, the masonry is unusually good, and, owing to the rich warm colour of the stone, the eastern apses, though they follow the common design of most of the Romanesque apses in this part of Spain, are more than usually good in their effect.
A flight of eighteen steps leads up from the old cathedral through the north transept into one of the southern chapels of the new cathedral, and I know few changes more remarkable than that from the modest simplicity, yet grandeur, of the early church, to the overbearing magnitude and somewhat flaunting character of the late one.
Salamanca seems to have tasted early of that prosperity which in the end ruined art in Spain; and it was possible, therefore, for the Bishop, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, to propose a scheme for replacing his modest old cathedral by one of the most sumptuous and ambitious in Spain, without attempting what was absurd or sure to fail. The whole discussion as to the planning of the church is told us in a series of documents published by Cean Bermudez, which are, I think, of sufficient interest to make them quite worth a place in the Appendix to this volume. I shall discuss in another chapter the light which they throw upon the architectural practice of the day, and here it will only be necessary to refer to such parts of them as affect the architectural history of the building.
In A.D. 1509 a Royal order was issued to Anton Egas, master of the works at Toledo Cathedral, to go to Salamanca to make a plan for the cathedral there. Egas seems to have delayed so long that it was necessary to send another order to him, and then at last, in May, 1510, he went. The same kind of command had been laid at the same time by the king on Alfonso Rodriguez, the master of the works at Seville, and after these two had considered the matter, they presented a joint plan, drawn on parchment, showing the heights and widths of the naves, the thickness of the walls, and so forth; but they were unable, they said, to agree as to the proportion of length to breadth in the Capilla mayor, and so they settled to meet in ten days at Toledo, and then to appoint an umpire. Nothing more seems to have been done by them, for in A.D. 1513 the Bishop and Chapter resolved to call together a Junta of architects to make another report; and Rodriguez being dead, they summoned Anton Egas of Toledo, Juan Gil de Hontañon. Juan de Badajoz of Leon, Alonso de Covarrubias of Toledo, Juan Tornero, Juan de Alava, Juan de Orozco, Rodrigo de Saravia, and Juan Campero, who all assembled in September, A.D. 1512, at Salamanca, and drew up their report. The detailed character of this report is very curious. It decides the dimensions of every part of the church, the thickness of the walls, the projection of the buttresses, and the exact position that it ought to occupy. The architects not only agreed in all their opinions, but testified to their truth by taking an oath “by God and St. Mary,” saying, each one, “So I swear, and amen.”
The question was, whether the new cathedral should be on the site of the old cathedral, or to the north or to the south of it; and among other reasons for placing it to the north, where it now is, the existence of the steeple at the west end of the old cathedral was mentioned. In fine, the church has been so placed as not to interfere at all with the steeple, but little with the old cathedral, and not at all with the cloister. The opinion of the Junta of Architects has been acted upon, in short, in everything save the shape of the head of the church, which they preferred should be octagonal, and which is, in fact, square in plan.
Three days after the presentation of this report certain of the Chapter were appointed to select an architect, and their choice fell at once on Juan Gil de Hontañon for the architect, and Juan Campero for clerk of the works.[96] Whether Juan Gil really made the plans or not seems very uncertain; and I confess that to me it seems more probable that the plan made in A.D. 1509 by Egas and Rodriguez was laid before the Junta, and that they drew up their resolutions upon the data it afforded, and left to Hontañon no choice as to the proportions of his church, but only the management of its construction and the designing of its details.
If this supposition be correct, I fear I can award but little credit to Hontañon; for in this cathedral the only point one can heartily praise is the magnificence of the general idea, and the noble scale and proportion of the whole work. But the detail throughout is of the very poorest kind, fairly Gothic in character inside, but almost Renaissance outside, and everywhere wanting in vigour and effect. Nothing can be much worse than the treatment of the doorways and windows, and--to take one portion--the south transept façade is spotted all over with niches, crockets, and pedestals in the most childish way; whilst every spandrel has a head looking out of a circle, reminding one forcibly of the old application of a horse-collar, and, in fact, the men were foolish who repeated, usque ad nauseam, so stale and unprofitable an idea!
In one respect, however, the design of this church is very important. The Spanish architects seldom troubled themselves to suit their buildings in any respect to the climate; and this, no doubt, because in very many cases they were merely imitating the works of another country, in which no precautions against heat were necessary. Here we have a church expressly designed, and with great judgment, for the requirements of the climate. The windows are very high up, and very small for the size of the building, so that no sunlight could ever make its way to any unpleasant extent into it. There are galleries in front of all the windows, both in the nave and aisles, but they are of thoroughly Renaissance character. The section of the church gives a main clerestory to the nave, and a second clerestory on one side of each aisle over the arches opening into the side chapels. The upper clerestory has two windows of two lights, and a circular window above them in each bay, and the lower clerestory traceried windows generally, I think, of three lights. The traceries are very weak and ill proportioned; but I noticed in places what seemed to be a recurrence to earlier traditions in the groupings of small windows, with several circles pierced in the wall above them. It was, however, just like the imitation of old works we so often see from incompetent hands at the present day. You see whence the idea has been taken, though it is so travestied as to be not even tolerable where the original was probably perfect!
The planning of the church is certainly infelicitous. The square east end is bald to a degree externally, and finished as it is inside with chapels corresponding with those of the aisles, wants relief and life. If the square east end is adopted in a great church, no doubt the prolonged Lady Chapels of our own churches are infinitely to be preferred to such a plan as this, which fails to give the great east windows of which we boast, and loses all the effects of light and shade in which the apsidal chevets of the Continent are so rich.
Everywhere here the buttresses are finished with pinnacles, always planned in the same way, each group being planned on a square, counterchanged over the one below: they are of several stages in height, furnished throughout with crocketed finials on all sides, and at last with a single tall pinnacle. Nothing can be more wearisome than this kind of pinnacled buttress, but the later Spanish authorities were very fond of it, and repeated it everywhere. The dome, or Cimborio, is altogether Pagan in its design and detail outside, and on the inside is so plastered with an olla of pink cherubs, rays of light, and gilt scallopshells of monstrous size, and the like, as to be utterly contemptible in its effect. It is, moreover, too small, and too little separated from the rest of the vaulting, to look really well. The church throughout is finished with hipped roofs in place of gables: but the parapets in front of these are all Renaissance, and marked at intervals by the favourite urns in which Renaissance architects still generally and most unfortunately indulge.
The cathedral was first used for service in A.D. 1560, when on all sides Renaissance buildings were being erected, and perhaps it would be more just to Juan Gil de Hontañon to look upon him as striving to the last to maintain the cause of Christian art against the inroads of the enemy, and failing in his detail not for want of will, but because it was simply impossible to resist the tide which had set in before he died. Much, too, of the church must, no doubt, be attributed to other men; Juan de Alava, Rodrigo Gil de Hontañon, Martin Ruiz, and Juan de Ribero Rada, having been masters of the works after Juan Gil, and the church not having been completed until more than a century after its commencement.[97]
It will have been noticed that the old steeple is spoken of by the Junta of Architects as a work of so much importance as to make it advisable to change the position of the new cathedral, rather than interfere with it. I do not quite understand this, for the greater part of it is now entirely of late Renaissance detail,[98] though some large crocketed pinnacles still exist at the angles of the highest stage. The lower part is very plain, but the upper stage of the square tower has a rich balustrade, and windows and pilasters, and above it is an octagonal stage with pinnacles at the angles, and this in its turn is surmounted by a dome, with a lantern at the top. The outline is certainly fine, and its great height and mass make it a conspicuous object for a very long distance from Salamanca.
The mixed character of the detail in this church is well seen in the great doorway. Its jambs are richly moulded and carved, but the mouldings are all planned on a line receding but little from the face of the wall, so that the general effect is flat, and wanting in shadow. The main arch is a bold simple trefoil, but the label above it is carried on in an ogee line, and the arches below over two sculptured subjects, and over two door-openings under them, are elliptical. So, too, in the sculpture on the bas-reliefs over the door-openings, we have the richest luxuriance of the latest school of Spanish Gothic, with its beasts, its crisp foliage, and its wild love of heraldic achievements, and, mixed with all this, naked cherubs, clouds, and representations of Roman architecture.
In conclusion, I am bound to say of this great church that, whilst its exterior fails in almost every single particular, its interior, thanks to compliance with certain broad rules of Gothic building, is beyond question very grand and impressive. To the vast size and height of the columns this is mainly owing, for though they are cut up with endless little mouldings ingeniously “stopped,” one does not observe their pettinesses, and the arches which they carry are bolder and more important than might have been expected.
Some of the side chapels have altars both at the east and the west; and where the old altars remain they have carved in stone an imitation of an altar frontal. They represent worked super-frontals with fringes, and frontals with fringed orphreys at either end: and I saw one altar with a painted imitation of embroidery all over it. A chapel on the south side of the nave has an altar entirely covered with glazed tiles, the walls around it being similarly inlaid.
Close to the cathedral is one of the University buildings, with a central dome and two dome-capped towers to the west of it, and near these again is another domed church, and in the distance this group is very remarkable and stately-looking.
I wandered all over Salamanca looking for old churches, and could find few of any interest.[99] The finest are all but Renaissance in their character and detail, and seem to have owed much to the influence of Hontañon. The convents and colleges, where not ruined, are grand in scale, yet they produce none of the effect which our Oxford buildings do: but, on the other hand, they are built of a much better stone, and of a rich, warm, yellow tint. The good people here are smartening up the entrance to the town with flower-gardens, seats, and acacias, and are certainly putting their best feet forward, though there is nothing else even approaching to smartness in the place. A walk round the old walls is a melancholy amusement. They are, in part, being levelled; still I saw two or three pointed gateways, which seemed to be of early date, but very simple. I saw also some convents in a dilapidated state, and indeed everywhere the state of these is very bad, and I never saw so many waste places or half-ruined buildings. A good deal of this is no doubt owing to the operations of the French during the Peninsular War, but something certainly to the natives, who are busier in pulling down than building up; or at any rate, when they do the latter, they combine it with the former; for in some repairs of one of the University buildings I found the men re-using old wrought stones from some fifteenth-century building.
A bull-fight had just been celebrated here, and the principal square in the city, the “Plaza Mayor,” one of the best I have seen in Spain, had been fitted up for the occasion as an arena, with seats sloping up from the ground to the first floor windows of the houses all round it. (There was a regular arena, but it was being demolished, to give place, I presume, to one on a grander scale.) Another Plaza close to it is the principal market-place, and affords good opportunities for the study of the costumes of the peasantry.
I was fortunate in happening to light upon one very curious church here--that of San Marcos. The engraving of the plan[100] will show how very cleverly its architect managed to combine the scheme of a circular church with the usual Spanish triapsidal arrangement. The apses are vaulted with semi-domes, whilst the rest of the church is covered with wooden roofs, and these all lean towards the central square, which has a hipped roof. The arches are all pointed, and there are rudely carved capitals to the columns. A simple corbel-table is carried along under the eaves, and there are one or two slits--they are not more--for light. This little church is close to the town walls, and the absence of windows gives it the look of a part of a fortress. The plan seems to me to be admirably suggestive: we are too much in the habit of working perpetually in certain grooves which have been cut for us by our forefathers, and most men now-a-days would be afraid to plan a little church like this, even if the idea of it came into their heads. Yet it struck me as being really an extremely useful and economical construction, and such a scheme might with ease be fitted specially for a cemetery chapel in place of one of the vulgar erections with which we are now everywhere indulged.
The church of San Martin has a fine early doorway, in which I first saw a very peculiar order of decoration, which I saw again at Zamora, and of which no doubt more examples exist in this district. My illustration will explain its design, one member of the archivolt of which is like a succession of curled pieces of wood put side by side and perfectly square in section. The effect of light and shade in such work is rather good, but it is nevertheless rather too bizarre to be quite pleasing.
Another little church--that of San Matteo--has a rather fine, though rude, Romanesque doorway, with a buttress on each side, and a corbel-table above. But besides these I saw no remains of early work in Salamanca.
From Salamanca an uninteresting road leads to Zamora: occasionally there are considerable woods, and in other parts of the road the fields were well covered with vines. For two or three hours the domes of Salamanca are in sight, backed, as every view in Spain seems to be, by a fine line of distant mountains. No old churches are passed on the road, unless I except a large convent, now desecrated and nearly destroyed, but which seemed by the glimpse I caught of it to have old parts.
The entrance to Zamora is very striking: the city crowns the long back of a rock, falling steeply on the south to the Douro, and on the north to another valley. At the extreme end of this hill is the cathedral, as far away from the bulk of the people as it can be, but, for all that, very picturesquely and finely perched. Below the cathedral is a scarped rock, and to the left the noble river flows round a wooded point, and then out of sight under a long line of green vine-covered hills. All this view is taken in from the end of an old bridge, carried on sixteen or seventeen pointed arches, across which, near the southern end, is built a picturesque and tall gate-tower. The long line of houses occupies the top of the rock, and then opposite the bridge the street descends by a steep-stepped hill, and the houses cluster round the water-side.
The want of water in most Spanish landscapes is so great, that I was never tired of the views here, where it is so abundant. One of the best, perhaps, is that from just below the cathedral, looking past the picturesque bridge across the cattle-peopled plains to a long line of hills which bounds the horizon, with the dead-level line with which so many of the Spanish table-lands finish above the banks of their rivers.
Of the history of Zamora Cathedral I know but little. Here, as elsewhere at the same time, a Frenchman, Bernardo, a Benedictine, was bishop from A.D. 1125 to 1149, having been appointed through the influence of, and consecrated by, his namesake, the French Archbishop of Toledo.[101] Dávila says that the cathedral was built by a subsequent bishop, Don Estevan, “by order and at the cost of the Emperor Don Alonso VII., as is proved by some lines which were in this church.” These lines give the date of 1174 as that of the completion of the work,[102] and it tallies fairly with the general character of much of the building; for, though it is true that everywhere the main arches are pointed, much of the detail is undoubtedly such as to suggest as early a date as that here given.
This cathedral is on a small scale, and the most important portion of the ground-plan--the choir--having been rebuilt, it has lost much of its interest. It consists now of a nave and aisles of four bays, shallow transepts, with a dome over the crossing, a short choir with an apse of seven sides, and two choir aisles with square east ends. At the west end are chapels added beyond the church, that in the centre being of considerable length, and groined with the common intersecting ribs.[103] At the west end of the north aisle is an unusually large and fine Romanesque steeple--the finest example of the kind I have seen in Spain--and erected, no doubt, during the time of one of the French bishops already referred to.
The nave piers are very bold and vigorous in design; they are planned with triple shafts on each face of a square core, and have square caps and bases. The arches are very simple, but pointed. The massiveness of the piers is very remarkable, for though the clear width of the nave is only about twenty-three feet, the columns are not less than seven feet across. The nave is groined in square, the aisles in oblong compartments. There are no groining ribs in the aisles, though the vaults are quadripartite, and in the transepts there are pointed waggon roofs. The central dome is carried on pendentives, similar to those in the old cathedral at Salamanca. It has an arcaded and pierced stage above the pendentives, and then a dome or vault, divided into sixteen compartments by ribs of bold section, the filling in between which is a succession of small cylindrical vaults, so that the construction inside looks rather complicated. It is, moreover, so defaced by whitewash and plaster as to produce a much less fine effect than the dome at Salamanca; but, on the other hand, there can be but little doubt, I think, that it is the earlier of the two by some years. The exterior of the dome, though much decayed and mutilated, is still very noble in its design and effect. It will be seen that in many respects it is singularly like that at Salamanca. The circular angle turrets, the dormers on the cardinal sides, are similar in idea, though ruder and heavier here than there: here, too, the outline of the dome is more thoroughly domical. All the courses of stone in the dome seem to have been scalloped at the edges. The arches of the windows and arcades are all semi-circular, and the angles of the dome have a sort of sharp fringe of ornament, in which we see the very earliest kind of suggestion of a crocket: it is very simple, and extremely effective. Unfortunately this extremely interesting work is not only very much decayed, but also rent throughout with cracks, and I much fear that ere long it may cease to exist. The loss of such an example would be one of the greatest misfortunes for the student of Christian art in Spain, and for rarity and peculiarity I am not speaking too strongly when I say that we in England have no monument of the middle ages which is one whit more precious. It is to be hoped that the authorities of the church will do their best to preserve it from further decay as far as possible, and to repair it in the most tenderly conservative spirit.
The aisles have very broad massive buttresses, and the corbel-tables which crown the wall are carried round them also. There were simple round-arched, shafted windows in each bay, and the clerestory was finished like the aisle with a corbel-table.
The south transept façade is, after the lantern, the most interesting part of the church. Its general character is extremely peculiar, and unlike any other work I have seen in Spain. There are plain buttresses at the angles, and the space between them is divided into three compartments by fluted pilasters, which rise as far as the corbel-table (continued at the same level as the eaves-cornice), and carry three pointed arches which are fitted to the original flat-pitched gable, the centre arch being the widest and highest. The centre compartment has a doorway with three shafts in each jamb, and four orders in the arch all alike, and resembling the door in San Martin, at Salamanca, illustrated at p. 91. The effect of light and shade in this ornamentation is very great; and, executed as it is with comparatively little labour, I rather wonder not to have seen more of the same work elsewhere. Two small recessed arches occupy the side compartments of the façade on either side of the doorway: that on the right hand has its archivolt carved with extreme delicacy with a small leaf repeated frequently; and both have within their arches sculptures of figures. The bases of all the columns are fluted, and the capitals are all carved rather rudely, and have heavy abaci. Over the side arches are square sunk compartments enclosing circular ornaments carved with a succession of hollow flutings sinking back to the centre. In fact, these strange ornaments--which at first sight look almost like modern insertions--are precisely like models of the dome with its arched groining spaces between the ribs. Above the doorway is a row of five arches recessed in the wall,[104] and under the central arch in the gable is a blocked-up window-opening.
I was unable to gain admission to the interior of the steeple. On the outside it rises in a succession of nearly equal stages, of which the upper three have, in the common Lombard fashion, windows of one, two, and three lights respectively.
It remains to say a few words as to the fittings of the church. The Coro here occupies the two eastern bays of the nave, and is fitted with very rich late stalls and canopies, which are quite magnificent in their effect. The backs of the stalls are carved with figures, and those over the lower range of stalls throughout with half-length figures of Old Testament worthies, most of which have inscribed scrolls, with legends referring to our Lord, in their hands. These texts have been printed by Dr. Neale in the ‘Ecclesiologist,’ and they afford so valuable an example of the right mode of selecting inscriptions, that, with his consent, I give a copy of his account.[105] The figures are rather in the style afterwards so much employed by Berruguete, large scale bas-reliefs of single figures--always an awkward kind of sculpture in the hands even of the very best artist. The traceries and crockets of this stall-work are very elaborate, crisp, and good of their kind. There is a continuous horizontal canopy above the upper stalls, each division of which is filled with purely secular sculptures of beasts and animals. The metal Rejas are of the same age as the stalls; and there is a fine ancient lectern for the choir, of enormous size, in the centre of the Coro, and two others of more modern date. The western screen is old--of the fifteenth century--and has the rare feature of two doorways, leaving the centre unpierced for the altar in the nave, and the bishop’s throne on its eastern side, towards the Coro. By the time this work was done, it was very generally settled that the bishop’s place was here, in the centre of the western end of the Coro; but I have seen no other screen in which the entrance has still been retained at the west in connexion with this arrangement of the stalls. There is an old metal screen or Reja under the eastern arch of the crossing, which is of the same age as the choir fittings, and has two iron pulpits projecting from its western face. These pulpits are lined with wood, and stand on stone bases; the staircases to them are of wood, carved on the Gospel side with figures of the Evangelists and St. Laurence, and on the Epistle side with St. John, St. Peter, and other Epistolers. Each pulpit has a desk on a little crane projecting from the column by its side.
The cloisters on the north side of the cathedral, and the bishop’s palace on the south, are all completely modernized; but just under the old town walls, to the north of the Cathedral Plaza, is the small Romanesque church of San Isidoro. It has a square-ended chancel of two bays, and a nave of three, the latter lighted by very small windows--mere slits in the masonry--the former by shafted windows with a deep external splay to the openings, which are also very narrow. There are two of these windows at the east end, and there is a corbel-table under the eaves. This church was not intended for groining.
The long, narrow, and winding street which leads along the thin crest of the hill to the centre of the city, passes on the way the very interesting little church of La Magdalena. This is a Romanesque church, divided into nave, chancel, and apsidal sanctuary, in the way we so often see in works of similar date in England. The chancel has a pointed waggon-vault, the apse is groined with ribs, whilst the nave has now a modern (and probably always had a) flat wooden roof. The south doorway is placed very nearly in the centre of the south wall of the nave. It is a very grand example of the most ornate late Romanesque work, with twisted and moulded shafts, and a profusion of carving in the capitals and archivolts. Over this door is a circular window with dog-tooth in the label, and a quatrefoil piercing in the centre; and on each side, in the other bays, are round-arched windows of two lights. There is a very considerable likeness between the plan of this church and that of San Juan at Lérida.[106] In both, the overwhelming size and grandeur of the doorway as compared with that of the building, combined with its central position, produces at first the impression that it is the western, and not the southern, façade one is looking at. This is a defect; yet perhaps more so to the eyes of an Englishman, who now as of old prefers creeping through little holes[107] in the wall into his finest churches, than to those of any one used to the noble doorways of the Continent. The interior of La Magdalena is more interesting than the exterior; for, in addition to the good early detail of the arches across the chancel, it has at the east end of the nave some very fine and very peculiar monuments. Two of these are high tombs, with lofty canopies over them, occupying the space between the side walls of the nave and the jambs of the chancel arch. These canopies are square-topped, with round arches on the two disengaged sides, and carried upon large shafts standing detached on the floor. The detail of the canopies is as plain as possible; but the capitals are carved with very pure and vigorous conventional foliage, and the shafts are twisted; the moulding on those of the northernmost of the two monuments being reversed in mid-height, so as to produce a large and simple chevron. The mouldings of the shaft are carefully stopped below the necking, and above the base. The effect of this monument, filling in as it does the angle at the end of the nave, is extremely good; its rather large detail and general proportions giving it the effect of being an integral part of the fabric rather than, as monuments usually are, a subsequent addition.
To the west of the monument already mentioned, against the north wall, is another of about the same age--probably the early part of the thirteenth century--and even more curious in its design. It has three shafts in front carrying the canopy; and this is composed of two divisions of canopy-work, very similar to those so often seen in French sculpture over figures and subjects in doorways; under each are a pair of monsters--wyverns, or some such nondescripts--fighting. The capitals are similarly carved, and the abaci have conventional foliage. The tomb under the canopy has a plain coffin-shaped stone with a cross on it; but against the wall are, below, a figure lying in a bed carved on a bold block of stone projecting from the wall; and, above this, the soul of the departed being carried up by angels. The whole design and character of this monument are so unlike any other work that I know, that I give a native artist the credit of them. Yet the character of the detail seems to me to show an acquaintance with the French and Italian architecture of the day.
La Magdalena is said to have been a church founded by the Knights Templars, but on the suppression of their order in A.D. 1312 to have become the property of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.
San Miguel, near the picturesque market-place in the centre of the city, has a fine south door. The archivolts are bold, but quite plain, and square in section. Each order is carried on three shafts, and the boldness of the effect is very striking. On the other side of the Plaza the tall tower of San Vicente rises well up against the sky. It has a fine west doorway, and rises above the roof in three stages, lighted respectively by windows of one, two, and three lights. It is finished with a simple corbel-table, above which is a modern roof. The whole of the detail here is fine, simple, early-pointed, very pure and good. The church seems to be almost entirely modernized.
In the lower and eastern part of the city there are also one or two interesting churches. San Leonardo has a square tower engaged against the north side of the west front, very plain below, but with a belfry-stage of two pointed windows, moulded angles, simple corbel-table, and a low square slated spire--the slates cut to pattern, like scales. The fine west door of this church is round-arched, and on either side of it are great brackets sculptured with a lion and a bear.
Sta. Maria de la Horta is a church of the same class as La Magdalena. It has a western tower, a nave of three bays of quadripartite groining carried on very bold piers and shafts in the side walls, a chancel, and apsidal sanctuary. The apse has a semi-dome, with a pointed archway in front of it. The chancel has a round waggon-vault, and the arch between it and the nave is semi-circular. The vaulting of the nave is extremely domical in its section. The light is admitted by small windows in the upper part of the walls, and above the abaci of the groining shafts, which are continued round the building as a string-course. The west doorway is round-arched, with chevron, and a sort of shell or flower-ornament in its arch-mouldings. The tower is of the prevailing type: in the stage above the roof there is a window of one light; in the next there are two lights; and above this the steeple has been destroyed, and a modern roof added. The walls outside are finished with a fine and bold thirteenth-century eaves-cornice.
I think one may see here the local influence exercised by the fine Romanesque tower of the cathedral, which, in its division into equal stages, with an increasing number of openings, has been followed in all these other steeples.
A walk over the bridge takes one to the ruins of a rather fine church close to its further end. This has an apse of seven sides, with good windows of two lights, with a trefoiled circle in the head; above this is a string-course with trefoiled arcading under it, and above this a second tier of windows. The whole is of good early middle-pointed character.[108]
The walls here, as in so many of the Spanish towns, are fairly perfect, and are thickly studded with the usual array of round towers throughout their length. The bridge already mentioned is probably a work of the thirteenth century. The arches are perfectly plain and pointed, springing from about the water-level. The piers between the arches project boldly; and over each is a small arch pierced through the bridge, which gives a good deal of additional effect to the design. The grand length of this bridge, with its long line of pointed arches reflected in the lazily-flowing Douro, and backed by the towers and walls of the city, is extremely striking. Neither of the gateways on it is really old; but nevertheless they add much to its picturesqueness. The only old domestic building of any note that I saw in Zamora was a very late Gothic house in the Plaza de los Momos. The entrance doorway has the enormous and exaggerated arch-stones so common in the later Catalan buildings, but not often seen in this part of Spain. It has above it a label, which is stepped up in the centre to enclose a great coat-of-arms, with its supporters. On either side of this are two windows which, with the coat-of-arms in the centre, make a panel of the same width as the door below. The other principal windows are on a line with these, and all of them of thoroughly debased design. They are of two round-headed lights enclosed within a label-moulding, which finishes in an ogee trefoil; and this again within another label-moulding, either square or ogee in the head. The vagaries of these later Gothic architects in Spain are certainly far from pleasant; yet odd as its detail is, the plain masses of unbroken wall in the lower part of this front give it a kind of dignity which is seldom seen in modern work. The practice of making all the living-rooms on the first-floor of course conduces largely to this happy result.
I was unable, unfortunately, to spare time when I was at Zamora to go over to Toro to see the fine Collegiata there. M. Villa Amil has given a drawing of the domed lantern over the Crossing. In plan it is similar to the domes at Salamanca and Zamora as to the angle pinnacles, but not as to the gabled windows between them. But it appears to have lost its ancient roof; and I cannot understand, from the drawing, how the domical roof, which it was no doubt built to receive, can now possibly exist.[109] It seems pretty clear that this example is of rather later date than that at Salamanca; and we have therefore in Zamora, Salamanca, and Toro a very good sequence of Gothic domes, all upon much the same plan, and most worthy of careful study. A more complete acquaintance with this part of Spain might be expected to reveal some other examples of the same extremely interesting kind of work.
From Zamora, cheered by the recollection of perhaps the most gorgeous sunset and the clearest moonlight that I ever saw, I made my way across country to Benavente. It is a ten hours’ drive over fields, through streams and ditches, and nowhere on a road upon which any pains have ever been bestowed; and when I say that the country is flat and uninteresting, the paternal benevolence of the government which leaves such a district practically roadless will be appreciated. Beyond Benavente the case is still worse, for the broad valley of the Esla, leading straight to Leon, is without a road along which a tartana can drive, though there is scarcely a hillock to surmount or a stream to cross in the forty miles between a considerable town and the capital of the province!
Soon after leaving Zamora some villages were seen to the right, and one of them seemed to me to have a church with a dome; but my view of it was very distant, and I cannot speak with any certainty. From thence to Benavente no old building was passed.
Benavente is the most tumble-down forlorn-looking town I have seen. Most of the houses are built of mud, rain-worn for want of proper thatching, of only one story in height, and relieved in front by a doorway and usually one very small hole for a window. There is, however, a church--Sta. Maria del Azogue--which made the journey quite worth undertaking. It is cruciform, with five apses projecting from the eastern wall, that in the centre larger than the others.[110] The apses have semi-domes, the square compartments to the west of them quadripartite vaulting in the three centre, and waggon-vaults in the two outer bays. The transepts and crossing are vaulted with pointed barrel-vaults at the two ends, and three bays of quadripartite vaulting in the space between these two compartments; and the internal effect is particularly fine, owing to the long line of arches into the eastern chapels and the rich character of most of the details. The nave and aisles no doubt retain to some extent their old form and arrangement, but most of the work here is of the fifteenth century, whilst that of the eastern part of the church is no doubt of circa A.D. 1170-1220. The west front is quite modernized. The transept walls are lofty, and there is a simple pointed clerestory above the roofs of the eastern chapels, and a rose window over the arch into the Capilla mayor. The smaller chapels have each one window, the centre chapel three windows with the usual three-quarter engaged shaft between them, finishing in the eaves-cornice. The south transept has a fine round-headed doorway, but all its detail is that of early-pointed work. It has an Agnus Dei surrounded by angels in the tympanum, the four Evangelists with their emblems in one order of the arch, bold foliage in the next, a deep scallop ornament in the third, and delicate foliage in the label. The capitals are well carved, and the jambs of the door and one of the members of the archivolt have simple rose ornaments at intervals. The abaci of the capitals are square, but notwithstanding this and the other apparently early feature of the round arch I am still not disposed to date this work earlier than circa A.D. 1210-20.[111] Of the same age and character probably are all the eaves-cornices of the earlier part of the church, and, I have little doubt, the whole lower portion of the church itself.
There is a fine doorway to the north transept, and a lofty tower of very singular design rises over its northern bay. This is three stages in height above the roof, and is finished with a corbel-table and a modern spire of ogee outline. The masons’ marks on the exterior of the walls are here, as is usual in these early churches, very plentiful.
The church of San Juan del Mercado seems to be in some respects even more interesting than the other. It has a south doorway of singularly rich character, the two inner orders of the arch being round and the others pointed. The shafts are unusually rich and delicate; they are carved with acanthus-leaves diapered all over their surface, with chevrons and spiral mouldings, and above their bands at mid-height have in front of them figures of saints, three on either side. The tympanum has the Adoration of the Magi, and the order of the arch round it is sculptured with angels. Altogether this is a very refined and noble work, and the combination of the pointed and round arches one over the other is very happy. The west front has also a fine doorway and engaged shafts at intervals in the wall, and the east end is parallel triapsidal of the same character as that of San Juan.
There are some other churches, but those which I saw seemed to be all late and uninteresting. There are, too, the rapidly wasting ruins of an imposing castle. It is of very late sixteenth century work, and apparently has no detail of any interest; but the approach to it through a gateway, and up a winding hilly road under the steep castle walls, is very picturesque. By its side an Alameda has been planted, and here is the one agreeable walk in Benavente. Below is the river Esla, winding through a broad plain well wooded hereabouts with poplars and aspens; in the background are lines of hills, and beyond them bold mountain outlines; and such a view, aided by the transparent loveliness of the atmosphere, was enough to make me half-inclined to forget the squalid misery of everything that met the eye when I passed back again to my lodging.
V. LEON
It is a ride of some six-and-thirty or forty miles from Benavente to Leon. The road follows the course of the valley of the Esla all the way, and, though it is as nearly as possible level throughout, it is impassable for carriages. This is characteristic of the country; the Spaniards are content to go on as their fathers have done before them, and until some external friend comes to make a railway for them, the people of Benavente and Leon will probably still remain as practically isolated from each other as they are at present.
The valley is full of villages, as many as ten or twelve being in sight at one time on some parts of the road. None of their churches, however, seem to be of the slightest value. They are mostly modern and built of brick, though some have nothing better than badly built cob-walls to boast of; and their only unusual feature seems to be the great western bell-gable, which is generally an elevation above the roof of the whole width of the western wall, in which several bells are usually hung in a series of openings. The villages, too, are all built of cob; and as the walls are either only half-thatched or not thatched at all, they are gradually being worn away by the rains, and look as forlorn and sad as possible. One almost wonders that the people do not quit their hovels for the wine-caves with which every little hill near the villages is honeycombed, and upon which more care seems to be bestowed than upon the houses. In these parts the peasants adorn the outside of their houses with plenty of whitewash, and then relieve its bareness with rude red and black paintings of sprigs of trees, arranged round the windows and doors.
The cathedral of Leon is first seen some three or four hours before the city is reached. It stands up boldly above the well-wooded valley, and is backed by a noble range of mountain-peaks to the north; so that, though the road was somewhat monotonous and wearying, I rode on picturing to myself the great things I was soon to see. Unfortunately I visited Leon a year too late, for I came just in time to see the cathedral bereft of its southern transept, which had been pulled down to save it from falling, and was being reconstructed under the care of a Madrilenian architect--Señor Lavinia. I saw his plans and some of the work which was being put in its place, and the sight made me wish with double earnestness that I had been there before he had commenced his work! In England or in France such a work would be full of risk, and might well fill all lovers of our old buildings with alarm; but in Spain there is absolutely no school for the education of architects, the old national art is little understood and apparently very little studied, and there are no new churches and no minor restorations on which the native architects may try their prentice hands. In England for some years we have lived in the centre of a church-building movement as active and hearty perhaps as any ever yet known; our advantages, therefore, as compared with those possessed by foreigners generally, are enormous; whilst perhaps, on the other hand, in no country has so little been done as in Spain during the present century. Yet in England few of us would like to think of pulling down and reconstructing one side of a cathedral, and few would doubt that art and history would lose much in the process, even in the hands of the most able and conservative architect.
The two great architectural features of Leon are the cathedral and the church of San Isidoro; and to the former, though it is by much the most modern of the two, I must first of all ask my readers to turn their attention.
Spaniards are rightly proud of this noble church, and the proverbs which assert its pre-eminence seem to be numerous. One, giving the characteristics of several cathedrals, is worth quoting:--
“Dives Toletana, Sancta Ovetensis Pulchra Leonina, fortis Salamantina.”
And again there is another Leonese couplet:--
“Sevilla en grandeza, Toledo en riqueza, Compostella en fortaleza, esta en sutileza.”
So again, just as our own people wrote that jubilant verse on the door-jamb of the Chapter-house at York, here on a column in front of the principal door was inscribed--
“Sint licet Hispaniis ditissima, pulchraque templa, Hoc tamen egregiis omnibus arte prius.”
There used to be a controversy as to the age of this cathedral, which must, however, one would think, long since have been settled. It was asserted that it was the very church built at the end of the ninth century during the reign of Ordoño II.; and the only proof of this was the inscription upon the fine fourteenth-century monument of the King which still stands in the aisle of the chevet behind the high altar:--
“Omnibus exemplum sit, quod venerabile templum Rex dedit Ordonius, quo jacet ipse pius. Hunc fecit sedem, quam primo fecerat ædem Virginis hortatu, quæ fulget Pontificatu. Pavit eam donis, per eam nitet urbs Legionis Quesumus ergo Dei gratia parcat ei. Amen.”
Fortunately, however, in addition to the indubitable evidence of the building itself, there is sufficient documentary evidence to give with tolerable exactness the dates of the commencement and completion of the existing church, and I did not see, and believe there is not, a relic of the church which preceded it still remaining.
One or two facts of interest in regard to the first cathedral may, however, well be mentioned here. The architect is said by Sandoval to have been an Abbat; and in Ordoño II.’s absence he is said to have converted the old Roman baths in the palace into a church, the plan being similar to that of churches with three naves.[112] It is interesting to find this plan so popular in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, already described as existing in the ninth.[113]
Don Manrique, Bishop of Leon from A.D. 1181 to A.D. 1205, is said to have been the first founder of the present cathedral. The contemporary chronicler Don Lucas de Tuy speaks most positively on this point, and as he wrote his history in the convent of San Isidoro close by, it is difficult to dispute his testimony.[114] How much he completed nowhere appears, though, judging by the style of the church, I should say it could have been but very little. Later than this, in A.D. 1258, during the episcopate of D. Martin Fernandez, a Junta of all the bishops of the kingdom of Leon was held at Madrid, at which the state of the fabric of the cathedral was discussed, and forty days of indulgence offered to those who made offerings towards the further promotion of the works.[115] Sixteen years later a council was held in Leon, and again the state of the fabric of the church was discussed and indulgence offered to those who gave alms for it.[116] Finally, in A.D. 1303, the Bishop Don Gonzalez gave back to the use of the Chapter a property which had been devoted to the work of the church, “because,” he says, “the work is now done, thanks be to God.” Nothing more clear on the face of it than this list of dates can be desired; yet, as frequently happens, when we come to compare them with the building itself, it is utterly impossible to believe in the most important part of it--the foundation, namely, of any part of the present church in the time of Bishop Manrique before the year 1205. I have elsewhere in this volume had occasion to show how much the Spaniards borrowed from the French in their architecture. Certain entire buildings, such as Burgos, Toledo, and Santiago, are distinctly derived from French churches, and in all cases are somewhat later in date than the French examples with which they most nearly correspond. If we apply this test to Leon it will be impossible to admit that any part of the existing church was built much before A.D. 1250. The church from beginning to end is thoroughly French; French in its detail, in its plan, and in its general design. And inasmuch as there is no long and regular sequence of Spanish buildings leading up step by step to the developed style which it exhibits, it is quite out of the question to give it credit for an earlier existence than the corresponding French churches, in the history of which such steps are not wanting.
The churches which are nearest in style to Leon are, I think, the cathedrals at Amiens and Rheims, and perhaps the later part of S. Denis. Of these, Amiens was in building from A.D. 1220 to A.D. 1269, and Rheims from A.D. 1211 to A.D. 1241. But both are slightly earlier in their character than Leon. In all three the chapels of the apse are planned in the same way; that is to say, they are polygonal and not circular in their outlines, and the sections of the columns, the plans of the bases and capitals, and the detail of the arches and groining ribs are as nearly as may be the same; and in all these points the resemblance between them and Leon Cathedral is close and remarkable.
A similar conclusion will be arrived at if we pursue the inquiry from a different point, and compare this cathedral with other Spanish works of the date at which it is assumed to have been in progress. I can only suppose that Don Lucas de Tuy, when he spoke of Bishop Manrique’s work at the cathedral, did so only from hearsay, or else that the work then commenced was subsequently completely removed to make way for the present building. Certainly in A.D. 1180-1200 all Spanish churches seem to have been built on a different plan, in a very much more solid fashion, and so that it would have been very difficult indeed to convert them into anything like the existing building. I venture to assume, therefore, that the scheme of Leon Cathedral was first made circa A.D. 1230-1240, and that the work had not progressed very far at the time the Junta of bishops was held in Madrid in A.D. 1258.
In plan[117] the cathedral consists of a nave and aisles of six bays, transepts, a choir of three bays, and chevet of five sides, with a surrounding aisle and pentagonal chapels beyond. There are two western towers, a large cloister on the north side, sacristies on the south-east, and a large chapel on the east side of the cloisters, with other buildings on their northern and western sides, arranged very much in the usual way; the chevet projects beyond the line of the old city wall, one of the towers of which is still left on the east side of the cloister. The city was long and narrow; and whilst the cathedral projects to the east of the wall, the church of San Isidoro has its western tower built out beyond the western face of the wall. There is not, however, here, as there is at Avila, any very distinct attempt to fortify the chevet of the cathedral, otherwise than by forming passages, passing through the buttresses all round it, and by raising the windows high above the ground on the east.
There are doorways in all the three grand fronts, west, north, and south; but these shall be described further on. The columns throughout are cylindrical, with attached shafts on the cardinal sides, the groining-shafts towards the nave and choir being, however, triple, instead of single. In the apse the small shafts are not placed regularly round the main shaft, but their position is altered to suit the angles at which the arches are built. The same alteration of plan occurs in the chevet of Amiens, a work which was in progress about A.D. 1240, and to which, as I have said, the plan of this cathedral bears considerable resemblance.
The feature which most struck me in this cathedral was the wonderful lightness which characterizes its construction in every part. The columns of the nave are of moderate size, and the arches which they carry very thin, whilst the large and lofty clerestory, and the triforium below it, were both pierced to such an extent as to leave a pier to receive the groining smaller than I think I ever saw elsewhere in so large a church. There are double flying buttresses, one above the other, and the architect trusted, no doubt, that the weight of the groining would be carried down through them to such an extent as to make it safe to venture on as much as he did. Moreover, he was careful to economize the weight where possible; and with this view he filled in the whole of his vaults with a very light tufa, obtained from the mountains to the north of Leon.[118] In short, when this cathedral was planned, its architect must either have resolved that it should exceed all others in the slender airiness of its construction, or he must have been extremely incautious if not reckless. It is not a little curious that in France, at the same time, the same attempt was being made, and with the like result. The architect of Beauvais, unable to surpass the majestic combination of stable loftiness with beauty of form, which characterized the rather earlier work at Amiens, tried instead to excel him alike in height, and in lightness of construction. No one can pretend that he was an incompetent man, yet his work was so imprudently daring, that it was impossible to avoid a catastrophe; and we now have it rebuilt, to some extent in the same design after its fall, but with so many additional points of support as very much to spoil its symmetry and beauty. Here, then, we have an exactly parallel case: for at Leon, no sooner was the church completed than it became necessary to build up the outer lights, both of the clerestory and triforium, to save the work from the same misfortune. Nor was the precaution altogether successful, for, owing almost entirely to the over-hazardous nature of the whole construction, the south transept had recently, it is said, become so dangerously rent with cracks and settlements as to render it absolutely necessary to rebuild it; and the groining throughout the church shows signs of failure everywhere, and this of serious, if not of so fatal a character.
At the risk of repetition, I cannot help saying how strongly this parallel between Beauvais and Leon tells in favour of the assumption that its origin was rather French than Spanish. For in Spain there were no other churches at the time it was built from which a Spanish architect could have made such a sudden development as this design would have been. The steps by which it would have been attained are altogether wanting, and yet in France we have every step, and, finally, results of precisely the same kind. Both at an earlier and at a later date, when Spaniards made use of their own school of architects, they developed for themselves certain classes of churches, unlike, in some respects, to those of any other country. Here, however, we have an exotic, which, like the cathedral at Burgos, is evidently the work of some artist who had at least been educated among the architects of the north of France, if he was not himself a Frenchman. The proof of this is to be found more perhaps at S. Denis than anywhere, for there the section of the mouldings of the clerestory windows, as well as their general design, tallies so closely with the same parts of Leon Cathedral that it is almost impossible to doubt their common origin.
One other feature not yet insisted upon, affords strong evidence in the same direction. This cathedral is a mere lantern, it has scarcely a yard of plain unpierced wall anywhere, and the main thought of its architect was evidently how he might increase to the utmost extent the size of the windows, and the spaces for the glorious glass with which he contrived to fill the church. No greater fault could be committed in such a climate. This lavish indulgence in windows would have been excessive even in England, and must have always been all but insupportable in Spain. It was the design of French and not Spanish artists, for in their own undoubted works these last always wisely reduced their windows to the smallest possible dimensions. The cathedral at Milan is a case of the same kind, for there a German architect, called to build a church in a foreign land, built it with as many windows as he would have put had it been in his own country, and with a similar contempt for the customs of the national architects to that which marks the work of the architect of Leon Cathedral.
Regarding this cathedral, then, as a French, rather than as a Spanish church, and giving up all attempt to make it illustrate a chapter of the real national artistic history, we shall best be able to do justice to it as a work of art. It is, indeed, in almost every respect worthy to be ranked among the noblest churches of Europe. Its detail is rich and beautiful throughout, its plan very excellent, the sculpture with which it is adorned quite equal in quantity and character to that of any church of the age, and the stained glass with which its windows are everywhere filled, perhaps some of the most brilliant in Europe.
There are many features in its construction and design which must be referred to somewhat in detail, and to this part of my subject I must now turn.
I have already mentioned that the triforium throughout the church was originally glazed. In order to obtain this the aisles were covered with gabled roofs, whose ridges were parallel with the nave; and in order to allow of this being done a stone gutter was formed below the sills of the clerestory windows, and below this again corbels were built into the wall to carry the aisle roofs; cross gutters also of stone were carried through the roof in each bay from the clerestory gutter to the outer wall of the aisles. I cannot say that the effect of this arrangement is good. The eye seems to require some grave space of wall between the main arches and the glazing of the clerestory; and it is difficult to say on what ground the triforium is to be treated as a separate architectural division of the fabric, when it is in truth, as it is here, nothing more than a prolongation of the clerestory.
The flying buttresses are rather steep in pitch, and each consists of two arches abutting against very broad buttresses rising from between the side chapels; the lower arch supports the clerestory just at the level of the springing of the groining; the higher a few feet only below the parapet. Two pinnacles rise out of each of the buttresses, and others form a finish to them all round the clerestory, and at the angles of the chapels of the apse.
The windows throughout have good traceries. They are all of pure geometrical character; those in the chapels of the choir being of two lights, with large cusped circles in the head, and those in the clerestory of four lights, subdivided into two divisions, similar to the chapel windows, with another cusped circle above. The heads of the lights throughout the windows are uncusped, the cusping being confined to the traceries. The clerestory windows originally had six lights, but the outer lights were rather clumsy additions to the original scheme for four-light windows, and have since been walled up, to give the necessary strength to the groining piers. The general arrangement of the traceries in this part of the church will be best understood by reference to the engraving which I give of one bay of the choir.
The stone-work of all the window traceries was very carefully cramped together with strong toothed iron plugs let into the centre of the stones, and the masons seem, in many cases, to have marked the beds and not the face of the stones. Indeed, the early masons’ marks are but few in number, and most of those that I saw occurred at the base of the eastern walls, and again in the upper portion of the work. On the late, and thoroughly Spanish chapel of Santiago also, a good many occur on the outer face of the stones. Owing to the works which were in progress in the south transept, I had an unusually good opportunity of looking for these marks, not only on the face of the stones, but also on their beds, and their almost entire absence from the early work was very remarkable. On the other hand, there were markings on some of the other stones which were of much more interest. I found, for instance, one of the large stones forming the capital of the pier at the crossing of the nave and transepts, carefully marked, first with an outline of the whole of the jamb mould, then with the lines of the capital, and finally with the whole of the archivolt. It had all the air of being the practical working drawing used for the execution of the work, some little alterations having been made in the archivolt. It is easy to conceive that the architect may thus have designed his details, and his mode bears considerable analogy to that which M. Verdier describes as having been adopted at Limoges, where the lines of the groining and all the working outlines were scratched on the floor of the triforia; here the lines are scratched boldly on the surface of the stones.
The walls throughout the church were built of rubble, faced with wrought stone inside and out, and some of the failures in the work are attributable, no doubt, to the want of strength and bond of this kind of walling.
The dimensions of the various parts are about as follows:-- Total internal length 300 feet. “ width of nave and aisles 83 feet. Height to springing of main arches 25 feet 6 inches. “ floor of triforium 46 feet. “ centre of groining about 100 feet.
These dimensions, though not to be compared to those of many of the French churches, are still very noble, and would place this among the finest of our own buildings in respect of height; but, like all Spanish, and most French churches, the length is not very grand.
The various views of the exterior are fine, but everywhere the height of the clerestory appears to be rather excessive. This is seen even at the west end, where a little management might easily have prevented it. But the two steeples standing beyond the aisles leave a narrow vertical chasm between their side walls and those of the clerestory, which is brought out, without any break in its outline by means of buttresses, quite to the west front. The lower part of these steeples is perfectly plain; each has a sort of double belfry stage, and they are both finished with low spires--that on the south pierced with open traceries, and that on the north simply crocketed; both of them are somewhat ungainly, of very late date, and not sufficiently lofty or important for the church to which they are attached.
The grand feature of the west front is the beautiful porch which extends all across, forming three grand archways, corresponding with the nave and aisles, with smaller and extremely pointed arches between them. These arches are all supported on clustered shafts, standing away between four and five feet from the main wall, in which the doorways are set. Statues are set on corbels round the detached shafts, and again in the jambs of all the doorways, and the tympana and archivolts of the latter are everywhere crowded with sculpture. An open parapet is carried all across the front above the porch, and above this the west end is pierced with a row of four windows corresponding with the triforium, and again, above, by a very large and simple wheel-window. The finish of the west front is completely modernized, with a seventeenth-century gable between two pinnacles.
The sculpture of the western doors well deserves description and illustration. It is charming work, of precisely the same character as the best French work of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and there is a profusion of it.
The central west door has in the tympanum our Lord seated, with angels, and St. John and the Blessed Virgin worshipping on either side. Below is the Last Judgment, the side of the Blessed being as pretty and interesting as anything I have seen. A youth sits at a small organ playing sweet songs to those who go to Paradise; and a king, going jauntily, and as if of right, towards St. Peter, is met by a grave person, who evidently tells him that he must depart to the other and sadder side. The three orders of the arch are filled with the resurrection of the dead, angels taking some, and devils others, as they rise from their graves,--the whole mixed very indiscriminately. On the central shaft is a statue of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord, now with wretched taste dressed up and enclosed in a glass case, to the great damage of the whole doorway.
The north-west doorway has its tympanum divided in three horizontal lines. The lower compartment has the Salutation, the Nativity, an Angel, and the Shepherds; the middle the Magi adoring our Lord in the Blessed Virgin’s arms, and the Flight into Egypt; and the upper, the Massacre of the Innocents. The arch of this door is elliptic, and the space between it and the tympanum is filled with figures of angels with crowns and censers, playing an organ and other instruments, and singing from books. The meaning of the sculpture in the archivolt was not clear to me, and seemed to refer to some legend.
The south-west doorway has the tympanum divided as the last, and in the lower compartment the death of the Blessed Virgin; next to this our Lord and the Blessed Virgin seated; and above, angels putting a crown on her head. The archivolt here is adorned with one order of sitting figures of saints and two of angels.
The east end is more striking than the west. It retains almost all its old features intact, save that the roof is now very flat, and covered with pantiles, whereas it is probable that at first it was of a steep pitch. It stands up well above the sort of boulevard which passes under its east end, and when seen from a little further off, the steeples of the western end group well with it, and, to some extent, compensate for the loss of the old roofing line.
The south transept had been entirely taken down when I was at Leon, and the sculpture of its three doorways was lying on the floor of the church. It is of the same fine character as that of the western doors; the central door has a figure of our Lord with the emblems of the Evangelists on either side, and beyond them the Evangelists themselves writing at desks. Below this are the twelve Apostles seated, and the several orders of the archivolt are carved with figures of angels holding candles, sculptures of vine and other leaves, and crowned figures playing on musical instruments. The south-west door of the transept has no sculpture of figures, but the favourite diapers of fleur-de-lys and castles, and lions and castles, and an order of foliage arranged in the French fashion, à crochet. The south-east door has in its tympanum the death of the Blessed Virgin, with angels in the archivolt holding candles. The gable of this transept seems to have been very much altered by some Renaissance architect before it was taken down.
The north transept has two doorways, only one of which is now open. This has a figure of our Lord seated within a vesica, supported by angels, and the archivolt has figures of saints with books. The jambs have--like all the other door-jambs--statues under canopies, and below them the common diaper of lions and castles. The closed north-west door of this transept now forms a reredos for an altar; it has no sculpture of figures.
The north transept doorway opens into a groined aisle which occupies the space between the transept and the cloister. This aisle is very dark, and opens at its eastern end into the chapel of Santiago, a fine late building of the age of Ferdinand and Isabella, running north and south, and showing its side elevation in the general view of the east end to the north of the choir.
The cloister is so mutilated as to have well-nigh lost all its architectural value. The entrance to the porch in front of the north transept is, however, in its old state; it is a fine doorway, richly and delicately carved with small subjects enclosed in quatrefoils. The original groining shafts, which still remain, show that the whole cloister was built early in the fourteenth century; the traceries, however, have all been destroyed; and the groining, the outer walls, and buttresses altered with vast trouble and cost, into a very poor and weak kind of Renaissance. But if the cloister has lost much of its architectural interest, it is still full of value from another point of view, containing as it does one of the finest series of illustrations of the New Testament that I have ever seen, remaining in each bay of the cloister all the way round. These subjects begin to the east of the doorway to the north transept, and are continued round in regular order till they finish on its western side. I have not been able to learn anything as to the history of these works. If they are Spanish, they prove the existence of a school of painters of rare excellence here, for they are all more or less admirable in their drawing, in the expression of the faces, and in the honesty and simplicity with which they tell their story. The colours, too, where they are still visible, are pure and good, and the whole looked to me like the work of some good Florentine artist of about the middle of the fifteenth century. It would not be a little curious to find the King or Bishop of Leon not only sending to France for his architect, but to Tuscany for his wall-painter, and, if it be the fact, it would show how firm must have been the resolve to make this church as perfect as possible in every respect, and how little dependence was then placed on native talent.
The subjects represented are the following, each painting filling the whole of the upper part of the wall in each bay of the cloister:--
1. The Birth of the Blessed Virgin. 2. Her Marriage. 3. The Annunciation. 4, 5, 6. Destroyed. 7. Massacre of the Innocents, and Herod giving orders for it. 8, 9. Destroyed. 10. The Blessed Virgin Mary seated with our Lord, angels above, and three figures with nimbi sitting and adoring, others with musical instruments. 11. The Baptism of our Lord. 12. Destroyed. 13. An ass and its foal, Jerusalem in the background, and indistinct groups of figures. 14. Our Lord riding into Jerusalem. The city has circular towers all round, and churches with two western octagonal steeples. 15. The Last Supper. 16. Our Lord washing the Disciples’ feet; some figures on the right carrying water-jars are drawn with extreme grace. 17. Destroyed. 18. The Betrayal. 19. Our Lord bound and stripped, and, 20. Scourged. (These two subjects are very finely treated.) 21. Brought to the Place of Judgment: desks with open books on them in front. 22. Buffeted and spit upon. 23. Judged: Pilate washing his hands. 24. Bearing the Cross. (This subject is painted round and over a monument on which is the date XXIII. October, A.D. MCCCCXL.; so that it must be of later date than this.) 25. Nailed to the Cross: the Cross on the ground. 26. The Descent from the Cross. 27, 28. The Descent into Hell. 29. The Incredulity of St. Thomas, and the appearance of our Lord on the way to Emmaus. 30. The Ascension. 31. The Descent of the Holy Ghost.
It will be noticed that the Crucifixion is most remarkably omitted from this series. There is no place on the wall for it, and it occurred to me as possible that there may have been a crucifix in the centre of the cloister, round which all these paintings were, so to speak, grouped.[119]
There are several fine monuments in these cloisters, some of them corbelled out from the wall, and some with recumbent effigies under arches in it. One of the latter is so fine in its way as to deserve special notice. The arch is of two orders, each sculptured with figures of angels worshipping and censing our Lord, who is seated in the tympanum of the arch holding a book and giving His blessing. Below, on a high tomb, is the effigy recumbent; and behind it, below the tympanum, two angels bearing up the soul of the departed. The sculpture is admirable for its breadth and simplicity of treatment; and the monument generally is noticeable for the extent to which sculpture, and sculpture only, has been depended on, the strictly architectural features being few and completely subordinate.
The cloister is surrounded by buildings, some of which only are ancient. On the north side are the chapel of San Juan de Regla, another chapel, and the Chapter-house. The latter has one of those foolish Spanish conceits, a doorway planned obliquely to the wall in which it is set.[120]
In the church itself there are several very fine monuments. The most elaborate is that of Ordoño II., the original founder of the old cathedral, which occupies the eastern bay of the apse, with its back to the high altar. This is sometimes spoken of as if it were a contemporary work. It is, however, obviously a work of the fourteenth century, and recalls to mind some of the finest monuments in our own churches. The effigy of the king, laid on a sloping stone, so that it looks out from the monumental arch, is singularly noble, very simple, of great size and uncommon dignity. The general design of this fine monument will be seen in my view of the aisle round the choir.
Another monument in the north transept has a semicircular arch carved alternately with bosses of foliage and censing angels; and within this a succession of cusps, the spandrels of which have also angels. The tympanum has a representation of the Crucifixion;[121] and below this, in an oblong panel just over the recumbent figure, is a representation of the service at a funeral. The side of the high tomb has also an interesting sculpture representing a figure giving a dole of bread to a crowd of poor and maimed people, whilst others bring him large baskets full of bread on their backs. The date in the inscription on this monument is Era 1280, i.e. A.D. 1242.
In a corresponding position in the west wall of the south transept is another monument of a bishop, recessed behind three divisions of the arcade which surrounds the walls of the church. The effigy is rather colossal, and has a lion at the head, and another under the feet. Over the effigy is a group of figures saying the burial office; and above, in panels within arches, are, (1) St. Martin dividing his Cloak, (2) the Scourging of our Lord, and (3) the Crucifixion. The soffeits of the arcade are diapered, and there were three subjects below the figure of the bishop, but they are now nearly destroyed.
The arches round the Capilla mayor were walled up, and those on either side of the monument of Ordoño II., already described, still retain the paintings with which they were all once adorned. They are of the same class as those in the cloister, and one of them, a large Ecce Homo, is certainly a very fine work. Unfortunately the figure of our Lord in the centre has been very badly repainted, but the troop of soldiers and Jews reviling Him on either side is full of life and expression.
The choir occupies the two eastern bays of the nave, and its woodwork is fine, though of late fifteenth-century date. There are large figures in bas-relief, carved in the panels behind the stalls. There is a western door from the nave into the Coro; and in part on this account, and in part from its considerable scale, the nave has less than usual of the air of uselessness which the Spanish arrangement of the Coro produces.
I have already incidentally mentioned that the windows are full of fine stained glass. It is all of the richest possible colour, and most of it of about the same date as the church. Modern critics would, no doubt, object to some of the drawing for its rudeness and want of accuracy. Yet to me this work seemed to be a most emphatic proof--if any were needed--that we who talk so much about drawing are altogether wrong in our sense of the office which stained glass has to fulfil in our buildings. We talk glibly about good drawing, and forget altogether the much greater importance of good colour. At Leon the drawing is forgotten altogether, and I defy any one to be otherwise than charmed with the glories of the effect created solely by the colour. At present in England our glass is all but invariably bad--nay, contemptible--in colour; whilst the so-called good drawing is usually a miserable attempt to reproduce some sentimentality of a German painter. Two schools might well be studied a little more than they are; the one should be this early school of rich colourists, and the other the beautiful works of the sixteenth and seventeenth century French glass-painters, where there is good drawing enough for any one, and generally great beauty and simplicity of colour. Finally, two practices might be suggested to our stained-glass painters,--one, that they should only use good, and therefore costly glass; and the other, that they should limit their palettes to a few pure and simple colours, instead of confusing our eyes with every possible tint of badly-chosen and cheaply-made glass.
If we want religious pictures in our churches--as we do most surely--let us go to painters for them, and, with the money now in great part thrown away on stained glass, we might then have some works of art in our churches of which we might have more chance of feeling proud, and for which our successors would perhaps thank us more than they will for our glass.[122]
I have detained my readers only too long, I fear, upon this cathedral, but it is too full of interest of all kinds to allow of shorter notice, and is, in its way, the finest church of which Spain can boast; at the same time the work is all so thoroughly French as to destroy, to some degree, the interest which we should otherwise feel in it.
The other great architectural attraction of Leon is the church of San Isidoro “el Real.” This is altogether earlier than, and has therefore an interest entirely different from, that of the cathedral.
Gil Gonzalez Dávila says that the church was founded in A.D. 1030,[123] by Ferdinand I., the Great. An inscription in the floor of the church gives the name of its architect;[124] and from the mention of Alonso VI., who came to the throne in A.D. 1065, and his mother Sancha, who died in A.D. 1067, the date of his death must have been between these two periods.[125] In A.D. 1063 King Ferdinand--Alfonso’s father--and Queen Sancha had very richly endowed the church, in the presence of various bishops, who had come together to celebrate the translation of the remains of San Isidoro.[126] Finally Dávila, in his History of the Cathedral at Avila, gives the date of the consecration of the church, from a deed in the archives there, as A.D. 1149.[127]
From these statements it would seem that the church was fit for the reception of the body of San Isidoro in A.D. 1065, and had then three altars; and yet that in A.D. 1149 it was consecrated, though indeed Ponz speaks of an inscription in the cloister which mentions the dedication of the church in A.D. 1063.[128]
San Isidoro was one of the most popularly venerated saints in Spain, and many are the miracles said to have been wrought by him. One of them is not a little suggestive of plans for church-building, not a whit behind the cleverest schemes of the present day. It is said that in a time when much sickness prevailed, the body of the saint was taken out in procession to a village near Leon, Trobajo del Camino, the bearers of the body barefooted, and all singing hymns, in order to charm away the disease from the people. Suddenly the weight became so great that it was impossible to move or lift the saint, even by the aid of a strong body of men: and many complained not a little of the Canons for bringing the body out on such an errand, whilst the King, who was at Benavente, was so incensed, that he insisted, as the saint would not move, that they should build a church over him for his protection; and at last came the Queen, grieving bitterly appealing to “her beloved spouse” San Isidoro, and saying, “Turn, O blessed confessor! turn again to the monastery of Leon, which my forefathers, out of their devotion, built for you;” and then the saint, moved by her prayer, allowed himself to be borne back upon the shoulders of four children, who brought him back to Leon amid the rejoicings of the people: and these, moved by the miracle, at once built a chapel on the spot which the saint had marked out for the purpose by his pertinacious refusal to move until the King had ordered it to be built, and until the Queen had shown how deep was her interest in the work.
But I must not dwell longer on what is merely legendary, but return to this church of San Isidoro at Leon. It is cruciform in plan,[129] with apsidal chapels on the eastern side of the transepts. The nave and aisles are of six bays in length, and there is a tower detached to the west. There is a chapel dedicated to Sta. Catalina (now called El Panteon) at the north-west end of the church, and a choir of the sixteenth century takes the place of the original apse. The whole of the nave is vaulted with a waggon-vault, with transverse ribs under it in each bay; and this vault is continued on without break to the chancel arch, there being no lantern at the crossing. The arches into the transepts have a fringe of cusping on their under sides, which has a very Moorish air, and the transepts are vaulted with waggon-vaults, but at a lower level than the nave. The chapels to the east of the transept are roofed with semi-domes. The nave has bold columns, with richly sculptured capitals, stilted semi-circular arches, and a clerestory of considerable height, with large windows of rich character.
The whole interior of the church has been picked out in white and brown washes to such an extent, that at first sight its effect is positively repulsive: nevertheless, its detail is very fine. The capitals are all richly sculptured, generally with foliage arranged after the model of the Corinthian capital; but some of them historiés with figures of men and beasts; and I noticed one only with pairs of birds looking at each other. The western part of the church is abominably modernized, but the alterations in the fabric evidently commenced at a very early period, for in the south aisle one of the groining-shafts is carried up exactly in front of what appears to be one of the original aisle windows. I confess myself quite at a loss to account for this, unless it be by the assumption that the church, consecrated in A.D. 1149, was commenced on the same type as S. Sernin, Toulouse--copied, as we shall see further on, at Santiago--and that before the consecration the original triforium had been altered into a clerestory by the alteration of the aisle-roofs and the introduction of quadripartite vaulting in them at a lower level, thus necessitating the introduction of the groining-shaft in front of a window. The difficulty did not occur to me forcibly when I was on the spot, and I am unable to say, therefore, how far a thoroughly close examination of the work would clear it up. It might of course be said that such an alteration proves that the church was of two periods; and such an opinion would be to some extent supported by reference to the certainly early character of the south door, which might have been executed before A.D. 1063. But I am, on the whole, disposed rather to regard the chapel of Sta. Catalina as the original church, and to assume that the remainder of the building was built between A.D. 1063 and A.D. 1149, and that the awkward arrangement to which I have just referred was, in fact, the result of some accident or change of plan. This supposition would reconcile more satisfactorily all the difficulties of the case than any other, and would tally well with what I have been able to learn as to the history of the church. The body of San Isidoro was sent for rather suddenly, and brought from Seville, and the King had but short time for the preparation of the building for its reception. Two years later the body of San Vicente was brought from Avila, and no doubt the popularity of the two saints soon made it necessary to enlarge the church. Then it might well happen that the old church was left in its integrity, and the new building added to the east, but with its north wall in a line with the north wall of the old one, so as to allow of the cloister being built along their sides, and without at all disturbing the early church or its relics. The relative position of the churches makes it probable, in short, that the large church was added to the small one, and not that the latter was a chapel added to the former.
The style of the two buildings leads to the same conclusion, for in Sta. Catalina Ave have a small, low, vaulted church, two bays only in length and three in width. The two detached columns which carry the vaults are cylindrical, with capitals of somewhat the same kind as those in the church, but simpler and ruder. Recessed arches in the side walls contain various tombs of the Royal Family, who for ages, from the time of Fernando I. and Doña Sancha his queen, have been buried here; and the very circumstance that this little chapel was selected for the burial of so many royal persons, seems to make it extremely probable that it was the very chapel in which the body of San Isidoro had first been laid.
The door of communication from the chapel to the church has an arch of the same kind as the transept arches, semi-circular and fringed with several cusps; and the chapel is now lighted by two open arches on the north side, which communicate with the cloister. The groining is all quadripartite, without ribs, but with plain bold transverse arches between the bays.
The exterior of the church has some features which have all the air of being very early and original in their character. Such is the grand south doorway of the nave. Its arch is semicircular, and above it the spandrels are filled with sculpture. Above this is a line of panels containing the signs of the Zodiac; below are figures with musical instruments; and below these again, on the west, is a figure of San Isidoro, and on the right a figure of a woman, I think, book in hand, both of them supported on corbels formed of the heads of oxen. The tympanum itself is divided into two parts, the lower half being surmounted by a flat pediment, and the upper filling up the space from this to the intrados of the arch. The upper half has an Agnus Dei in a circle in the centre, and the lower half has Abraham’s sacrifice, with figures on horseback on either side. The head of the opening of the doorway is finished with a square trefoil, under which rams’ heads are carved. The whole detail of this sculpture is very unlike that of most of the early work I have seen in Spain; the figures are round and flabby, and badly arranged, and very free from any of the usual conventionality. All this made me feel much inclined to think that the execution of this work was at an early date, and soon after the first consecration of the church.
The elevation of the south transept is rather fine. It has a doorway, now blocked, with a figure against the wall on either side, standing between the label and a second label built into the wall from buttress to buttress. Above this is a rich corbel-table, and then an arcade of three divisions, of which the centre is pierced as a window; in the gable is another statue standing against the wall. The doorway has its opening finished with a square trefoil, and the tympanum is plain. The design of the apsidal chapel east of the apse is so precisely like the eastern apsidal chapels of many of the Spanish Romanesque churches,[130] that its date must, to some extent, be decided by theirs: and it may well be doubted whether it can be much earlier than circa A.D. 1150, though the lower part of the south transept appeared to me to be as early as the south door, or at any rate not later than A.D. 1100.
The walls are all carried up high above the clerestory windows, and finished with corbel-tables, carved with a billet-mould on edge, and carried on corbels moulded, not carved. Simple buttresses divide the bays of the clerestory.
The choir, as has been said, was a late addition in place of the original Romanesque apse. It was built in A.D. 1513, or a little after, by Juan de Badajoz, master of the works at the cathedral.[131] It is of debased Gothic design and coarse detail, but large and lofty. The groining at the east end is planned as if for an apse, and portions of diagonal buttresses, to resist the thrust of the groining ribs, are built against the east wall, in the way often to be noticed in the later Spanish buildings. The east window was of two lights only, and is now blocked up by the Retablo. In this church there is a perpetual exposition of the Host, and the choir is therefore screened off with more than usual care, none but the clergy being allowed to enter it. At Lugo, where there is also a similar exposition, the choir is left open, but two priests are always sitting or kneeling before faldstools in front of the altar.
I could not gain admission to the cloister on the north side of the church; it is large and all modernized, and surrounded by the buildings of the monastery, which is now suppressed. A chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity was founded here in A.D. 1191, and a list of the relics preserved at its altar is given on a stone preserved in the convent.
The chapel of Sta. Catalina, already described, is specially interesting on account of the remarkable paintings with which the whole of the groining is covered. These all appeared to me to have been certainly executed at the end of the twelfth century, circa A.D. 1180-1200, and they are remarkably rich in their foliage decoration, as well as in painting of figures and subjects. Beginning with the eastern central compartment, over the altar, and going round to the right, the subjects in the six bays of the vault are as follows:--
(1.) In this our Lord is seated in a vesica, at the angles of which are four angels, with the heads of the four Evangelists, with their books and names painted beside them. Our Lord’s feet are to the east, and He holds an open book and gives His blessing.
(2.) The angel speaking to the shepherds, with the inscription, “Angelus a pastores.”
(3.) The Massacre of the Innocents.
(4.) The Last Supper, painted without the slightest regard to the angles formed by the groining, and as if the vault were a flat surface.
(5.) a. Herod washing his hands. b. St. Peter denying our Lord. c. Our Lord bearing his Cross. d. The Crucifixion (this is almost destroyed).
(6.) Our Lord seated with His feet to the west; the seven churches around Him, seven candles, and an angel giving the book to St. John.
The soffeits of the cross arches between the vaults are painted, some with foliage, others with figures. Of the latter, one has the twelve Apostles, another the Holy Spirit in the centre, with angels worshipping on either side, and a third a Hand blessing (inscribed “Dextra Dei”) in centre, and saints on either side. The whole detail of the painted foliage is of thoroughly good conventional character, and just in the transitional style from Romanesque to Pointed.
There is a fine steeple detached from the church to the west. It stands on the very edge of the old town wall, several of the round towers of which still exist to the north of it, and below the great walls of the convent built within them. This steeple is very plain below, but its belfry stage has two fine shafted windows in each face, and nook shafts at its four corners. It is capped with a low square spire with small spire-lights: but as I found the working lines of all this drawn out elaborately on the whitewashed walls of one of the cloisters, and as all the work appears to be new, I cannot say whether or no it is an exact restoration, though I dare say it is.
In the sacristy there are some paintings, of which one or two are of great beauty. One is a charming picture of the Blessed Virgin with our Lord, with angels on either side, and others holding a crown above: the faces are sweet and delicate. One of the attendant angels offers an apple to our Lord; the other plays a guitar: the background is a landscape. The frame, too, is original. It has a gold edge, then a flat of blue covered with delicate gold diaper, and there are two shutters with this inscription on them:--“Fœlix ē sacra virgo Maria et omni laude dignissima quia in te ortus est sol justicie Chrūs Deus noster.” There is also a very little triptych, with a Descent from the Cross, and an inscription on the shutters. Two figures are drawing out the nails, and hold the body of our Lord; two other figures on ladders support His head and feet, and St. Mary and St. Mary Magdalene weep at the foot of the cross. The inscriptions on the shutters are from Zachariah xii., Plagent eum, &c., and Second Corinthians, “Pro omnibus mortuus est Christus.” There are other paintings which the Sacristan exhibits with more pride, but these two are precious works, of extremely good character, and painted probably about the end of the sixteenth century.
Leon is a much smaller city than might be expected for one so famous in Spanish history; its streets wind about in the most tortuous fashion; there are but few buildings of any pretension, and I saw no other old churches. There is indeed a great convent of San Marcos, built from the designs of Juan de Badajoz, in the sixteenth century, and afterwards added to by Berruguete, but I forgot to go to see it, and his work at San Isidoro makes me regard the omission as a very venial one. Round the city, on all sides, are long groves of poplars which look green and pleasant; there is a river--or at least in summer, as I saw it, the broad bed of one--and over the low hills which girt the city is a background of beautiful mountains. Both for its situation, therefore, and for the artistic treasures it enshrines, Leon well deserves a pilgrimage at the hands of all lovers of art.
VI. ASTORGA, LUGO, LA CORUÑA
The road from Leon to Astorga is bad, and traverses a very uninteresting country. A good part of the old walls of Astorga still remains, with the usual array of lofty round towers at short intervals: they were in process of partial demolition when I saw them, and I noticed that they were in part constructed with what appeared to be fragments of Roman buildings. There is a rather picturesque Plaza de la Constitucion here, one end of it being occupied by a quaint town-hall of the seventeenth century, through an archway in the centre of which one of the streets opens into the Plaza. A number of bells are hung in picturesque slated turrets on the roof, and some of them are struck by figures.
The only old church I saw was the cathedral. A stone here is inscribed with the following words in Spanish: “In 1471, on the 16th of August, the first stone of the new work of this holy church was laid;” and there is no doubt that the church is all of about this date, with some additions,--chiefly, however, of Retablos and other furniture,--in the two following centuries. The character of the whole design is necessarily in the very latest kind of Gothic; and much of the detail, especially on the exterior, is quite Renaissance in its character. The east end is finished with three parallel apses, and the nave is some seven or eight bays in length, with towers projecting beyond the aisles at the west end, and chapels opening into the aisles between the buttresses. The light is admitted by windows in the aisles over the chapel arches, and by a large clerestory. These windows are fortunately filled with a good deal of fine early Renaissance glass, which, though not all that might be wished in drawing and general treatment, is still remarkable for its very fine colour. Arches of the same height as the groining of the aisles open into the towers, the interior view across which produces the effect of a sort of western transept, corresponding with a similar transept between the nave and the apsidal choir. The detail is throughout very similar to that of the better known cathedrals at Segovia and Salamanca, the section of the columns being like a bundle of reeds, with ingeniously planned interpenetrating base mouldings, multiplied to such an extent that they finish at a height of no less that ten feet from the floor. Another evidence of the late character of the work is given by the arch mouldings, which die against and interpenetrate those of the columns, there being no capitals. Beyond a certain stateliness of height and colour which this small cathedral has in common with most other Spanish works of the same age, there is but little to detain or interest an architect. But stateliness and good effects of light and shade are so very rare in modern works, that we can ill afford to regard a building which shows them as being devoid of merit or interest.
From Astorga the road soon begins to rise, and the scenery thenceforward for the remainder of the journey to la Coruña becomes always interesting, and sometimes extremely beautiful. The country can hardly be said to be mountainous, yet the hills are on a scale far beyond what we are accustomed to; and the grand sweep of the hill sides, covered occasionally with wood, and intersected by deep valleys, makes the whole journey most pleasant. One of the prettiest spots on the road, before reaching Villafranca, is the little village of Torre, where a quaint bridge spans the brawling trout-stream; and where the thick cluster of squalid cottages atones to the traveller, in some degree, by its picturesqueness, for the misery in which the people live. They seem to be terribly ill off, and their chimneyless hovels--pierced only with a door and one very small window or hole in the wall, into which all the light, and out of both of which all the smoke have to find their way--are of the worst description. The village churches appear to be, almost without exception, very mean; and all have the broad western bell-turret, so popular in this part of Spain.
In ten hours from Astorga, passing Ponferrada on the way, from the hill above which the view is very fine, Villafranca del Vierzo is reached; and this is the only place of any importance on the road. Its situation is charming, on a fine trout-stream, along whose beautiful banks the road runs for a considerable distance; and it is the proper centre for excursions to the convents of the Vierzo, of which Mr. Ford gives an account which made me anxious to examine them, though unfortunately the time at my disposal put it completely out of the question. These old towns, of the second or third rank, have a certain amount of picturesque character, though far less than might be expected of external evidence of their antiquity. Here, indeed, the picturesqueness is mainly the result of the long tortuous streets, and the narrow bridges over the beautiful river, which make the passage of a diligence so much of an adventure, as to leave the passengers grateful when they have gained with safety the other side of the town. The Alameda here is pleasantly planted; and the town boasts of an inn which is just good enough to make it quite possible for an ecclesiologist to use it as headquarters in a visit to the convents of the Vierzo, whilst any one who is so fortunate as to be both fisherman and ecclesiologist could scarcely be better placed.
Villafranca has one large, uninteresting, and very late Gothic church, into which I could not get admission; the other churches seemed to be all Renaissance in style.
I arrived at Lugo after a journey of more than thirty hours from Leon. Like Astorga it is surrounded with a many-towered wall, which still seems to be perfect throughout its whole extent. The road passes along under it, half round the town, until at last it turns in through an archway, and reaches the large Plaza of San Domingo, in which is the diligence Fonda. This was so unusually dirty even to the eyes and nose of a tolerably well-seasoned traveller, that I was obliged to look for a lodging, which, after a short search, I discovered; and if it was not much better, it was still a slight improvement on the inn. In these towns lodgings are generally to be found; and as they are free from the abominable scent of the mules, which pervades every part of all the inns, they are often to be preferred to them. Mine was in a narrow street leading out of the great arcaded Plaza, which, on the day of my arrival, was full of market-people, selling and buying every kind of commodity; and on the western side of this Plaza stands the cathedral.
This is a church of very considerable architectural value and interest. It was commenced early in the twelfth century, under the direction of a certain Maestro Raymundo, of Monforte de Lemos. His contract with the bishop and canons was dated A.D. 1129; and by this it was agreed that he should be paid an annual salary of two hundred sueldos of the money then current; and if there was any change in its value, then he was to be paid six marks of silver, thirty-six yards of linen, seventeen “cords” of wood, shoes and gaiters as he had need of them; and each month two sueldos for meat, a measure of salt, and a pound of candles. Master Raymundo accepted these conditions, and bound himself to assist at the work all the days of his life; and if he died before its completion, his son was to finish it.[132]
The church built by Raymundo is said to have been finished in A.D. 1177,[133] and still in part no doubt remains.[134] It consists of a nave and aisles of ten bays in length, transepts, and a short apsidal choir, with aisle and chapels round it. The large central eastern chapel is an addition made in A.D. 1764; and the west front is a very poor work of about the same period. There is an open porch in front of the north transept, and a steeple on its eastern side.
The design and construction of the nave and aisles is very peculiar, and must be compared with that of the more important, cathedral at Santiago. This had been finished, so far as the fabric was concerned, in the previous year, and evidently suggested the mode of construction adopted at Lugo.
Here the arches, with few exceptions, are pointed; but otherwise the design of the two churches is just the same. The nave has a pointed barrel-vault; the triforium, however, has quadripartite vaulting throughout, in place of the half barrel-vaults used at Santiago; and the buttresses externally are connected by a series of arches below the eaves. The triforium consists in each bay of two pointed arches under a round enclosing arch, carried upon coupled shafts, which have rudely sculptured capitals. The five eastern bays of the nave appear at first sight to have no arches opening into the aisles; but upon closer examination the outline of some low arches will be found behind the stall work of the Coro. These arches are all blocked up; but if they were originally open they are so low that they could not have made the effect very different from what it now is. It looks, in fact, at first sight, as if the present arrangement of the Coro were that for which the church was originally built, and as if the nave proper was always that part only of the church to the west of the present Coro which opens to the aisles with simple pointed arches of the whole height of the aisle. But on further examination we find that the vaulting of the aisles in the four eastern bays is a round waggon-vault, and this, of course, limited the height to which it was possible to raise the arches between the aisle and the nave; and it is therefore probable that their height is not to be attributed so much to the wish to define a Coro in the nave, as to the fault of the architect, who did not at first perceive the advantage of using a quadripartite vault instead of a waggon-vault. The three bays west of these have the former kind of vaulting without ribs, and with windows both larger and higher from the floor than the simple round-arched openings which light the four eastern bays. The eighth and ninth bays are evidently rather later than the rest; and the western bays, again, are quite subsequent additions. The crossing has a quadripartite vault, and the transepts waggon-vaults like those of the nave.
It is pretty clear that the work was commenced upon the scheme which we still see in the bays next the crossing, and carried on gradually with alterations as the work went on, and probably as it went on the architect discovered the mistake he was making in confining himself to waggon-vaulting in the aisles. It is somewhat remarkable that, with the example of Santiago so near, such a scheme should ever have been devised, unless, indeed, the work was commenced earlier than the date assigned, of which I see no evidence.
The choir shows the same gradual variation in style; and I have considerable difficulty in assigning a precise date to it. It is clear, however, that the whole of it is of much later date than the original foundation of the cathedral; and it is probable, I think, that it was reconstructed in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The windows in the chapels of the chevet are of two lights, with a small quatrefoil pierced in the tympanum above the lights. The mouldings of the groining are extremely bold and simple. The aisle-vaulting, too, is very simple and of early-pointed character, whilst the clustered columns round the apse look somewhat later. There is, however, no mark of alterations or additions; and I think, therefore, that the whole of this work must be of the same date, and that the difference visible between the various parts of it may be put down to the long lingering of those forms of art which had been once imported into this distant province, and to the consequent absence of development. The sculpture of the capitals in the chevet is nowhere, I think, earlier than about the end of the thirteenth century, though that in the chapels round it, being very simple, looks rather earlier.
Unfortunately all the upper part of the choir was rebuilt about the same time that the eastern chapel was added. It has strange thin ogee flying buttresses, large windows, and a painted ceiling.
Here, as at San Isidoro, Leon, the Host is always exposed, and, as I have mentioned before, two priests are always in attendance at faldstools on each side of the Capilla mayor in front of the altar.
The interior, of course, has been much damaged by the destruction of the old clerestory of the choir. It is, nevertheless, still very impressive, and much of its fine effect is owing to the contrast between the bright light of the nave and the obscure gloom of the long aisles on either side of the Coro. The length of the nave, too, is unusually great in proportion to the size of the church; and though much of the sculpture is rude in execution, it is still not without effect on the general character of the building.
On the north side of the nave a chapel has been added, which preserves the external arrangement of the windows and buttresses in the earliest part of the building, as they are now enclosed within and protected by it. The simple and rather rude buttresses are carried up and finished under the eaves’ corbel-tables with arches between them, so as to make a continuous arcade the whole length of the building on either side.
The north doorway is of the same age as the early part of the church, and has a figure of our Lord within a vesica in the tympanum, and the Last Supper carved on a pendant below it. The head of the door-opening is very peculiar, having a round arch on either side of this central pendant. The door has some rather good ironwork. The porch in front of it is a work of the fifteenth century, or perhaps later, and is open on three sides.
The only good external view of the church is obtained from the north side. Here the tower rises picturesquely above the transept, but the belfry and upper stage are modern[135] and very poor. The bells are not only hung in the windows, but one of them is suspended in an open iron framework from the finish the centre of the roof.
The cloister and other buildings seem to be all completely modern, and are of very poor style.
There are two old churches here--those of the Capuchins and of San Domingo--both of them in or close to the Plaza of San Domingo. The church of the Capuchins is evidently interesting, though I could not gain access to its interior, which appears to be desecrated. It has transepts, a low central lantern, a principal apse of six sides, and two smaller apses opening into the transepts. These apses are remarkable for having an angle in the centre, whilst their windows have a bar of tracery across them, transome fashion, at mid-height. It is certainly a very curious coincidence, that in both these particulars it resembles closely the fine church of the Frari at Venice; and though I am not prepared to say that the imitation is anything more than the merest accident, it is certainly noteworthy. The eaves are all finished with moulded corbel-tables; and there is a rather fine rose-window in the transept gable. The circles in the head of the apse windows are filled in with very delicate traceries, cut out of thin slabs of stone, a device evidently borrowed from Moresque examples; and it is somewhat strange to meet them here so far from any Moorish buildings or influence.
The church of San Domingo is somewhat similar in plan. It has a modernized nave of five bays, a central dome, which looks as though it might be old, but which is now all plastered and whitewashed, a principal apse of seven sides, transepts covered with waggon-vaults, and small apses to the east of them. The capitals have carvings of beasts and foliage; but none of these, or of the mouldings, look earlier than the fourteenth century; yet the capitals are all square in plan, and the arches into the chapels have a bold dog-tooth enrichment. There is a fine south doorway to the nave, in which chevrons, delicate fringes of cusping, and dog-tooth, are all introduced. In such a work the date of the latest portion must be the date of the whole; and so I do not think it can be earlier than the rest of the church, though at first sight it undoubtedly has the air of being more than a century older.
Gil Gonzalez Dávila[136] says that Bishop Fernando gave permission for the foundation of the convent of San Domingo in A.D. 1318, and that circa A.D. 1350-58 the Dominican Fray Pedro Lopez de Aguiar founded it; and this date appears to me to accord very well with the peculiar character of the work.
There is little more to be seen in Lugo. The old walls, though they retain all their towers, have been to some extent altered for the worse to fit them for defence in the last war; they have been also rendered available as a broad public walk,--very pleasant, inasmuch as it commands good views of the open country beyond the city.
The people here and at Santiago all go to the fountains armed with a long tin tube, which they apply to the mouths of the beasts which discharge the water, and so convey the stream straight to their pitchers placed on the edge of the large basins. The crowd of water-carriers round a Spanish fountain is always noisy, talkative, and gay; and many is the fight and furious the clamour for the privilege of putting the tube to the fountain in regular order.
I travelled between la Coruña and Lugo by night, so that I am unable to say anything as to the country or scenery on the road, save that for some distance before reaching Lugo it is cold, bare, and unattractive.
Betanzos, the only town of importance on the road, has two or three good churches, which I missed seeing by daylight. They are of early date, with apsidal east ends, and somewhat similar, apparently, to the churches at la Coruña, though on a larger scale.
La Coruña is charmingly situated, facing a grand landlocked bay, but on the inner side of a narrow ridge, a short walk across which leads to the open sea, which is here very magnificent. The views of the coast, and the openings to the grand bays or rios of Ferrol, Betanzos, and la Coruña, are of unusual beauty, and it is rarely indeed that one sees a more attractive country. But there is not very much to detain an architect. The town is divided into the old and the new; and in the former are two old churches, which, though small, are interesting; whilst in the latter there is absolutely nothing to see but shops and cafés.
The Collegiata of Sta. Maria del Campo was made a parish church by King Alonso X. in A.D. 1256, and in A.D. 1441 was made collegiate: it has a nave and aisles of five bays, and a short chancel, with an apse covered with a semi-dome vault.[137] The nave and aisles are all covered with pointed waggon-vaults springing from the same level; and as the aisles are narrow, their vaults resist the thrust of the main vault, without exerting a violent thrust on the aisle walls. The capitals are rudely carved with foliage, and the arches are perfectly plain. The bay of vaulting over the chancel is a pointed waggon-vault, with ribs on its under side, arranged as though in imitation of a sexpartite vault.[138]
The western doorway has a circular arch, with rudely carved foliage in the outer orders; and ten angels, with our Lord giving His blessing in the centre, in the inner order. The tympanum has the Adoration of the Magi. The abaci and capitals are carved, but everywhere the carving is overlaid with whitewash so thickly as to be not very intelligible. The south door has storied capitals, and angels under the corbels, which support the tympanum over the door-opening; this has a figure with a pilgrim’s staff, probably Santiago, and there are other figures and foliage in the arch. The abacus is carried round the buttresses, and a bold arch is thrown across between them above the door. An original window near this door is a mere slit in the wall, and not intended for glazing. The north door is somewhat similar to the other, with a sculpture of St. Katharine in the tympanum.
The apse has a very small east window, engaged columns dividing it into three bays, and a simple corbel-table.
The west front is quaint and picturesque. It has a bold porch--now almost built up by modern erections--and two small square towers or turrets at the angles. Of these the south-western has a low, square stone spire, springing from within a traceried parapet, and with some very quaint crockets at the angles. A tall cross, with an original sculpture of the Crucifixion, stands in the little Plaza in front of the church. The Coro here is in a large western gallery, but both this and the stalls are Renaissance in style.
The other church is that of Santiago. This has a broad nave, forty-four feet wide, into the east wall of which three small apses open.[139] The nave is divided into four bays by bold cross arches, which carry the wooden roof; and of the three eastern arches, the central rises high above the others, and has a circular window above it. The west front has a very fine doorway, set in a projecting portion of the wall, finished with a corbel-table and cornice at the top. This has a figure of Santiago in the tympanum, and statues in the jambs. The north doorway has heads of oxen supporting the lintel, and rude carving of foliage in the arch. One of the original windows remains in the north wall. This is roundheaded and very narrow, but has good jamb-shafts and arch-mouldings. The detail of the eastern apse is of bold and simple Romanesque character, with engaged shafts supporting the eaves-cornice.
There is not, so far as I know, any evidence as to the exact date of these churches; but I think that the character of all their details proves that they were founded about the middle of the twelfth century. They are evidently later than the cathedral at Santiago, and tally more with the work which I have been describing in the nave of Lugo Cathedral. And though the dimensions of both are insignificant, they appear to me to be extremely valuable examples, as showing two evident attempts at development on the part of their architect, who, to judge of the strong similarity in some of their details, was probably the same man.
Three barrel-vaults on the same level as at Sta. Maria are seldom seen; and the bold cross arches spanning Santiago are a good example of an attempt in the twelfth century to achieve what few have yet attempted to accomplish in the revival of the present day--the covering of a broad nave in a simple, economical, and yet effective manner.
In the church of Santiago there is preserved a fragment of an embroidered blue velvet cope. The sprigs with which it is diapered are so exactly similar in character to those of some of our own old examples--the Ely cope in particular--as to suggest the idea that the work is really English.
From La Coruña to Santiago the road is, for the first half of the way, extremely pleasant, and passes through a luxuriant country; gradually, however, as the end of the great pilgrimage is reached, it becomes dreary and the country bare; still the outlines of the hills are fine, and some of the distant views rather attractive. But Santiago is too important a city, and its cathedral is too grand and interesting, to be described at the end of a chapter.
VII. SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELLA
The journey from Lugo to Santiago is pleasant so far as the country is concerned, and there is one advantage in the extremely slow and grave pace of the diligences in this part of the world, that it always allows of the scenery being well studied. Moreover, in these long rides there is a pleasure and relief in being able to take a good walk without much risk of being left behind, which can hardly be appreciated by the modern Englishman who travels only in his own country. The general character of the landscape is somewhat like that of the Yorkshire moors, diversified here and there by beautiful valleys, the sides of which are generally clothed with chestnut, but sometimes with walnut, oak, and stone-pines. The heaths were in full flower, and looked brilliant in the extreme, and here and there were patches of gorse. The road is fine, and has only recently been made. The country is very thinly populated, so that we passed not more than two or three villages on the way, and in none of them did I see signs of old churches of any interest. It is difficult to picture anything more wretched than the state of the Gallegan peasantry as we saw them on this road. They were very dirty, and clothed in the merest rags: the boys frequently with nothing on but a shirt, and that all in tatters; and the women with but little more in quantity, and nothing better in quality. The poorest Irish would have some difficulty in showing that their misery is greater than that of these poor Gallegans.
My journey to Santiago was quite an experiment. I had been able to learn nothing whatever about the cathedral before going there, and I was uncertain whether I should not find the mere wreck of an old church, overlaid everywhere with additions by architects of the Berruguetesque or Churrugueresque schools, instead of the old church which I knew had once stood there. In all my Spanish journeys there had been somewhat of this pleasant element of uncertainty as to what I was to find; but here my ignorance was complete, and as the journey was a long one to make on speculation, it was not a little fortunate that my faith was rewarded by the discovery of a church of extreme magnificence and interest.
The weary day wore on as we toiled on and on upon our pilgrimage, and it was nearly dark before we reached the entrance of the city, and after much delay found ourselves following a porter up the steep streets and alleys which lead up from the diligence Fonda to the principal inn, which happens fortunately to be very near the one interesting spot in the city--the cathedral. The next morning showed us not only the exterior of the city, but enabled us also to form a good idea of its surroundings. It stands on the slope of a steep hill, with great bare and bleak hills on all sides, rising generally to a great height. From some of them the views are no doubt very fine, and the town with its towers and walls may well look more imposing than it does on a nearer view.
For, to say the truth, if the cathedral be left out of consideration, Santiago is a disappointing place. There is none of the evidence of the presence of pilgrims which might be expected, and I suspect a genuine pilgrim is a very rare article indeed. I never saw more than one, and he proclaimed his intentions only by the multitude of his scallop-shells fastened on wherever his rags would allow; but I fear much he was a professional pilgrim; he was begging lustily at Zaragoza, and seemed to have been many years there on the same errand, without getting very far on his road. And there is not much evidence in the town itself of its history and pretensions to antiquity; for, as is so often the case in Spain, so great was the wealth possessed by the Church in the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century, that all the churches and religious houses were rebuilt about that time, and now, in place of mediæval churches and convents, there are none but enormous Renaissance erections on all sides; and as they are bad examples of their class, little pleasure is to be derived from looking at them, either outside or inside.
Perhaps some exception ought to be made from this general depreciation of the buildings at Santiago in favour of the entourage of the cathedral; for here there is a sumptuous church opening on all sides to Plazas of grand size, and surrounded by buildings all having more or less architectural pretension. Steep flights of steps lead from one Plaza to another, a fountain plays among quarrelsome water-carriers in one, and in another not only does an old woman retail scallop-shells to those who want them, but a tribe of market people ply their trade, cover the flags with their bright fruit, make the ear tired with their eternal wrangle, and the eye delighted with their gay choice of colours for sashes, headgear, and what not.
The whole record of the foundation of this cathedral is a great deal too long to enter upon here; but fortunately enough remains of its architectural history to make the story of the present building both intelligible and interesting, and to this I must now ask the attention of my readers.
There seems to have been a church founded here in or about the year 868,[140] which is said to have been completed in thirty-one years,[141] and consecrated in A.D. 899. Of this church nothing now remains; but the contemporary deed of gift to the church by the King Alfonso III., and the account of the altars and relics existing in it at the time, are of considerable interest.[142]
I need hardly say how much store was laid by the clergy of Santiago on their possession of the body of the Apostle. Mr. Ford[143] gives only too amusing, if it is, as I fear, only too true, a version of the story of the Saint’s remains. Suffice it here to say, that there no longer seem to be great pilgrimages to his shrine, and that even in Spain the old belief in the miracle-working power of his bones seems now practically to have died out.[144] Nothing could, however, have been stronger than the old faith in their patron, and the extreme wealth brought to the church by the pilgrimages made of old to his shrine from all parts of Europe would no doubt have involved the entire destruction of all remains of the early church, in order to its reconstruction on a far grander scale, had it not been destroyed, so far as possible, in the century after its erection, by the Moors under Almanzor.
From the end of the tenth century I find no mention of the cathedral until the episcopate of Diego Gelmirez, in whose time Santiago was made an archbishopric. He was consecrated in the year 1100, and died in A.D. 1130, and the history of his archiepiscopate is given in great detail in the curious contemporary chronicle, the ‘Historia Compostellana.’[145] Here it is recorded that, in A.D. 1128, “forty-six years after the commencement of the new church of St. James,” the bishop, finding that the subordinate buildings were so poor that strangers absolutely “wandered about looking for where the cloisters and offices might be,” called his chapter together, and urged upon them the necessity of remedying so grave a defect, finishing his speech by the offer of a hundred marks of pure silver, thirty at once, and the rest at the end of a year.[146] This would put the commencement of the new cathedral in the year 1082, during the episcopate of Diego Pelaez, though, as will be seen, the same History elsewhere says that the church was commenced in A.D. 1178, a date which occurs also on the south transept door-jamb; and the works must have been carried on during the time of his successors, Pedro II. and Dalmatius (a monk of Cluny), to its completion under Gelmirez.[147] It was in the time of this bishop, in the year 1117, it is recorded in the Chronicle, that during a violent tumult in the city, in which both the bishop and queen hardly escaped alive, the cathedral was set on fire by the mob; but its construction is so nearly fireproof, that doubtless it was the furniture only that was really burnt; for, eleven years later, in A.D. 1128, the bishop, in his speech to the chapter, already mentioned, speaks of the church as being extremely beautiful, and, indeed, renowned for its beauty.[148] In A.D. 1124 two canons of Santiago were collecting money for the works at the cathedral, in Sicily and Apulia,[149] and the cloister, which was commenced in A.D. 1128, seems to have been still unfinished in A.D. 1134.[150] From this date until A.D. 1168 I find no record of any alteration; but in this year Ferdinand II. issued a warrant[151] for the payment of the master of the works--one Matthew--and twenty years later, the same master of the works put the following inscription on the under side of the lintel of the western door:--
“Anno: ab: Incarnatione: Dai: Mº. Cº. LXXXVIIIvo: Era Iª CCXXh. VI.:ª Die K-L. Aprilis: supra liniharia: Principalium: portalium.”
“Ecclesiæ: Beati: Jacobi: sunt collocata: Per: Magistrum: Matheum: qui: a: fundamentis: ipsorum: portalium: gessit: magisterium.”[152]
In addition to these evidences, there are two others in the church itself; one, to which I shall refer again, a date which I take to be A.D. 1078, on the jamb of the south transept doorway; and the other, an inscription which, with some modifications, is repeated several times round the margins of circles let into the aisle walls, in the centre of which are the dedication crosses. The date on one of these over the west side of the transept, as well as I could read it, appeared to me to be A.D. 1154;[153] but as the inscriptions vary somewhat round the different crosses, it is possible that the dates may vary also with the time of completion of the various parts of the building; and I regret therefore that I did not make accurate copies of all of them. The dedication crosses are all floriated at the ends, and have in the spandrels between the arms of the cross--above, the sun and moon, and below, the letters A and Ω. Three of these remain on each side of the nave, two in each transept, and two in the choir aisle, twelve in all. I saw none on the exterior; but so little of the old external walls can now be seen that this is not to be wondered at.
It is now time to describe the building itself, the age of its various parts having been pretty accurately defined by the documentary evidence which I have quoted.
This cathedral is of singular interest, not only on account of its unusual completeness, and the general unity of style which marks it, but still more because it is both in plan and design a very curiously exact repetition of the church of S. Sernin at Toulouse.[154] But S. Sernin is earlier in date by several years, having been commenced by S. Raymond in A.D. 1060, and consecrated by Pope Urban II. in A.D. 1096; and the cathedral at Santiago can only be regarded, therefore, as to a great extent a copy of S. Sernin, the materials being, however, different, since granite was used in its construction in place of the brick and stone with which its prototype was constructed.
The dimensions of the two churches do not differ very much; Santiago has one bay less in its nave, but one bay more in each transept; it has only one aisle, whilst S. Sernin has two on each side of the nave; and its two towers are placed north and south of the west front, instead of to the west of it, as they are at S. Sernin. The arrangement of the chevet and of the chapels on the east of the transepts was the same in both churches. Here they still exist in the chevet, but in the transepts traces of them are only to be found after careful examination. Three of them, indeed are quite destroyed, though slight traces still exist of the arches which opened into them from the aisles, but the fourth has been preserved by a piece of vandalism for which one must be grateful. It has been converted into a passage-way to a small church which once stood detached to the north-east of the cathedral, and the access to which was by a western doorway. The erection of a modern chapel blocked up the access to this doorway, and an opening was then made through the northern chapel of the north transept, which has thus been saved from the fate which has befallen the others. The position and size of these chapels are indicated in the ground-plan.
The proportions of the several parts of the plans of the two churches are also nearly identical; and owing in part to the arrangement of the groining piers of the transepts, in which the aisles are returned round the north and south ends, the transept fronts in both churches have the very unusual arrangement of two doorways side by side--a central single doorway being impossible. The triforium galleries surround the whole church, being carried across the west end and the ends of the transepts, so that a procession might easily ascend from the west end, by the tower staircases--which are unusually broad and spacious--and make the entire circuit of the church. Finally, the sections of both these great churches are as nearly as possible the same; their naves being covered with barrel-vaults, their aisles with quadripartite vaults, and the triforia over the aisles with quadrant vaults, abutting against and sustaining as with a continuous flying buttress the great waggon-vaults of their naves.[155]
The exterior of the cathedral at Santiago--to a more detailed description of which I must now devote myself--is almost completely obscured and overlaid by modern additions. The two old western steeples shown on the plan are old only about as high as the side walls of the church, and have been raised to a very considerable height, and finished externally with a lavish display of pilasters, balustrades, vases, and what not, till they finish in a sort of pepper-box fashion with small cupolas. Between them is a lofty niche over the west front, which contains a statue of the tutelar.[156] Fortunately the whole of the façade between the steeples was built on in front of, and without destroying, Master Matthew’s great work, the western porch. The ground falls considerably to the west, and a rather picturesque quadruple flight of steps, arranged in a complicated fashion, leads up from the Plaza to the doors. There are two great and two lesser flights of steps, so that a procession going up might be divided into four lines; a doorway in the centre of the western wall below these steps leads into a chapel constructed below the western porch. This is now called the Chapel of St. Joseph, but seems to have been known of old as Santiago la Vajo. The arrangement of its plan is very peculiar.[157] There are two large central piers east and west of a sort of transept; to the west of this are two old arches, and then the modern passage leading to the doorway at the foot of the steps. To the east of the transept is an apse consisting of an aisle formed round the great central pier, with small recesses for altars round it. The aisle is covered with a round-arched waggon-vault; it has five recesses for altars; the easternmost seems to have a square east end, the next to it on either side have apses, and the others are very shallow recesses hardly large enough for altars. There can be no doubt whatever, I think, that this is the work on which Master Matthew was first employed; it is exactly under the porch and doorway, on which, as we know by the inscription on the lintel of the door, he wrought; and as he was first at work here in A.D. 1168, and finished the doors in A.D. 1188, we may safely put down this chapel as having been begun and finished circa A.D. 1168-1175. In this the bases are some of them square, some circular in plan; the sculpture of the capitals is elaborate and similar in character to most of the later work in the cathedral. The favourite device of pairs of animals regarding each other is frequently repeated; and there are moulded and spiral shafts in the jambs of the western arches. My view of the interior of this interesting little chapel will best explain its general character and peculiarities, and it will be felt, I think, that it is certainly not earlier than the date I have assigned, and therefore, like the great western door, of later date than the church in connection with which it was built. Behind the eastern altar there is an arcade of three arches forming a kind of reredos, but I am not at all sure whether they are in their old places, and I am inclined to think it more likely that there is an eastern apse behind them. There is nothing to prove whether there were any western doors to this chapel, and as all the light must originally have come through the western arches, it would seem to be most probable that there were none. The chapel is now kept locked, and is but seldom used for service.[158]
To return to the west front. This is the centre only of a vast architectural façade; to the right of the church being the chapter-house and other rooms on the west side of the cloister, and to the left another long line of dependent buildings. The Plaza is bounded by public buildings on its other three sides;[159] and beyond, to the west, the ground falling very rapidly affords a fine view across the valley to the picturesque mountain-like ranges which bound the landscape. This is the Plaza Mayor or “del Hospital.”
Going northward from the west entrance, and turning presently to the east, a low groined gateway is reached, which leads into another Plaza fronting the north transept. This gateway is a work of the twelfth century, but of the simplest kind. The Plaza de San Martin, to the north of the cathedral, is picturesquely irregular; its north side is occupied by a vast convent of St. Martin, and the ground slopes down steeply from it to the cathedral. Here is the gayest and busiest market-place of the town, and the best spot for studying the noisy cries and the bright dresses of the Gallegan peasantry. They are to be seen on a Sunday, especially, in all their finery,--bright, picturesque, and happy looking, for those who can afford to dress smartly are happy, and those who cannot don’t seem to come--selling and buying every possible kind of ware, save, perhaps, the large stock of scallop-shells, which, though they are kept for sale with due regard to the genius loci, seemed to me never to attract any one to become a purchaser, and to adopt the badge of St. James!
The whole of the northern front of the transept and church is modernized. But to the east of it lies the little church used as the Parroquia, and which will be better described when I go to the interior, as externally it has no old feature save a simple little window in its north wall.
A narrow passage from the Plaza de San Martin leads to the upper side of a third Plaza opposite the east end; and here, though the cathedral has been enclosed within square modern walls, there is fortunately just enough left of the exterior of the eastern chapel and part of the apse enclosed in a small court to explain its whole original design. The entrance to this court is garnished with a number of statues, evidently, I think, taken from a doorway, and perhaps from the destroyed north doorway.[160] From this fragment of the chevet, it seems that the eastern chapel was surrounded with a deeply recessed arcading, within which were broad, round-arched windows with moulded archivolts carried on shafts with sculptured capitals. The smaller chapels have three-quarter shafts running up to the cornices placed between the windows, and the corbel-tables at the eaves are simple and bold. The bay between the chapels has a window occupying the whole space in width, and above it is a small circular window, a feature which occurs in almost exactly the same position in S. Sernin, Toulouse.[161] A string-course is carried round the aisle wall above the roofs of the chapels, and the wall is continued up to the same level as the walls of the aisles of the church, and has alternately windows and arcading in its outer elevation. This is perhaps the only serious difference between the design of this church and that of S. Sernin. There the triforia are not carried round the chevet, and consequently the aisle walls are not so lofty, and the clerestory of the apse is shown in the usual way.
Continuing the circuit of the cathedral, we now reach the Plaza de los Plateros, in front of the south transept. This is bounded on the west side by the outer walls of the cloisters, and a broad flight of steps all across the Plaza leads up to the transept. This has been to some extent damaged by the erection of a lofty clock-tower projecting at its south-east angle, in which are the clock and the bells. The rest of the old façade is fortunately preserved. It has two doorways in the centre division, and two grand and deeply recessed windows above them. The ends of the aisles seem to have been similarly treated above. The finish of the transept wall is modern, but there still remain two canopies in it, under one of which is a figure of the Blessed Virgin, no doubt part of a sculpture of the Annunciation.
The detail of the work in this front is of great interest, inasmuch as it is clearly by another and an earlier workman than that of the western part of the church. There are three shafts in each jamb of the doors, whereof the outer are of marble, the rest of stone. These marble shafts are carved with extreme delicacy with a series of figures in niches, the niches having round arches, which rest upon carved and twisted columns separating the figures. The work is so characteristic as to deserve illustration. It is executed almost everywhere with that admirable delicacy so conspicuous in early Romanesque sculpture. The other shafts are twisted and carved in very bold fashion.
The jamb of this door retains an inscription deeply cut in large letters, which appears to give the same date--Era 1116, 5 Ides of July--that I have already quoted from the ‘Historia Compostellana.’ But as the reading of this inscription is open to doubt, I think it well to engrave it. This Era would make the date of these doors agree with the commencement of the works. Figures on either side support the ends of the lintels of the doors, but the tympana and the wall above for some feet are covered with pieces of sculpture, evidently taken down and refixed where they are now seen. They are arranged, in short, like the casts at the Crystal Palace, as if the wall were part of a museum. One of the stones in the tympanum of the eastern door has the Crowning with Thorns and the Scourging; and on other stones above are portions of a Descent into Hades, in which asses with wings are shown kneeling to our Lord. Asses and other beasts are carved elsewhere, and altogether the whole work has a rude barbaric splendour characteristic of its age.
The windows above deserve special notice. Their shafts and archivolts are very richly twisted and carved, and the cusping of the inner arch is of a rare kind. It consists of five complete foils, so that the points of the lowest cusp rest on the capital, and, to a certain extent, the effect of a horseshoe arch is produced. This might be hastily assumed to be a feature borrowed from the Moors; but the curious fact is that this very rare form of cusping is seen in many, if not most, of the churches of the Auvergnat type, to which reference has already been made, and it must be regarded here, therefore, as another proof of the foreign origin of most of the work at Santiago, rather than of any Moorish influence. I have omitted to say that in addition to the other steeples there is a modern dome over the crossing. The lower part of the lantern is old, and the four piers which support it are somewhat larger than the rest.
The exterior of the cloister is rather Renaissance than Gothic in its character, and has some picturesque small towers at the angles.
Altogether the impression which is first given here is of a church which has been completely altered by Renaissance architects of rather a more picturesque turn of mind than is usual; and the generally similar character of the work in the Plazas on the several sides of the church gives certainly a rather stately, though to me it was a very disappointing, tout ensemble.
With such feelings about the exterior, the complete change in the character of the work as one goes through the door is more than usually striking, for you are at once transferred from what is all modern, to what is almost all very old, uniform, and but little disturbed. The interior of the transepts is very impressive; their length is not far from equal to that of the nave, and the view is less interrupted than in it, as the rails between the Coro and the Capilla mayor are very light, and the stalls are all to the west of the crossing. The whole detail of the design is extremely simple. The piers are alternated throughout the church of the two sections given on my ground-plan. The capitals are all carved, generally with foliage, but sometimes with pairs of birds and beasts. Engaged columns run up from the floor to the vault, and carry transverse ribs or arches below the great waggon-vault. The triforium opens to the nave with a round arch, subdivided with two arches, carried on a detached shaft. I have already described the construction, and I need only add here that the buttresses, which appear on the ground-plan, are all connected by arches thrown from one to the other, so that the eaves of the roof project in front of their outside face. There is consequently an enormous thickness of wall to resist the weight and thrust of the continuous vault of the triforium, these arches between the buttresses having been contrived in order to render the whole wall as rigid and uniform in its resistance to the thrust as possible. The height of the interior, from the floor to the centre of the barrel-vault of the nave, is a little over seventy feet. This dimension is, of course, insignificant if compared with the height of many later churches; but it must be borne in mind that here there is no clerestory, and that, owing to its absence, there is much less light in the upper part of the church than is usual, and one consequence of this partial gloom is a great apparent increase in the size of every part of the building. The original windows remain throughout the greater part of the church. In the aisles they have jamb-shafts inside, and in both aisles and triforia there are jamb-shafts outside. Occasionally at the angles of the aisles, and elsewhere where it was impossible to pierce the walls for windows, sunk arcading, corresponding with them in outline and detail, is substituted for them.
The chevet has been a good deal altered; most of the chapels remain, but the columns and arches round the choir have all been destroyed, or, at any rate, so covered over with modern work as to be no longer visible. A thirteenth-century chapel has been added on the north of the apse, and a small chapel of the fifteenth century and a large one of the Renaissance period on its south-west side. The other alterations are clearly indicated on the engraving of the ground-plan.
I have already said that the existing Renaissance steeples at the west end are built upon the lower portions of the original Romanesque towers. The only peculiarity about these is the planning of their staircases. The steps are carried all round the steeple in the thickness of the wall, and the central space is made use of for a succession of small chambers one over the other. These staircases are unusually wide and good, and their mode of construction is obviously very strong.
The only other part of the church of the same age as the original fabric is the detached chapel to the north-east of it. This seems to have had originally no connexion whatever with the cathedral, the passage which now leads to its western doorway from the north transept being quite modern, and made for the reason already mentioned. Its western door is a good late Romanesque work, with shafts in the jambs, and carved capitals. The church itself consists of a nave and aisles of two bays in length, and a chancel with an aisle on either side. The columns are cylindrical, with carved capitals. The aisles have quadrant vaults, and the nave a semi-circular ceiling, but I could not ascertain certainly whether this was of plaster or stone. If the latter, then this little church affords a very interesting example of the adaptation of precisely the same mode of construction that we see in the great cathedral by its side, viz. the waggon-vault in the nave supported on either side by the quadrant vaults of the aisles.
It is now necessary to say something about what is to an architect the chief glory of this noble church--its grand western entrance, fitly called the Portico de la Gloria. On the whole, with no small experience to warrant my speaking, and yet with a due sense of the rashness of too general an approval, I cannot avoid pronouncing this effort of Master Matthew’s at Santiago to be one of the greatest glories of Christian art.[162] Its scale is not very grand, but in every other respect it is quite admirable, and there is a freshness and originality about the whole of the detail which cannot be praised too much. If we consider the facts with which we are acquainted, we may understand how it is that it has these great merits. Let us assume that Master Matthew was, as he no doubt was, extremely skilled when the king sent him to Santiago with his special warrant and recommendation. From that time until the happy day came, after twenty years of anxious labour, when he was able to write his inscription on the lintel of the door, it is probable that this same man wrought on slowly but systematically on this great work. During all this time he had but a very moderate opportunity of studying similar works in his own neighbourhood, or of receiving incitement by the competition of others of his craft; and I think the whole work bears about it evidence that this was its history. There is up to a certain point a conformity to common custom and precedent, and yet at the same time a constant freshness and originality about it which seems to me to show that its sculptor was not in the habit of seeing other similar works during its progress. The figures are almost all placed in attitudes evidently selected with a view to giving them life and piquancy. But these attitudes are singularly unconventional; and though they are by no means always successful to an eye educated in the nineteenth century, they have all of them graces and merits which are almost entirely unseen in the productions of nineteenth century sculptors; whilst, again, in strong contrast to what is now almost the invariable rule, there is no doubt that here we have the absolute handiwork of the sculptor, and not a design only, the execution of which has been relegated to a band of unknown and unrewarded assistants! The detail of some of the smaller portions, as e.g. of the sculptured shafts, is exquisitely refined and delicate, beautifully executed, and with a singular appreciation, in some respects, of the good points of classic sculpture.
The doorways are three in number, of which that in the centre opens into the nave, and those on either side into the aisles. In front of these doors is a western porch, of three groined divisions in width, the outer face of which has been built up and concealed by the modern western façade. The groining ribs of this porch are very richly decorated with sculpture of foliage in their mouldings. The general design of the doors will be best understood by reference to the engraving which I give of them. The bases are all very bold, and rest generally on monsters. That under the central shaft has a figure of a man with his arms round the necks of two open-mouthed winged monsters;[163] whilst on the other side is a figure of a person kneeling towards the east, in prayer, and about life-size. The central shaft is of marble, and carved all over with the tree of Jesse. The detail of this shaft is so delicate and characteristic of the whole work, that I give an engraving of a portion of it; nothing can be prettier or more graceful than the design, and the execution is admirable. The corresponding shaft in either jamb is also sculptured, but in these there is no story, the shafts being twisted with carving of foliage and figures in the alternate members. The capital of the central shaft has the figures of the Holy Trinity, with angels on either side censing; and above is a grand sitting figure of St. James, with a scroll in his right hand, and a palmer’s staff in the other. His nimbus is studded with large crystals; but as none of the other figures throughout the door have nimbi, I suspect it has been added in his case. The main capital of the central shaft, above the saint’s head, has on three sides the Temptation of our Lord, and on its fourth side angels coming and ministering to Him.
The tympanum of this central door has a central seated figure of our Lord, holding up His open hands. Around Him are the four Evangelists, three of them with their emblematic beasts standing up on their hind legs, with their paws in the Evangelists’ laps. Beyond them are angels holding the various instruments of the passion, and above these angels a multitude of small figures worshipping--the hundred and forty-four thousand, many of them naked, i.e. free from sin. The archivolt is perhaps the most striking feature in the whole work, having sitting figures of the four-and-twenty elders arranged around its circumference, in a manner at once quite original and singularly effective. The skill and fancy shown in the treatment of this crowd of figures is beyond praise, and there is a certain degree of barbaric splendour about the profuse richness of the work which is wonderfully attractive. Traces everywhere remain of the old delicate colouring with which the sculpture was covered, and this just suffices to give a beautiful tone to the whole work.
The side jambs have standing figures on a level with that of St. James. On the north jamb are Jeremiah, Daniel, Isaiah, and Moses, and on the opposite side St. Paul, and, I suppose, other New Testament saints, though I could not tell which. The side doorways, though there is no sculpture in their tympana, have figures corresponding with the others in their jambs. Under the groining against the north wall is an angel blowing a trumpet, and there are other angels against the springing of the groining ribs holding children in their hands.
The whole scheme is, in fact, a Last Judgment, treated in a very unconventional manner; the point which most invites hostile criticism being the kind of equality which the sculptor has given to the figures of our Lord and St. James, both being seated, and both in the central position; and though the figure of the apostle is below that of his Lord, it is still the more conspicuous of the two.
The design of the interior of the west end is peculiar. The doorway occupies the same space in height as the nave arches; above it the triforium is carried across over the porch, opening into the nave with two divisions of the same arcade as in the side galleries. Above this is a large circular window, with sixteen small cusps and a small pierced quatrefoil on either side. These openings now all communicate with the western triforium gallery; and I found it impossible to make out, to my own satisfaction, what the original scheme of the west end could have been. It does not appear clear whether there ever were any doors hung in the doorways, but I think there never were; and, perhaps, as we are told that the first church built over the body of the saint was of two stages in height, and open at the ends[164] (somewhat like the curious church still remaining at Naranco, near Oviedo), we may be safe in assuming that this western porch was in the same way open to the air. Above it the vault of the nave may have been prolonged between the towers, and under this the circular window would have been seen from the outside as it is still from the inside. Whether there was any direct access to this western porch from the ground, may admit of question; but it seems difficult to see how it would have been contrived without blocking up the chapel below the porch, which I have already described.
The only remaining work of any importance is the cloister, with its adjacent buildings,--the sacristies, chapter-room, library, &c. The present erections show no relics whatever of the work which, as we have seen, the Archbishop Diego Gelmirez undertook in the twelfth century. It is uncertain, indeed, whether his constructions were on this side of the church, for there are still remains of walls which seem to be coëval with the church round a courtyard on the north side of the nave. The cloisters now in existence are the work of Fonseca, afterwards Archbishop of Toledo, and were commenced in A.D. 1533. As might be expected by the date, there is very little Gothic character in their design; they have the common late many-ribbed Spanish groining; and if they have ever had traceries in the arches, these are now all destroyed.
The festival of St. James is celebrated with special solemnity whenever it happens to fall upon a Sunday. Then the people, I was told, ascend a staircase behind the altar, pass in front of some of his relics, and descend by another staircase[165] on the other side. The body of the saint is said to be contained in a stone tomb below the high altar, which lies north and south, with a modern sarcophagus over it, and there is a rather good old statue of him on horseback against the west wall of the south transept.
The ritual arrangements here are the same as they usually are in Spain. The Coro occupies four bays of the nave, and there is a passage railed off between the Reja of the Coro and that of the Capilla mayor, and there are not many altars now in use, but the number of clergy is very great, and the church is constantly crowded with worshippers.
On a Sunday morning during my stay the Archbishop said Mass, and there was a procession with tapers all round the church. As the slow chant rose from among the dense crowd of worshippers, and the flickering lights of the tapers struck here and there on the walls of the dark old church, one of those pictures was produced which one must, I suppose, go to Spain to see really in perfection. The number of communicants seemed to be extremely small, but the number of those at confession unusually large. The penitents have a way of kneeling with their cloaks held up over them against the confessional, so that their heads are quite concealed. Spanish women are fond of squatting on the floor, fanning themselves, before an altar; but here they often kneel, with their arms stretched out as in wild entreaty, for a long time together, and with rather striking effect. I think I am within bounds in saying that fifty or sixty priests are to be seen in this church at one time, some at the altars, some hearing confessions, and others with a large staff of singing men and boys in the choir.
I have but little more to say about Santiago. The churches seemed everywhere to be modern, and, though some of them are very large, extremely uninteresting. The streets are narrow, picturesque, and winding, but with far fewer traces of any antiquity in the houses than might have been expected. The only Gothic domestic building that I saw is the great hospital, close to the cathedral, which has four fine courts, and the principal entrance through a chapel or oratory, with an altar in it. The detail of this work is, however, extremely late and poor; it was founded in A.D. 1504 by Ferdinand and Isabella, Henrique de Egas being the architect.
The interest which, as an architect, one must feel in a building which is--as I have shown the cathedral here to be--a close copy of another church in another country, is very great. And the only regret I feel is that I am unable to give any evidence as to the nationality of the men who wrought the exquisite work in the western porch. My feeling is certainly strong that they must have been Frenchmen, and from the district of Toulouse. This I infer from the execution of their work. Moreover, I do not know where in Spain we are to find the evidence of the existence of a school in which such artists could have been trained, whilst at Toulouse no one can wander through the Museum in the desecrated convent of the Augustines without recognizing the head-quarters of a school of artists from among whom the sculptor of Santiago might well have come thoroughly educated for his great work.
From Galicia I travelled back by the same road along which I had already journeyed as far as Leon; and from thence by Medina del Rio Seco--a poor, forlorn, and uninteresting town--to Valladolid. The plain between Leon and Valladolid is most uninteresting; and the whole journey from the coast of Galicia to the last-named city is one of the most wearisome I ever undertook. The occasional beauty of the scenery,--and on this road it is oftentimes very beautiful,--does not prevent one’s feeling rather acutely a diligence journey of sixty-six hours with few and short pauses for meals; and the only solace--if solace it is--one has, is that the adalantero or postilion, who has to ride the whole distance, is in infinitely worse case than oneself! Fortunately the least interesting part of the road is now superseded by the opening of the railway from Palencia to Leon.
VIII. MEDINA DEL CAMPO--AVILA
In going by the railroad from Valladolid to Madrid the decayed old town of Medina del Campo is passed, and few travellers can have failed to be struck by the size and magnificence of the great castle, under whose walls they are hurried along--the Castle “de la Mota,” founded in 1440, and built under the direction of Fernando de Carreño, as master of the works.[166]
The castle founded at this time evidently took the place of one of much earlier date; for at some distance from its walls there still remain great fragments of old concrete walls lying about, mis-shapen, decayed, and unintelligible; whilst the greater part of the existing castle is a uniform and simple work entirely executed in brick, incorporating and retaining, however, in one or two parts, portions of the walls of the earlier building. The outline is a very irregular square, with round towers at all its angles rising out of the sloping base of the walls, and overlooking the moat which surrounds the whole. Within these outer walls rise the lofty walls of the castle, flanked by occasional square towers, and with an unusually lofty keep at one angle. The entrance is protected with much care, the gateways always opening at right angles to each other, so as to give the best possible chance of easy defence. Entering by the gateway in the centre of the principal front, across the now destroyed bridge, the path turned round the walls of the keep, and then through a small gate by its side into the great inner courtyard, the shape of which is very irregular, and the buildings opening into which are almost all destroyed. There seems to be no direct mode of getting into the keep save by climbing up the face of the wall some twenty feet from the ground; and to this I was unequal, though it was evident, from the well-worn holes in the brick-work, that some of the natives are not so. Possibly there may have been an entrance from below, for the whole of the walls surrounding the castle, and looking out upon the moat, are honeycombed with long vaulted galleries at various levels, along which I tramped for a long time, looking in vain for an outlet towards the keep. The architectural detail here is all of the simplest possible kind; the arches are pointed, but square in section, and only remarkable for the great depth of their archivolts, which gives them an air of strength very fitting to such a building. The bricks are generally a foot long, eight inches wide, and an inch and three-eighths thick, and the mortar-joints are generally an inch and three-quarters wide. Little as such a work affords for mere technical description, I have seldom seen one of its kind altogether more magnificent. The great height of the walls, the simplicity of the whole detail, and the bold vigour of the outline sufficiently account for this.
Medina del Campo is the dullest and saddest of towns now, though three hundred years ago it seems to have been one of the most important places in the district. Nor is there much to detain the ecclesiologist or architect. The principal church--S. Antholin--seems to have been founded in the sixteenth century. An inscription round the chancel gives the date of its erection as A.D. 1503,[167] and the church was probably built at the same time. The plan consists of nave and aisles of three bays in length, and a chancel of one bay. The nave and aisles cover an area of about ninety feet each way, the dimensions being, as they usually are here, very considerable. The columns are really clusters of groining-ribs banded together with a very small cap at the springing, and then branching out into complicated vaulting-bays, most of which are varied in pattern. The Coro is near the west end of the nave, and about equal in length to one of its bays, nearly two bays between its Reja and the Capilla mayor being left for the people; its fittings are all of Renaissance character, and there is a very picturesque organ above it, on the south, bristling with projecting trumpet-pipes, and altogether very well designed. The columns are lofty, and the church is lighted by small round-headed windows of one or two lights placed as high as possible from the floor; there is one light in each southern bay, and two in each on the north side; evidently therefore the whole work is carefully devised for a hot country; and it is an undoubted success in spite of the extremely late character of all its detail. Twenty years only after the foundation of the chancel, and just about the time that Segovia Cathedral was being commenced, a chapel was added on the north side of the altar, covered with a dome, and thoroughly Pagan in almost all its details.
There are three pulpits in this church--one on each side of the chancel, and one in the nave; and low rails keep the passageway from the Coro to the Capilla mayor.
There is a good painting of the Deposition in the sacristy of S. Antholin; and a still more interesting work is the Retablo of a small altar against the eastern column of the nave. This has the Mass of St. Gregory carved and painted, with other paintings of much merit. That of the Pietà recalls Francia, and the figure of the Blessed Virgin in an Annunciation is full of tender grace and sweetness. It is strange how completely the Inquisition altered the whole character of Spanish art, and deprived it at once and for ever apparently of all power of regarding religion from its bright and tender side!
An uninteresting country is passed between Medina and Avila. This old city is indeed very finely situated; and if it be approached from Madrid, seems to be a real capital of the mountains, with ranges of hills on all sides. It lies, in fact, on the northern side of the Sierra, and just at the margin of the great corn-growing plains which extend thence without interruption to Leon and Palencia. Of the many fortified towns I have seen in Spain it is, I think, the most complete. The walls are still almost perfect all round the city; they are perfectly plain, but of great height, and are garnished with bold circular towers not far apart; and for the gateways two of these towers are placed near together, carried up higher than the rest, and connected by a bold arch thrown from one to the other. There are in all no less than eighty-six towers in the circuit of the walls, and ten gateways; and so great is their height[168] that nothing whatever is seen of the town behind them, and they follow all the undulations of the hill on which they stand with a stern, repulsive, savage look which seems almost to belong to a city of the dead rather than to a fairly lively little city of the present day.
The space within the walls was very confined, and no doubt it was found impossible for any new religious foundations to be established within their boundaries. Several of the great churches, and among these some of the most important--as San Vicente, San Pedro, and San Tomás--were therefore built outside the walls; and the Cathedral itself, cramped by its close neighbourhood to them, was built out boldly with its apse projecting beyond the face of the walls, and making an additional circular tower larger and bolder than any of the others.
The walls of Avila were commenced in A.D. 1090, eight hundred men having been employed on them daily in that year;[169] among them were many directors who came from Leon and Biscay, and all of them wrought under Casandro, a master of geometry and a Roman, and Florin de Pituenga, a French master; so at least we learn from the contemporary history attributed to D. Pelayo, Bishop of Oviedo. The walls were finished in 1099.
In 1091 the Cathedral of San Salvador was commenced by an architect named Alvar Garcia, a native of Estella, in Navarre;[170] the work was completed in sixteen years, as many as nineteen hundred men, according to the authority already quoted, having been employed on the works. D. P. Risco[171] throws considerable doubt on the veracity of D. Pelayo; and his figures certainly seem to be on too grand a scale to be at all probable.
I doubt very much whether any part of the existing Cathedral is of the age of the church whose erection is recorded by Don Pelayo, except perhaps the external walls of the apse. Its general character is thoroughly that of the end of the twelfth or early part of the thirteenth century, with considerable alterations and additions at later periods; and we may safely assume that the chevet, commenced in A.D. 1091, was continued westward very slowly and gradually during the following hundred years or more. The ground-plan will show the very singular disposition of the plan; in which the chevet, with its double aisle and semi-circular chapels in the thickness of the walls, is, I think, among the most striking works of the kind in Spain.[172] The external wall of the apse is a semi-circle divided into bays by buttresses of slight projection alternating with engaged shafts. The chapels do not therefore show at all in the external view; and indeed all that does appear here is a projecting tower of vast size pierced with a few very small windows--mere slits in the wall--and flanked on either side by the wall and towers of the town. It is finished at the top by a corbel-table and lofty battlemented parapet; and behind this again, leaving a passage five feet and a half in width, is a second and higher battlemented wall, from within which one looks down upon the aisle-roof of the chevet, and into the triforium and clerestory windows of the central apse. From below very little of the apse and flying buttresses which support it are seen; and one is more struck perhaps by the strange unlikeness to any other east-end one has ever seen, than by any real beauty in the work itself; though at the same time it is pleasant to see that not even so difficult a problem as that of a windowless fortified chevet presented any serious difficulty to these old architects.
Assuming as I do that the external wall of the apse is as old as the end of the eleventh century, I think it nevertheless quite impossible that the chapels within it, in their present state, should be of the same early date. In general plan it is true that they are similar to those round the chevet of the abbey at Veruela,[173] the eastern chapels in the transepts being apsidal in both cases, and similarly planned in connection with those of the apse. The church of Veruela was completed by about the middle of the twelfth century, and is beyond all question earlier in style than the interior of Avila. The great beauty of the latter arises from the narrow, recessed aisle round the apse, the groining of which is carried on lofty and slender shafts, whilst the columns round the apse itself consist of a bold single column with three detached shafts on the side next the aisle. The groining throughout is extremely good, and, in the chapels, is carried on clustered shafts. A careful examination of the groining of the choir shows clearly how much the design of the church was altered during its progress, though it is certainly not an illustration of the advantage of such a course. The lines of the groining on the plan explain that it is planned with hardly any reference to the structure below: some of the groining shafts not being over the piers, and everything having been sacrificed by the architect of the triforium and clerestory in order to make all their bays equal in width both in the apse and in the side walls. East of the Crossing there is a narrow quadripartite bay of vaulting, then a sexpartite bay, and then those of the apse, and each of the three bays of the choir is thus made about equal to those of the apse, though the arches below are quite unequal. Externally all of them are supported by regularly arranged flying-buttresses, some of which must, I think, be supported on the cross-arches of the aisle in front of the chapels. The triforium is round-arched, of two horseshoe-headed lights divided by a shafted monial; and the clerestory is of round-headed broadish windows, with jamb-shafts and richly-chevroned arches. The flying-buttresses are all double, the lower arch abutting against the triforium, and the upper against the wall above the clerestory windows; and all appear to me to have been added after the original erection of the clerestory. The parapet here, as well as in the aisles, is battlemented, the battlements being finished with pyramidal copings of the common Moorish type. I should have observed that the passage round the town walls is connected with that round the aisle walls, and that the two levels of battlements in the latter are connected by occasional flights of stone steps.
The transepts have the same triforium in their eastern walls as the choir; and here, too, the same kind of construction was ventured on, the groining shafts not being over the clustered column which divides the arches of the aisles round the chevet. When this was done the intention was evidently to erect one bay of sexpartite vaulting next the Crossing, and then a quadripartite bay beyond it. At present both bays are similar--quadripartite--and the clerestory is filled with large traceried windows.
The remainder of the church was so much altered in the fourteenth century, that its whole character is now of that period. The north transept façade has in its lower stage two windows of two lights, the traceries of which are precisely similar to those of our own early geometrical style, and there is a very fine rose window above them. This rose is of sixteen divisions, each containing two plain pierced circular openings, but the dividing lines between them being marked, give the whole tracery that effect of radiation from the centre which is so important a feature in the designs of many wheel-windows. All the windows in this façade are richly moulded, and there are well-developed buttresses at its angles, but, unhappily, the gable has been entirely destroyed, and the present termination of the wall is a straight line of brickwork below the eaves of the hipped roof. The question of the original pitch of the roof--always so interesting--is therefore left uncertain and undecided. The clerestory throughout is filled with enormous six-light traceried windows, with transomes, and the double flying buttresses between them are very large, and are finished at the top with a line of traceries below their copings, and with crocketed pinnacles in front. There are two towers at the ends of the aisles, which do not open into them, but only into the nave. The south-west tower has never been completed, but the north-west steeple is a very fine work of the same age as the clerestory of the nave. It has bold buttresses, and a belfry stage lighted by two windows on each side, with tall crocketed pediments above them, and below the battlemented parapet a line of rich sunk tracery. The angles--internal as well as external--are carved with a ball enrichment, which at a distance produces the same effect as our English ball-flower ornament; and, like it, gives an air of richness to the whole work. The buttresses finish above the parapet with crocketed pinnacles, and the parapet with a pointed coping, which somewhat recalls the outline of the Moorish battlement. The whole effect of the steeple, transept, and nave is certainly very noble, and they are marked by an entire absence of any of those foreign peculiarities which usually strike an English eye. The whole might, in fact, be English work of the fourteenth century. The north door of the nave is of grand dimensions, having six statues in niches in each jamb, and others against the buttresses on either side. The tympanum is sculptured with our Lord in an aureole in the centre, the Betrayal and the Last Supper below, angels censing on either side, and the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin above. The orders of the archivolt are filled with figures, some representing the resurrection of the dead, and others figures of kings and saints worshipping the central figure of our Lord. The door-opening has the peculiarity of having an elliptical or three-centred arch. This feature I noticed also in doors evidently of about the same age at Burgos and at Leon, and it is just one of those evidences which go surely to prove that the several works are all designed by the same architect. The resemblance of the mouldings in the jamb of this doorway to those in the western end of Leon Cathedral is very close, and all these doors have an order of very similar foliage between the several sculptured or storied orders of the archivolt. I do not think the work here is quite as good as that at Leon, though the filling in of the tympanum with a well-marked vesica in the centre, and four rows of subjects divided by well-defined horizontal lines, is uncommonly good. A sort of shallow porch has been formed by some later groining, which occupies the space between the buttresses on either side of the doorway, and this is finished in front with a rich open traceried parapet and pinnacles.
It was during the prelacy of Don Sancho III., Bishop of Avila from A.D. 1292 to 1353, that most of the later works of the cathedral were executed, and his arms are sculptured upon the vault of the Crossing. The character of all the work would agree perfectly with this date, which is given by Gil Gonzalez Dávila[174] in his account of the church.
A staircase in the south-west tower leads up into the roof of the aisles, which now partly blocks up the too large clerestory; and passing through this, and then over the roofs of the sacristies, we reach the exterior of the chevet and the fortified eastern wall. Over the sacristies is some original stone roofing, of an extremely good, and, so far as I know, almost unique kind, with which it, seems very probable that the whole of the roofs were originally covered. But it is now, as well as all the others, protected by an additional timber roof covered with tiles, and is not visible from the exterior. This roofing is all laid to a very flat pitch with stones, which are alternately hollowed on the surface for gutters, and placed about eight and a half inches apart, and other square stones, which rest on the edges of the first, so as to cover their joints. The stones are of course all of the same length--two feet seven inches--and set over each other so as to form a drip. The cornice at the eaves of this roof is very well managed, and looks as if it were of the thirteenth century. Its construction reminded me much of the stone guttering so frequently seen in the early Irish buildings, and which, being so much less perishable than lead, has often preserved them, where the common English construction would long ere this have involved the whole building in ruin.
The cloister on the south side of the nave is much decayed and mutilated. It was built probably in the early part of the fourteenth century, and has good traceried windows, generally of four lights, but blocked up, and with all their cusping destroyed. On its east side is a fine fifteenth century chapel, with an altar at the south end, and a passage through its other end, screened off by an iron Reja, leading to the priests’ rooms, and so round to the sacristies. The windows of this chapel are covered with a rude ball ornament, constantly seen in works of the fifteenth century.
I must not forget to notice the furniture of the interior of the cathedral, some of which is very fine. The Retablo of the high altar is very grand, having five sides, which follow the outline of the apse, and it is of three stages in height. The lowest stage has the four evangelists and the four doctors painted on its side panels, and SS. Peter and Paul in the centre; the next has the Transfiguration in the centre, and the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Presentation in the Temple at the sides; and the upper stage the Crucifixion in the centre, and the Agony, the Scourging, the Resurrection, and the Descent into Hell at the sides. These paintings were executed in A.D. 1508 by Santos Cruz, Pedro Berruguete, and Juan de Borgoña: and some of them are not only valuable in the history of art, but of great merit. The St. Matthew attended by an angel, who holds his ink for him, is designed with great grace; and the Adoration of the Magi, and some of the other subjects, are admirably designed and painted. The drawing is rather sharp and angular, and has more the character of German than of Italian art. The woodwork in which the paintings are framed is richly carved and gilt, but in a jumble of styles; the canopies over the pictures being Gothic, and the columns which support them thoroughly Renaissance in style.[175]
The fittings of the Coro are all Renaissance, and there is a screen of the same age across the nave on its western side. To the east is the usual metal Reja, and low rails enclosing the passage from the Coro to the Capilla mayor. A flight of seven steps in front of the altar, the magnificent colour of its Retablo, and the contrast of the extremely light choir and the almost windowless aisles and chapels round it, make the pictorial effects here extremely fine; and they are heightened by a good deal of stained glass, which, though of late date, has some fine rich colour. It was executed at the end of the fifteenth century.
Fine as this cathedral is, I think, on the whole, I derived almost as much pleasure from the church of San Vicente, built just outside the walls, a little to the north of the cathedral. This is a very remarkable work in many respects.
The church--dedicated to the three martyrs, Vicente, Sabina, and Cristeta, who are said to have suffered on the rock still visible in the crypt below the eastern apse--is cruciform in plan,[176] with three eastern apses, a central lantern, a nave and aisles of six bays in length, two western steeples with a lofty porch between them, and a great open cloister along the whole south side of the nave. The south door is in the bay next but one to the transept, and there are staircase turrets in the angles between the aisles and the transepts. The design and detail of the eastern apses recall to mind the Segovian type of apse. Their detail as well as their general design are, in fact, as nearly as possible identical, and no doubt they are the work of the same school of late Romanesque architects. They are very lofty, the ground being so much below the floor of the church that the windows of a crypt under the choir are pierced in the wall above the plinth. They have, too, the usual engaged shafts between the windows, dividing each apse into three vertical compartments, each pierced with a round-headed window. These shafts are finished with finely carved capitals under the eaves’ corbel-tables; and the stringcourses which occur below the windows, on a level with their capitals, and again just over their arches, are generally delicately carved, but sometimes moulded. The central apse is higher than those on either side, and consequently none of the horizontal lines are continuous round the three apses; and as the eastern walls of the transepts have no openings, and no stringcourses or enrichments of any kind between the ground and the eaves, there is a certain air of disjointedness in the whole design which is not pleasing. The transept façades are very simple: both are pierced with windows of one light high up in the wall, and the northern transept is vigorously treated with a grand system of buttressing, used as mediæval artists alone apparently knew how! The buttresses are mere pilasters at the top, and the eaves-cornices are carried round them and up the flat-pitched gable-line in the way so commonly seen in Italian Gothic. But at mid-height these pilasters are weathered out boldly, and run down to the natural rock on which the church is built, and which here crops up above the surface of the ground: a central buttress is added between the others, and between the buttresses the whole wall is battered out with a long succession of weatherings to the same thickness at the base as the greatest projection of the buttresses. Probably the lower part of this front has been added long after its first erection for the sake of strength; and undoubtedly the somewhat similar system of buttressing which is carried along the north wall of the nave is long subsequent in date to the early church, to which it has been applied. The south transept, owing to the rapid rise of the ground to the south, is much less lofty than the other, and has between its buttresses three high tombs.
The whole south side of the nave is screened, so to speak, by a very singular lofty and open cloister, which extends from the west wall of the transept to a point in advance of the west front. It is very wide, and is entirely open to the south, having occasional piers, with two clustered shafts between each. There is something at first sight about the look of these clustered shafts which might lead one to suppose them to be not later than the thirteenth century; and as the lofty arches are semi-circular, this idea would be strengthened were it not that a careful comparison of the detail with other known early detail proves pretty clearly that they cannot be earlier than about the middle of the fourteenth century. The material--granite--favours this view, for here, just as in our own country, the early architects seem to have avoided the use of granite as much as possible, even where, as at Avila, it lies about everywhere ready for use. There is something so novel and singular about this open loggia or cloister, that I could not help liking it much, though it undoubtedly destroys the proportions, and conceals some of the detail, of the old church in front of which it has been added.
The bays of the aisle are divided by pilaster-buttresses, and lighted with round-headed windows which have external jamb-shafts.
The west end is, perhaps, the noblest portion of this very remarkable church. There are two towers placed at the ends of the aisles. These are buttressed at the angles, and arcaded with sunk panels of very considerable height on the outer sides; they are groined with quadripartite vaults, and do not open into the church, but only into the bay between them, which, though it is a continuation of the full height of the nave, is treated simply as a grand open porch, with a lofty pointed arch in its outer (or western) wall, and a double doorway in its eastern wall opening into the church. This porch is roofed with a vault of eight cells, level with that of the nave, and extremely lofty and impressive, therefore, from the exterior, and over the doorway a window opens into the nave. The western, as well as the side arches, have bold engaged shafts, and the groining is also carried on angle shafts. The whole effect is fine, and the light and shade admirable and well contrasted: but the charm of the whole work seemed to me to lie very much in the contrast between the noble simplicity and solid massiveness of the architecture generally, and the marvellous beauty and delicacy of the enrichments of the western doorway, which is certainly one of the very finest transitional works I have ever seen. It is, as will be seen by the engraving, double, with round arches over each division, and the whole enclosed under a larger round arch. Statues of saints are placed in either jamb, and against the central pier in front of the shafts which carry the archivolt, and the latter and the capitals are carved with the most prodigal luxuriance of design and execution, and with a delicacy of detail and a beauty of which an idea cannot be conveyed by words. Sculptured subjects are introduced in the tympana of the smaller arches, and a richly carved stringcourse is carried across under a parapet which is placed over the doorway. The figures and carving are all wrought in a very fine and delicate stone. The tympana are sculptured on the left with the story of Dives and Lazarus, and on the right with a death-bed scene, where angels carry up the soul to Paradise. The detail of the foliage seemed to me to have a very Italianizing character, being mostly founded on the acanthus-leaf. The capitals are very delicate, but copied closely from Classic work, and the figures are dignified in their pose, but their draperies are rather thin and full of lines. Some of the shafts are twisted, and beasts of various kinds are freely introduced with the foliage in the sculpture.
To me the sight of such work as this is always somewhat disheartening. For here in the twelfth century we find men executing work which, both in design and execution, is so immeasurably in advance of anything that we ever see done now, that it seems almost vain to hope for a revival of the old spirit in our own days: vain it might be in any age to hope for better work, but more than vain in this day, if the flimsy conceit and impudent self-assertion which characterize so much modern (so-called) Gothic is still to be tolerated! for evil as has been the influence of the paralysis of art which affected England in the last century, it often seems to me that the influence of thoughtless compliance with what is popular, without the least study, the least art, or the least love for their work on the part of some of the architects who pretend to design Gothic buildings at the present day, may, without our knowing it, land us in a worse result even than that which our immediate ancestors arrived at. Here, however, at Avila, in this porch of San Vicente, let us reverence rightly the art and skill of him who built, not only so delicately and beautifully, but also so solidly and so well; let us try to follow his example, knowing for certain that in this combination lies the true merit of all the best architecture--Pagan or Christian--that the world has ever seen.
The three stages of the western towers are, I think, respectively of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fifteenth centuries. The second or intermediate stage is arcaded, and has its angles planned with a shaft set in a broad splay precisely in the mode we see so commonly adopted in the Segovian towers.[177] The upper stage is finished with gables on each face, the gable being fringed with a line of granite trefoils in not very good taste. Gil Gonzales Dávila[178] says that the tower of this church was built by alms in A.D. 1440. He refers, no doubt, to the upper stage, the design of which agrees with this statement. I was not able to learn how it had originally been roofed; but my impression is that it probably had two stone gabled roofs intersecting each other.
In addition to the western door there is another fine entrance on the south side of rather earlier date than the other, and now always in use as the ordinary entrance to the church. Descending here by some steps from the cloister, we find ourselves in the impressive interior, and are at once struck by some features which are of rare occurrence in this part of Spain. The columns are of very bold, perhaps heavy, design, and rest on circular bases. Their front portion is carried up on a bold and massive groining pier in front of the main wall; the arcades are severely simple, the arches semi-circular, and the capitals richly carved. A carved stringcourse is carried round the church above the arches, and there is the very uncommon arrangement (in this country) of a well-developed triforium; each bay here having a round-arched opening, subdivided into two smaller openings, divided by a massive column with sculptured capital. Another stringcourse divides the triforium and clerestory, which has also round-arched windows of one light. The vaulting, both in the nave and aisles, is quadripartite, the only remarkable feature in it being the massive size of the ribs.
The three eastern apses are vaulted with waggon-vaults over their western compartments, and semi-domes over the apses, and the transepts are roofed with waggon-vaults. All the latter have cross arches or ribs below them carried on engaged shafts, and the side walls of the chancel and chancel-aisles are arcaded below the vaulting.
The central lantern is carried on piers, which have evidently been in great part rebuilt at some time subsequent to the foundation of the church. They carry pointed arches of granite, clumsily moulded, and have rudely-carved capitals. Two piers on the south of the nave next the Crossing, and one on the north, were either partly or altogether rebuilt at the same time, and it looks very much as though the first lantern had partly fallen, and then, two centuries after the original foundation of the church, the existing one had been erected, for over the pointed arches there still seem to be remains of the older round arches. The lantern is rather loftier than is usual; it is vaulted with an eight-ribbed dome, carried on arched pendentives, and is lighted by small windows of two lights in its upper stage. Dávila[179] says that this church was rebuilt in the time of Ferdinand “El Santo” (1252-1284), who endowed it with certain rents for the purpose. But other authorities say, with more show of probability, that the work undertaken in this year was the repair of the church. The rebuilding at this date, which is utterly inconsistent with the whole character of the church, agrees, nevertheless, very well indeed with that of the lantern. Subsequently, in A.D. 1440, according to Dávila,[180] the tower of the church was built, and this statement probably refers to the upper stages of the western steeples. The crypt under the choir, called Nra. Sra. de Soterraña, is important only for its position: it is entered by a long flight of steps from the east end of the north aisle, and extends under the three eastern apses. It is mainly modernized, and the great attraction seems to be the hole in which, as I understood, people who wish to take a solemn oath put their hands whilst they swear.
There are no original ritual arrangements remaining here; but an iron Reja is carried across the nave and aisles one bay to the west of the crossing, and here probably was the old place for the Coro, as the position of the shrine of San Vicente under one side of the lantern would have made it impossible for the Coro to be placed nearer the east.
Some features still remain to be noticed, and the most important is the tomb or shrine of the tutelars--San Vicente and his brethren. This is picturesquely placed on one side of the space under the lantern, with entire disregard to that desire for balance everywhere which so painfully affects almost all of us now-a-days. It is a thirteenth-century erection standing on detached shafts, within which appears to be a tomb which is always kept covered with a silken pall. Over this is a lofty canopy carried on four bold shafts at the angles, and consisting of a deep square tester, above which is a lofty pyramidal capping with its sides slightly concave and crockets at the angles. It is rather difficult to convey an idea of this very remarkable work without large and careful illustrations. The inner tomb or shrine is the really important work, the outer canopy or tester being evidently a much later addition.[181] The shrine has all the character of an early pointed Italian Gothic work. Its canopy is carried on clusters of four shafts twisted together, at each of the angles; between them, on each side, are three coupled columns, and at the east and west ends are single shafts. These carry trefoiled or many-cusped arches, the spandrels of which are sculptured; and above this is a sort of shrine with a sloping stone scalloped all over on either side, and a steep diapered roof rising out of the centre. A series of subjects is carved in panels all along the sides of the shrine, which seem to have reference to three saints and martyrs--probably to San Vicente and his companions. Figures of the Twelve Apostles are introduced, two and two, at the angles, and other figures sitting and reading between the subjects. A late iron screen between the columns of the outer baldachin makes it rather difficult either to see or to sketch this interesting work carefully. Its detail is all very peculiar, and in the twisted and sculptured shafts, the strange form of some of the cusping, and the iron ties with which it is undisguisedly held together, I thought I saw evident traces of the influence of Italian art. I take the shrine to be a work of the thirteenth century, though the baldachin is no doubt of later date.
Near this shrine in the south aisle is some very fine rich and delicate wrought-ironwork in a grille round a side altar. It is possibly part of the old choir-screen, and at any rate does not belong to the place in which it is now preserved. The beauty of this work consists in the delicacy of the thin strips of iron, which are bent into a succession of circular lines ending in roses, and on an excessively small and delicate scale. Some similar work is still to be seen in one of the windows of the apse.
The arches on either side of the great western porch are filled in with open trellis-work wood-screens, which show how good occasionally may be the adaptation by Gothic hands of Moorish work. Here the lines of wood cross each other at intervals, leaving, of course, a regular series or diaper of open squares. The edges of all these are simply cut out in a pattern, or notched, in a variety of forms, and the effect is extremely good. The same kind of work is common in Moorish buildings, but I had not seen it before so boldly used by Christians.
San Vicente stands outside the walls of Avila, close to one of the principal gates, and near the north-east angle of the city. The church of San Pedro is similarly placed at the south-east angle, and at the end of a large open Plaza called the Mercado Grande. It is not a little remarkable that so soon after the enclosure of the city within enormous walls two of the most important of its churches should have been built deliberately just outside them, and exposed to whatever risks their want of defence entailed. In plan and general design San Pedro is very similar indeed to San Vicente. It has a nave and aisles of five bays, transepts of unusual projection, a central lantern, and three apsidal projections to the east. The doors, too, are in the centre of the west front, and in the next bay but one to the transept on both sides. The detail is almost all of a simple and extremely massive kind of Romanesque, round arches being used everywhere and uncarved capitals with square abaci. The nave piers are of the commonly repeated section, but very large in proportion to the weight they have to carry. There is no triforium, and the clerestory windows are of moderate size, whilst those in the aisles are very small, and placed as high as possible from the floor. The groining generally is quadripartite, and some of the ribs boldly moulded in a manner which suggests the possibility of this severe Romanesque-looking work being in truth not earlier than circa 1250. The transepts and the western portion of the apses are covered with waggon-vaults, and the apses themselves with semi-domes. The lantern over the Crossing is probably not earlier than A.D. 1350, the mark of the junction with the old work just over the arches into the transepts being still very plainly visible. The vaulting here is very peculiar. Groined pendentives at the angles are introduced to bring the vault to an octagon in plan, but the eight compartments are variously treated; those on the cardinal sides having ordinary vaulting cells over the windows, whilst those on the intermediate or diagonal sides are crossed with four segments of a dome with the masonry arranged in horizontal courses.
The west front has three circular windows, that in the centre having wheel tracery; the north doorway has a richly-sculptured archivolt, which is later in character than the general scheme of the church, having an order of good dog-tooth enrichment, and the abacus is carved with rosettes. There are staircases in the usual position in the angle between the transepts and the aisles, and the apses are divided into bays by engaged shafts with sculptured capitals. There is, in fact, not very much to be said about this otherwise noble and remarkable church, because it repeats to so great an extent most of the features of its neighbour San Vicente. Yet its scale, character, and antiquity are all such as would make us class it, if it were in England, among our most remarkable examples of late Romanesque.
There are several other churches in Avila,[182] but the only one besides those already mentioned of which I made any notes is that of the Convent of San Tomás built between A.D. 1482 and 1493.[183] In a charter of Ferdinand the Catholic, dated May 29, 1490, reference is made to this monastery, together with those of Sta. Cruz, Segovia; San Juan de los Reyes, Toledo; Sta. Engracia, Zaragoza; and other churches in Granada, &c., all of them founded by that King and Queen Isabella. They founded this convent on the petition of Confessor P. W. Tomás de Torquemada.
The convent has been closed for some years, but has just been purchased by the Bishop of Avila, who is now repairing it throughout, with the intention, I believe, of using it as a theological seminary. The detail of the conventual buildings, which surround two cloisters, one of which is of great size, is, as might be expected, of the latest kind of Gothic, and extremely poor and uninteresting, whilst the design of the church, as so often seems to be the case with these very late Spanish churches, is full of interest. It has a nave of five bays with side chapels between the buttresses, short transepts, and a very short square chancel to the east of the Crossing; but the remarkable feature is, that not only is there a large gallery filling the two western bays of the nave and fitted up with seventy stalls with richly-carved canopies, the old choir-book desk in the centre, and two ambons projecting from the eastern parapet, but that there is also another gallery at the east end, in which the high altar, with its fine carved and painted Retablo, is placed. This eastern gallery has also gospel and epistle ambons projecting from its front. Strange as the whole arrangement of this interior is, it strikes me as almost more strange that it should not have been one of constant occurrence in a country where at one period the Coro was so constantly elevated in a western gallery. For there is a sort of natural propriety, as it seems to me, in the elevation of an altar, where folk care at all for the mysteries celebrated at it, to at least as high a level as any part of the church used for service; and undoubtedly the effect of the altar-service to those in the raised Coro is much, if not altogether, marred where the altar is in its usual place on the floor. Here the effect is certainly very fine, whether the altar is looked at from the Coro or from the floor of the nave below it; and from the former in particular, the strangeness of looking across the deep-sunk well of the nave to the noble altar raised high above it at the east is in every way most attractive. The detail of all the architecture here is very uninteresting, though the many-ribbed vaulting is certainly good, and the effect of the dark cavernous nave under the western gallery is very fine in light and shade. Rarely as I trouble my reader with any reference to Renaissance works, I must here in justice say that the great tomb of Don Juan, the son of Ferdinand and Isabella, which occupies the floor below the altar, is one of the most tender, fine, and graceful works I have ever seen, and worthy of any school of architecture. The recumbent effigy, in particular, is as dignified, graceful, and religious as it well could be, and in no respect unworthy of a good Gothic artist. It was executed by Micer Domenico Alexandra Florentesi, who refers to it in a contract which he entered into with Cardinal Ximenes in 1518; but it is said to have been completed as early as A.D. 1498.[184] At present it is necessary to get an order to see it from the Bishop, who has the key of the church; doubtless before long this will not be necessary, but it is well to give the caution, as the convent is some little distance beyond the town-walls, and the Bishop’s palace is in the very centre of the city.
It will be felt, I think, that Avila is a city which ought on no account to be left unseen in an architectural tour in Spain. Fortunately it is now as easy of access as it was once difficult, for the railway from Valladolid to Madrid, in order to cross the Sierra de Guadarrama, makes a great détour by Avila, and thence on to the Escorial is carried on through the mountain ranges with considerable exhibition of engineering skill, and with great advantage to the traveller, as the views throughout the whole distance are almost always extremely beautiful.
I did not stop on my road to see the Escorial: as far as the building is concerned, it is enough I think to know that Herrera designed it, to be satisfied that it will be cold, insipid, and formal in character. And the glimpses I had of it as I passed amply justified this expectation. It is, too, as utterly unsuited to its position on the mountain-side as it well could be. On the other hand, I no doubt lost much in neglecting to make the excursions to the various points of view which it is the fashion for visitors to go to, though it seemed to me that the country in the neighbourhood of La Granja, which one passes on the road from the Escorial to Segovia, was more interesting than this, the mountains being as high and much more finely wooded.