V Toledo
I withdrew at once with the Morisco into the cloisters of the Cathedral.
—Don Quixote.
I
The peace of death is over Toledo, unbroken by any invasion of modern thought or new architecture since her last deep sighs mingled with the distant echoes of the middle ages. But she still wears the mantle of her imperial glory. She sleeps in the fierce, beating sunlight of the twentieth century like the enchanted princess of fairy tales, undisturbed by, and unconscious of, the world around her.
The atmosphere is transparent; the sky spreads from lapis-lazuli to a cobalt field back of the snow-capped, turquoise Sierra de Gredo mountains, while a clear streak of lemon color throws out the sharp silhouette of the battlements and towers.
There is sadness and desolation in the decay, a pathetically forlorn and tragical widowhood, strangely affecting to the senses.
A blackened ruin, lonely and forsaken,
Already wrapt in winding-sheets of sand;
So lies Toledo till the dead awaken,—
A royal spoil of Time’s resistless hand.
Toledo! The name rings with history, romance and legend. Enthralling images of the past rise before one and vanish like the ghosts of Macbeth. Capital of Goth, of Moslem, and of Christian; mightiest of hierarchical seats,8 city of monarch and priest, she has worn a double diadem. Gautier says, “Jamais reine antique, pas même Cléopatre, qui buvait des perles, jamais courtisane Vénitienne du temps de Titien n’eut un écrin plus étincelant, un trousseau plus riche que Notre Dame de Tolède.” But the flame of life which once burned warm and bright is now extinct and all her glory has vanished. Neglected churches, convents, palaces, and ruins lie huddled together, a stern and solemn vision of the past, waiting with the silence of the tomb, broken only by the continual tolling of her hoarse bells.
The city has a superb situation. Once seen, it is forever impressed upon the memory. The hills on which it stands rise abruptly from the surrounding campagna, which bakes brown and barren and crisp under the scorching rays of the sun, and stretches away to the distant mountains, vast and uninterrupted in its solitude and dreariness. It is “pobre de solemnidad,”—solemnly poor, as runs the touching phrase in Spanish. There is no joy and freshness of vegetation, no glistening of wet leaves, no scent of flowers. You read thirst in the plains, hunger in the soil-denuded hills. All is naked and bare, without a softening line or gentler shadow, lying fallow in spring, unwatered in drought, and ungarnered at harvest time.
The Tagus rushes round the city in the shape of a horseshoe, confining and protecting it as the Wear does the towers of Durham. It boils and eddies ’twixt its narrow, rocky confines, hurrying from the gloomy shadows to the sunshine below, through which it slowly sweeps, murky and coffee-colored, to the horizon, no life between its flat banks, no commerce to mark it as a highway.
You pass over the high-arched Alcantara Bridge, which the Campeador and his kinsman, Alvar Fanez, crossed with twelve hundred horsemen at their back, to demand justice from their sovereign. A broad terrace crawls like a serpent up the steep incline to the city gates. A forest of soaring steeples rises above you, topped by the square bulk of the Alcazar.
The city smells sleepy. The narrow streets, or rather alleys, of the town wind tortuously around the stucco façades, with no apparent starting-point or destination, as confused as a skein of worsted after a kitten has played with it. Thus were they laid out by the wise Arabs, to afford shade at all hours of the day. At every corner, one runs into some detail of historical or artistic interest,—history and architecture here wander hand in hand.
Huge, wooden doors, closely studded with scallop nails as big as a man’s fist, proud escutcheons of noble races lost to all save Spain’s history; charming glimpses of interior courtyards and gardens glittering fresh in their emerald coloring, and sweet with the scent of orange blossoms; Gothic crenelations, Renaissance ironwork and railing, and Moorish capitals and ornamentation, all pell-mell, the styles of six centuries often appearing in the same building. More than a hundred churches and chapels and forty monasteries crumble side by side within the small radius of the city. Half of its area was once covered by religious buildings or mortmain property.
II
The church, be it a grand cathedral or the humble steeple of some little hamlet, is always the connecting link between past and present. It has been the highest artistic expression of the people, and it remains an eloquent witness to continuity and tradition. It is what makes later ages most forcibly “remember,” for it seeks to embody and satisfy the greatest need of the human heart.
| KEY OF PLAN OF TOLEDO CATHEDRAL | |||
| A. | Chapel of Saint Blase. | M. | Capilla Mayor. |
| B. | Chapel of the Parish of Saint Peter. | N. | Chapel of the Tower or of the Dean. |
| C. | Octagon. | O. | Mozarabic Chapel. |
| D. | Chapel of the Virgin of the Sanctuary. | P. | Choir. |
| E. | Large Sacristy. | Q. | Portal of the Lions. |
| F. | Court of the Hall of Accounts. | R. | Portal of the Olive, or Gate of La Llana. |
| G. | Chapel of the New Kings. | S. | Portal of the Choir. |
| H. | Chapel of the Master of Santiago, D. Alvaro de Luna. | T. | Portal of the Little Bread. |
| I. | Chapel of Saint Ildefonso. | V. | Portal of the Visitation. |
| K. | Chapter House. | W. | Portal of the Tower or Gate of Hell. |
| L. | Chapel of the Old Kings or of the Holy Cross. | X. | Portal of the Scriveners or of Judgment. |
The history of a great cathedral church of Spain is so closely connected with the civil life of its city that one cannot be thoroughly studied without some familiarity with the other. Spanish cathedrals differ in this respect from their great English and French sisters. In England, cathedrals were built and owned by the clergy, they belonged to the priests, they were surrounded and hedged in from the outside world by their extensive lawns and cloisters, refectories, chapter houses, bishops’ palaces, and numerous monastic buildings. They were shut off from the rest of the world by high walls. In France, the cathedrals were the centre of civic life; their organs were the heart-throbs of the people; their bells were notes of warning. The very houses of the artisans climbed up to their sides and nestled for protection between the buttresses of the great Mother Church. Notre Dame d’Amiens, for instance, was the church of a commune, what Walter Pater calls a “people’s church.” They belonged to the people more than to the clergy. They were a civil rather than an ecclesiastical growth, essentially the layman’s glory.
In Spain, the church belonged to both. Municipal and ecclesiastical history were one and the same, going hand in hand in bloody strife or peaceful union,—the city was the body, the cathedral its animating soul. The cathedrals were meant, not for prayer alone, but to live in,—they were for festivals, meetings, thanksgivings, for surging, excited crowds. The church was an imperium in imperio. It was the rallying place in all great undertakings or excitements. Here the Cortes often met, the great church conclaves assembled, the mystical Autos or sacred plays were performed, in them soldiers gathered, prepared for battle, edicts were published, sovereigns were first proclaimed, and allegiance was sworn; kings were christened, anointed, and buried. The troubled murmurings of the lower classes were here first voiced. They were the art galleries; here were displayed their finest paintings, statues and tapestries; they were even museums of natural history, and exhibited the finest examples of their wood-carving and glass-work, and the iron and silversmith’s arts. It is thus easy to see that the political history of Toledo becomes vital in connection with its Cathedral church.
The history of Toledo dates back to Roman days,—we find Pliny referring to the city as the metropolis of Carpentania. She was among the first cities of Spain to embrace Christianity. All the barbarians, with the exception of the Franks, were Arians, but the last Gothic ruler in Spain to withstand the Roman faith was Leovgild, who reigned in the last half of the sixth century. He was also their first able administrator, the first who consistently strove to bring order out of the chaos of warring tribes and conflicting authorities. Contemporaries describe his palace at Toledo, his throne and apparel, and his council chamber, as of truly royal magnificence. It was reserved to his son Reccared to change the history of Spain by publicly announcing his conversion to the Roman faith before a council of Roman and Arian bishops held in Toledo in 587, at the same time inviting them to exchange their views fearlessly and, as many as would, to follow him. The Goths were never difficult to convert, and many of the bishops and of the lords who were present embraced the Catholic faith, to which a majority of the people already belonged. Gregory the Great, hearing of the success of Reccared’s gentle and liberal proselytism, wrote to him: “What shall I do at the Last Judgment when I arrive with empty hands, and your Excellency followed by a flock of faithful souls, converted by persuasion?” He summoned a third council at Toledo in 589, and in concert with nearly seventy bishops, regulated the rites and discipline of the Church, at the same time excluding the Jews from all employments. In royal Toledo Reccared was anointed with holy oil, and he substituted the Latin for the Gothic tongue in divine service, where Isidore was the first to use it. In daily life Latin soon replaced Gothic. King Wamba built the great walls round the city, and King Roderick held his glorious tournament inside them.
Greater than any fame of Gothic monarch was that of the Church Councils which met here to determine the course of early dogma and shape the destinies of the larger part of Christendom.
The most salient figure during the rule of the Gothic kings was Saint Ildefonso, who quite overshadows his royal contemporaries. In 711 the Moors conquered the city, which then became a dependency of the Caliphs of Damascus and Bagdad until a Moorish prince shook off the foreign yoke. Independent Arab princes ruled, with Toledo as capital of their empire, until Alfonso VI, King of Castile and Leon, in 1085, finally conquered it for himself and his successors.
During the reigns of the early Castilian kings, we find names connected with the city’s history which became famous all over Spain. The Cid was the city’s first Alcaide. Alfonso el Batallador and Pedro el Cruel stand out in sombre relief, and Toledo was the cradle of the dramatic Comunidades’ rising, and the scene of the noble death of their patriotic leader Padella. The streets ran with blood, and the walls spoke of glorious resistance before the Flemish emperor had crushed the liberties of the people.
We have a description of the brilliant pageant of Ferdinand and Isabella’s entry after defeating the king of Portugal. “The Prince of Aragon was in full armour on his war horse and Isabella riding a beautiful mule, splendidly caparisoned, the bridle being held by two noble pages. Followed by their gorgeous retinue they rode slowly towards the Cathedral, while the highest dignitaries of the Church, the archbishop, himself a mitred king, the canons, and the clergy, in their pontifical garments, preceded by the Cross, came forth from the Puerta del Perdon to receive them. On each side of the arch above the doorway were two angels, and in the centre a young maiden richly clothed, with a golden crown on her head, to represent the image of ‘La Bendita Madre de Dios, nuestra Señora.’ When Ferdinand and Isabella and all the company had gathered around, the angels began to sing. The following day the trophies of war were presented to the Cathedral.”
During the period immediately following the reign of the Catholic Kings, Toledo reached her highest prosperity. She numbered as many as 200,000 inhabitants;—to-day she has only 20,000. Glorious processions swept through her streets, the proud knights of the military orders of Alcantara, Calatrava, and Santiago, black-robed Dominican inquisitors, executioners, royal chaplains and major-domos, the Councils of the Indies, Castilian grandees, Roman princes and cardinals, brawling Flemish and Burgundian nobles, German landsknechts, and great Catholic ambassadors.
Toledo received her death-blow when Philip II, unable to brook the haughty claims of the Toledan archbishops, and feeling his power second to theirs, finally, in 1560, moved the capital of his realm to Madrid. Toledo’s annals grew dark. So merciless was the Tribunal of the Inquisition that under its vigilant eye 3327 processes were disposed of in little more than a year. So Toledo fell from her former greatness.
The site of the Cathedral in the very heart of the city is by no means dominant. The church lies so low that even the spire is inconspicuous in the landscape. On three sides adjacent buildings completely bar all view or approach. The only free perspective is on the fourth side, from the steps of the Ayuntamiento across the square.
The inscription above the door of the city hall, with its trenchant advice to the magistrates, is well worth notice:—
Nobles discretos varones,
Qui gobernais a Toledo
En aquatos escalones
Codicia, temor y miedo.
Por los comunes provechos
Deschad los particulares
Puez vos hezo Dios pilares
De tan requisimos lechos
Estat vermes y derechos.9
In the streets, the alcazerias which wind around the sides of the Cathedral, the rich silk guild traded. Here were shipped the goods that freighted vessels sailing for the American colonies.
During the Visigothic reign in Toledo, the Cathedral site was occupied by a Christian temple. It was transformed by the Moors after their occupancy of the city into their principal mosque; there they were still permitted to carry on their worship, according to the terms of the treaty made on their surrender of the city to King Alfonso IV in 1085. A year afterwards King Alfonso went off on a campaign, leaving the capital in charge of his French queen, Constance, and the Archbishop Bernard, recently sent to Toledo at the King’s request by the Abbot of Cluny. No sooner was King Alfonso outside the city walls than the regents turned the Moors out of the church. The Archbishop arrived with a throng of Christian citizens, battered down the main entrance, threw the Moslem objects of worship into the gutters, and set in their place the Cross and the Virgin Mary. When the news of this outrage reached the ears of the King, he returned in wrath to Toledo, swearing he would burn both wife and prelate who had dared to break the oath he had so solemnly sworn. The Moslems, sagely fearing later vengeance would be wreaked upon them should they permit matters to take their course, besought the returning sovereign to restrain his wrath while they released him from his oath,—“Whereat he had great joy, and, riding on into the city, the matter ended peacefully.”
The appearance of this fanatic Cluny monk is of the greatest importance as heralding a new influence in the development and history of Spanish ecclesiastical architecture. His coming marks the introduction of a foreign style of building and a revolution in the previous national methods, known as “obra de los Godos,” or work of the Goths. Further, with the gradual arrival of French ecclesiastics from Cluny and Citeaux, came also a greater interference from Rome in the management of the Spanish Church, and a radical limitation of the former power of the Peninsula’s arrogant prelates. Owing to the new influence, the Italian mass-book was soon presented in place of the ancient Gothic ritual and breviary. The foreign churchmen likewise aided in uniting sovereign, clergy, and nobility in common cause against the Saracen infidels now so firmly ensconced in the Peninsula. Spanish art had previously felt only national influences; now, through the door opened by the monks, it received potent foreign elements.
Spain had been far too much occupied with internal strife and political dissension to have had breathing spell or opportunity for the development of the fine arts and the building of churches. The passion for building which the French monks brought with them awoke entirely dormant qualities in the Spaniard, which in the early Romanesque, but especially in the Gothic edifices, produced beautiful, but essentially exotic fruits. First in the days of the Renaissance the architecture showed features which might be termed original and national. With the Cluniacs came not only French artisans but Flemish, German, and Italian, all taking a hand in, and lending their influences to the great works of the new art.
Nothing remains of the old Moorish-Christian house of worship. It was torn down by order of Saint Ferdinand (he had laid the foundation stone of Burgos as early as 1221), who laid the corner stone of the present edifice with great ceremony, assisted by the Archbishop, in the month of August, 1227 (seven years prior to the commencement of Salisbury and Amiens). The building was practically completed in 1493, during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the most illustrious epoch of Spanish history. Additions and alterations injurious to the harmony and symmetry of the building were made till the end of the seventeenth century, and again continued during the eighteenth. It thus represents the architectural inspiration and decadence of nearly six hundred years.
In style it belongs to the group of three great churches, Burgos, Toledo and Leon, which were based upon the constructional principles and decorative features termed Gothic. In some respects these churches embodied to a highly developed extent the organic principles of the style, in others, they fell far short of a clear comprehension of them. None of them had the beauty or the purity of the greatest of their French sisters. Burgos may be said to be most consistently Gothic in all its details, but neither Toledo nor Leon was free from the influence of Moorish art, which was indeed developing and flowering under Moslem rule in the south of the Peninsula, at the time when Gothic churches were lifting their spires into the blue of northern skies under the guidance and inspiration of the French masters. In many respects the Gothic could not express itself similarly in Spain and France,—climatic conditions differed, and, consequently, the architecture which was to suit their needs. In France, Gothic building tended towards a steadily increasing elimination of all wall surfaces. The weight and thrusts, previously carried by walls, were met by a more and more skillfully developed framework of piers and flying buttresses. Such a development was not practical for Spain nor was it understood. The widely developed fields for glass would have admitted the heat of the sun too freely, whereas the broad surfaces of wall-masonry gave coolness and shade. Nor were the sharply sloping roofs for the easy shedding of snow necessary in Spain. In French and English Gothic churches, the light, pointed spire is the ornamental feature of the composition, whereas in the Spanish, with a few exceptions, the towers become heavy and square.
None of the three Cathedrals in question impresses us as the outcome of Spanish architectural growth, but seems rather a direct importation. They have the main features of a style with which their architects were familiar and in which they had long since taken the initial steps. They are working with a practically developed system, whose infancy and early growth had been followed elsewhere.
While in the twelfth, and the early portion of the thirteenth century, Frenchmen were gradually evolving the new system of ecclesiastical architecture, the Spaniards, destined to surpass them, were to all purposes still producing nothing but Romanesque buildings, borrowing certain ornamental or constructional features of the new style, but in so slight and illogical a degree, that their style remained based upon its old principles. They employed the pointed arch between arcades and vaulting, and unlike the French, threw a dome or cimborio over the intersection of nave and transepts. In some instances we find a regular French quadripartite vault at the crossing, but such changes are not sufficient to term the cathedrals of the period (Tudela, Tarragona, Zamora, and Lerida) Gothic. They remain historically, rather than artistically, interesting. With the second quarter of the thirteenth century, comes the change.
In style Toledo corresponds most closely to the early Gothic of the north of France. Its plan reminds one forcibly of Bourges, though it is far more ambitious in size. Owing to the long period of its building, it bears late Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque features, while traces of Moorish influence are not wanting.
The Cathedral of Toledo was built in an imaginative, creative and passionate age,—an age when the ordinary mason was a master builder as well as sculptor, stimulated by local affection, pride and piety. The results of his work were tremendous,—his finished product was a storehouse of art. Artists of all nations had a hand in the work. Bermudez mentions 149 names of those who embellished the Cathedral during six centuries. Here worked Borgoña, Berruguete, Cespedes, and Villalpando, Copin, Vergara Egas, and Covarrubias. It is rather difficult to analyze their genius. They were not naturally artists, as were the French and Italians; they did not create as easily, but were rather stimulated by a more naïve craving for vast dimensions. With this we find interwoven in places the sparkling, jewel-like intricacy and play of light and shade so natural to the Moorish artisan, and the sombre, overpowering solemnity of the warlike Spanish cavalier.
It is necessary for a people at all times to find expression for its æsthetic life. Architecture, like literature, reflects the sentiments and tendencies of a nation’s mind. As truly as Don Quixote, Don Juan, or the Cid express them, so do the stories told by Toledo, Leon, or Burgos. They reproduce the passions, the dreams, the imagination, and the absurdities of the age which created them.
Toledo’s first architect, who superintended the work for more than half a century, was named Perez (d. 1285). He was followed by Rodrigo, Alfonso, Alvar Gomez, Annequin de Egas, Martin Sanchez, Juan Guas, and Enrique de Egas. Hand in hand with the architects, worked the high priests.
The Archbishop of Toledo is the Primate of Spain. Mighty prelates have sat on that throne, and the chapter was once one of the most celebrated in the world. The Primate of Toledo has the Pope as well as the King of Spain for honorary canons, and his church takes precedence of all others in the land. The offices attached to his person are numerous. As late as the time of Napoleon’s conquest of the city, fourteen dignitaries, twenty-seven canons, and fifty prebends, besides a host of chaplains and subaltern priests, followed in the train of the Metropolitan. At the close of the fifteenth century, his revenues exceeded 80,000 ducats (about $720,000), while the gross amount of those of the subordinate beneficiaries of his church rose to 180,000. This amount, or 12,000,000 reals, had not decreased at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the middle ages he was followed by more horse and foot than either the Grand Master of Santiago or the Constable of Castile. When he threw his influence into the balance, the pretender to the throne was often victorious. He held jurisdiction over fifteen large and populous towns besides numbers of inferior places.
Many who occupied the episcopal throne of Toledo ruled Spain, not only by virtue of the prestige their high office gave them, but through extraordinary genius and remarkable attainments. They were great alike in war and in peace. Many of them combined broadness of view and real learning with purity of morals. They founded universities and libraries, framed useful laws, stimulated noble impulses, corrected abuses, and promoted reforms. Popes called them to Rome to ask their advice in affairs of the Church. Bright in the history of Spain shine the names of such prelates as Rodriguez, Tenorio, Fonseca, Ximenez, Mendoza, Tavera, and Lorenzana.
From the tenth to the sixteenth centuries Castile was far less bigoted than other European nations, for, of all the daughters of the Mother Church, Spain was the most independent. Her kings and her primate were naturally her champions, ever ready and defiant. King James I even went so far as to cut out the tongue of a too meddlesome bishop. From early Gothic days to the time when Ferdinand began to dream of Spain as a power beyond the Iberian Peninsula, no kingdom in Europe was less disposed to brook the interference of the Pope. Ferdinand and Isabella thwarted him in insisting upon their right to appoint their own candidates for the high offices of the Spanish church, and the Pope was obliged to give way.
The figure we constantly encounter in the thrilling tilts between Rome and Spanish prelates is the Archbishop of Toledo. Like Richelieu and Wolsey, Ximenez and Mendoza towered above their time, and their great spirits still seem present within their church. Ximenez, better known in English as Cardinal Cisneros, rose to his high office much against his will from the obscurity of a humble monk. The peremptory orders of the Pope were necessary to make him leave his cell and become successively Archbishop of Toledo, Grand Chancellor of Castile, Inquisitor General, Cardinal, Confessor to Queen Isabella, Minister of Ferdinand the Catholic, and Regent of the Kingdom of Charles V. He was “an austere priest, a profound politician, a powerful intellect, a will of iron, and an inflexible and unconquerable soul; one of the greatest figures in modern history; one of the loftiest types of the Spanish character. Notwithstanding the greatness thrust upon him, he preserved the austere practices of the simple monk. Under a robe of silk and purple, he wore the hard shirt and frock of St. Francis. In his apartments, embellished with costly hangings, he slept on the floor, with only a log of wood for his pillow. Ferdinand owed to him that he preserved Castile, and Charles V, that he became King of Spain. He did not boast when, pointing to the Cordon of St. Francis, he explained, ‘It is with this I bridle the pride of the aristocracy of Castile.’”10
History may accuse him of the unpardonable expulsion of the Moriscos, and the retention of the Inquisition as well as its introduction into the New World,—but what he did was done from the strength of his convictions and according to what, in the light of his age, seemed the best for his country and his Church. He was perhaps even greater as a Spaniard than as a churchman. His conceptions were all grand, and he was as versatile as he was great. Victor in the greatest of all Spanish toils, he executed the polyglot version of the Scriptures, the most stupendous literary achievement of his age. Fitting his greatness is the simplicity of his epitaph:—
Condideram musis Franciscus grande lyceum,
Condor in exiguo nunc ego sarcophago.
Praetextam junxi sacco, galeamque galero,
Frater, Dux, Praesul, Cardineusque pater.
Quin virtute mea junctum est diadema cucullo,
Cum mihi regnanti paruit Hesperia.
The figure of Cardinal Mendoza stands out clear and strong in the final struggle with Granada. It was he who first planted the Cross where the Crescent had waved for six centuries, and he was the first to counsel Isabella to assist the great discoverer. His keen intellect made him lend a ready ear and friendly hand to the rapid development of the science of his time and the fast-spreading taste for literature.
And so the line of Toledo’s illustrious bishops continues,—leaders of the church militant, like the Montagues and Capulets, they fought from the mere habit of fighting, but they seldom stained their swords in an unworthy cause.
III
There is a great discrepancy between the interior and the exterior of the Cathedral. The former is as grand as the latter is insignificant and unworthy. The scale is tremendous. Only Milan and Seville cover a greater area, if the Cathedral is considered in connection with its cloisters. Cologne comes next to it in size. It runs from west to east, with nave and double side aisles, ending in a semicircular apse with a double ambulatory. As is characteristic of Spanish churches, it is astonishingly wide for its length,—being 204 feet wide and 404 feet long. The nave is 98 feet high and 44 feet wide, while the outer aisles are respectively 26 and 32 feet across.
The exterior, with the exception of the ornamental portions of the portals and a few carvings, is all built of a Berroqueña granite. The interior is of a kind of mouse-colored limestone taken from the quarries of Oliquelas near Toledo. Like many limestones, it is soft when first quarried, but hardens with time and exposure.
The impression of the exterior is strangely disappointing. Imposing and massive, but irregular, squat, and encumbered by surrounding edifices clinging to its masonry. An indifferent husk, encasing a noble interior. Only one tower is completed, and no two portions of the decoration are symmetrical. The exterior has no governing scheme, no “idée maîtresse,” no individual style, and is the outgrowth of no definite period. Successive generations of peace or war have enriched or destroyed its masonry. You stop with an exclamation of admiration in front of certain details of the exterior; before others, you only feel astonishment. The want of order and unity in the execution of its various portions and elevations is distressing.
Order and harmony may be preserved, even where an edifice is carried on by successive ages, each of which imparts to its work the stamp of its own developing skill and imagination. Very few of the great cathedrals were begun and completed in one style. Most of the great French churches show traces of the earlier Norman or Romanesque; most of the English Gothic, traces of the Norman or of the different periods of English Gothic architecture; but one dominating scheme has been followed by the consecutive architects. The lack of such a governing and restraining principle is felt in the exterior of Toledo. Further than this, although successive wars and religious fanaticism have with their destructive fury injured so many of the beautiful statues and exquisite carvings and much of the stained glass of the French and English religious establishments, still the architecture itself has in the main been left undisturbed. In Toledo, there is hardly a portion of the early structure and decoration of the lower, visible part of the Cathedral which has not been altered or torn down by the various architects of the last three centuries.
As an obvious result, the portions of the exterior which are interesting are individual features, and not a unified scheme; and they are interesting historically, rather than in relation to or in dependence upon one another.
The west front, which is the principal façade, the various doorways and completed tower form the most interesting portions of the exterior.
The west front is flanked by two projecting towers, dissimilar in design. To the south is the uncompleted one, containing the Mozarabic chapel,11 roofed by an octagonal cupola and surmounted by a lantern, strangely betraying in exterior form its Byzantine ancestry.
To the north rises the spire which commands the city and the Cathedral of Toledo. It was begun in 1380 and completed in sixty years,—no long time when we take into account its size and detail and the carefulness of its construction. Rodrigo Alfonso and Alvar Gomez were the architects, and the Cardinals Pedro Tenorio and Tavera directed the work. Although it lacks the soaring grace of the towers of Burgos, it possesses quiet strength and a majestic dignity, and the transitions between its various stories have been executed with a skill scarcely less than that shown in the older tower of Chartres. It is in fact full of a character of its own. Divided into three parts, it rises to a height of some three hundred feet and terminates in a huge cross. The principal building material is the hard but easily carved Berroqueña granite, with certain portions finished in marble and slate. The lower part, which is square, has its faces pierced by interlacing Gothic arches, windows of different shapes, ornamental coats-of-arms and marble medallions. It is crowned by a railing and, at the corners where the transition to the hexagon occurs, by stone pyramids. The central part is hexagonal in plan and ornamented by arches and crocketed finials. Above it rises the slate spire terminating under the cross in a conical pyramid, added after a fire in the year 1662. The spire is curiously and uniquely encircled by three collars of pointed iron spikes, intended to symbolize the crowns of thorns.
The great bells of the Cathedral peal from this tower, among them the huge San Eugenio, better known, though, by the name “Campana gorda,” or the Big-bellied Bell, weighing 1543 arobes (about 17 tons) and put up the same day it was cast in the year 1753. Its fame is shown by the old lines, which enumerate the wonders of Spain as the—
Campana la de Toledo,
Iglesia la de Leon,
Reloj el de Benavente,
Rollos los de Villalon.12
Fifteen shoemakers could sit under it and draw out their cobbler’s thread without touching each other. A legend relates that “the sound of it reached, when first it was rung, even to heaven. Saint Peter fancied that the tones came from his own church in Rome, but on ascertaining that this was not the case, and that Toledo possessed the largest of all bells, he got angry and flung down one of his keys upon it, thus causing a crack in the bell which is still to be seen.”
Not only does the hoarse croak of Gorda’s voice remind the tardy worshiper of the approaching hour of prayer, but it tells each and all of the “barrio” where the fire is raging. Though the prudent Toledan may not know the art of signing his name or reading his Pater Noster, full well he knows, whenever Gorda speaks, whether the danger is at his own door or at his neighbor’s.
The lower portion of the façade between the towers is composed of a fine triple portal dating from 1418 to 1450, which, despite later changes, is still an excellent piece of Gothic work. It contains over seventy statues. Above, the façade is composed of an ornamental screen inexpressive of the structure and the internal arrangement of the edifice. A railing separated the “lonja,” or enclosure immediately in front of the entrances, from the street outside. The central entrance is the Gate of Pardon; to the north is the Gate of the Tower, also called the Gate of Hell; to the south is the Gate of the Scriveners or of Judgment. The middle door is the largest and most important. For centuries the steps leading to it have been climbed and descended by the pregnant women of Toledo, to insure an easy parturition.
The doors themselves are covered with most interesting bronze work, showing how far the Spaniards had in later centuries developed the art of their skillful Saracenic predecessors. The arch of the Gate of Pardon is exquisitely formed and its moldings and recesses are profusely decorated with finely chiseled figures and ornaments. Each of the three doors is surmounted by a relief, that over the Pardon representing the Virgin presenting the chasuble to Saint Ildefonso, who is kneeling at her feet.
The Scriveners’ Gate derives its name from having been the door of entry for the scriveners when they came to the Cathedral to take their oath, but, though they had a gate for their own particular use, they did not seem to enjoy an especially good reputation. According to an old verse, their pen and paper would drop from their hands to dance an independent fandango long before their souls ever entered the Kingdom of Heaven.
Above the door is an inscription commemorative of the great exploits of the Catholic Sovereigns and Cardinal Mendoza and of the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Sicily.
The principal feature above the doors is a classical gable which extends the whole width of the façade, its field filled with colossal pieces of sculpture representing the Last Supper. Our Lord and the Apostles are seated, each in his own niche. It recalls the carving over the northeast entrance of Notre Dame du Puy. Nothing could be more ineffective and out of place than to crown this portion of the Gothic building with a Greek gable end. Finally, above the gable, with a curious pair of arches built out in front of it, comes a circular rose almost thirty feet in diameter, of early fourteenth-century work, this again being surmounted by late eighteenth-century Baroque additions.
There are two doorways on the south side. The Gate of the Lions, which forms the southern termination to the transept, is of course named from the lions standing over the enclosing rail directly in front of it, each supporting its shield. Here you have a bit of the finest work of the exterior, a most exquisite specimen of the Gothic work of the fifteenth century. Its detail and finish are remarkable, and few pieces of Spanish sculpture of its time surpass it in elegance and grace. The larger figures are most interesting, varying greatly in execution and character. Those of the inner arches are stiff and still struggling for freedom from tradition, but of admirably carved drapery,—while the bishops in the niches to the right and left have faces radiating kindness and patriarchal benignity, faces we meet and bless in our own walks of life to-day. The bronze Renaissance doors are as fine as their setting,—splendid examples of the metal stamping of the sixteenth century, and the wooden carving on their inner surfaces is equally fine. The bronze knocker might easily have come from the workshop of the great Florentine goldsmith.
The Gate of La Llana, west of the Gate of the Lions, is as ludicrous in its eighteenth-century dress as the gable of the west façade.
On the north side of the church we find three gates; in the centre, forming the northern entrance to the transept, the Puerta del Reloic, and east and west of it, the Puerta de Santa Catalina, and the Puerta de la Presentacion.
IV
You leave the outside with a feeling of distress at having viewed a patchwork of architectural composition, feebly decorating and badly expressing a noble and mighty frame. You enter into a light of celestial softness and purity. It seems an old and faded light. As soon as you regain vision in the cool, refreshing twilight, you experience the long-deferred exultation. You are amid those that pray,—the poor and sorrowing, those that would be strengthened. Here voices sink to a reverent whisper, for curiosity is hushed into awe. “I could never fathom how a man dares to lift up his voice to preach in a cathedral,—what has he to say that will not be an anti-climax?” says Robert Louis Stevenson, and you are struck by the force of his remark when you compare the droning voice coming from one corner of the building with the glorious expression of man’s faith rising above and around you. The quiet majesty and silent eloquence of the one accentuates the feebleness of the other.
For the interior is as simple and restrained and the planning as logical and lucid as the exterior is blameworthy and unreasonable. Here is rhythm and harmony. The constructive problems have been ingeniously mastered, and the carved and decorated portions subordinated to the gigantic scheme of the great monument. The sculptures are limited to their respective fields. Structural and artistic principles go hand in hand. Eloquently the carvings speak the language of the time,—they become a pictorial Bible, open for the poor man to read, who has no knowledge of crabbed, monastic letters. They are the language of true religion, the religion that may change but can never die.
The plan is unquestionably the grand feature of the Cathedral; the beauty and scale of it challenge comparison with those of all other churches in Christendom. The vaulting and its development, the concentration of the thrust upon the piers and far-leaping flying buttresses are unquestionably on such a scale and of such character as to place it among the mightiest, if not the most pure and well-developed Gothic edifices. It is like a giant that knows not the strength of his limbs nor the possibilities in his mighty frame.
You do not feel the great height of the nave, owing to the immensity of all dimensions and the great circumference of the supporting piers. The nave and the double side aisles on each side are all of seven bays. The transept does not project beyond the outer aisles. The plan proper has thus, at a rough glance, the appearance of a basilica and seems to lack the side arms of the Gothic cross. The choir consists of one bay, and the chevet formed by an apse to the choir of five bays. Both aisles continue around the chevet. Outside these again, and between the buttresses of the main outer walls, lie the different chapels, the great cloister and the different compartments and dependencies belonging to church and chapel,—a tremendous development, accumulation, growth,—a city in itself. The cloisters, as well as almost all the chapels, were added after the virtual completion of the Cathedral proper.
The chevet is the keynote of the plan, and the solution of the problem, how to vault the different compartments lying between the three concentric circular terminations beyond the choir. Their vaulting shows constructive skill and ingenuity of the highest order. The architects solved the problem with a simplicity and grandeur which places their genius on a level with that of the greatest of French builders. There are no previous examples of Spanish churches where similar problems have been dealt with tentatively. We are thus forced to acknowledge that the schooling for, and consequent mastery of, the problem, must have been gained on French soil. The central apse is surrounded by four piers, the two aisles are separated by eight, and the outer wall is marked by sixteen points of support. The bays in both aisles are vaulted alternately by triangular and virtually rectangular compartments. The vista from west to east is perfectly preserved, and the distance from centre to centre of every second pair of outer piers is as nearly as possible the same as that of the inner row. The outer wall of the aisles, except where the two great chapels of Santiago and San Ildefonso are introduced, was pierced alternately by small, square chapels opposite the triangular, vaulting compartments and circular chapels opposite the others.
In the cathedrals of Notre Dame de Paris, Saint Remi of Rheims, and in Le Mans, we find intermediate triangular vaulting compartments introduced, but they are either employed with inferior skill or in a different form. In none of these cathedrals do they call for such unstinted admiration as those of the architect of Toledo. They just fall short of the happiest solution. In Saint Remi, for instance, we have intermediate trapezoids instead of rectangles, the inner chord being longer than the exterior.
The seventy-two well-molded, simple, quadripartite vaults of the whole edifice (rising in the choir to about one hundred, and, in the inner and outer aisles, to sixty and thirty-five feet) are supported by eighty-eight piers. The capitals of the engaged shafts, composed of plain foliage, point the same way as the run of the ribs above them. Simple, strong moldings compose the square bases. The great piers of the transept are trefoiled in section. The outer walls of the main body of the church are pierced by arches leading into uninteresting, rectangular chapels, some of them decorated with elaborate vaulting. In the outer wall of the intermediate aisle is a triforium, formed by an arcade of cusped arches, and above this, quite close to the point of the vault, a rose window in each bay. The clerestory, filling the space above the great arches on each side of the nave, is subdivided into a double row of lancet-pointed windows, surmounted by a rosette coming directly under the spring of the vault.
The treatment of the crossing of transept and nave is in Toledo, as in all Spanish churches, emphatic and peculiar. The old central lantern of the cruciform church was retained and developed in their Gothic as well as in their Renaissance edifices, and was permitted illogically to break the Gothic roof line. The lantern of Ely is the nearest reminder we have of it in English or French Gothic. In Spain the “cimborio” became an important feature and made the croisée beneath it the lightest portion of the edifice. It shed light to the east and west of it, into the high altar and the choir.
The position of the choir is striking and distressing. Its rectangular body completely fills the sixth and seventh bays of the nave, interrupting its continuity and spoiling the sweep and grandeur of the edifice at its most important point. It sticks like a bone in the throat. Any complete view of the interior becomes impossible, and its impressive majesty is belittled. One constantly finds the choir of Spanish cathedrals in this position, which deprives them of the fine perspective found in northern edifices. In Westminster Abbey, strangely enough, the choir is similarly placed, and there, as here, it is as if the hands were tied and the breath stifled, where action should be freest.
This peculiar position of the choir was owing to the admission of the laity to the transept in front of the altar. In earlier days the choir was adjacent to and facing the altar, the singers and readers being there enclosed by a low and unimportant rail. The short, eastern apses of the Spanish cathedrals and the undeveloped and insufficient room for the clergy immediately surrounding the altar almost necessitated this divorce of the choir. In France and England the happier and more logical alternative was resorted to, of providing sufficient space east of the intersection of the transept for all the clergy.
The rectangular choir of Toledo is closed at the east by a magnificent iron screen; at the west, by a wall called the “Trascoro,” acting as a background to the archbishop’s seat. A doorway once pierced its centre but was blocked up for the placing of the throne.
If the position of the choir is unfortunate, its details are among the most remarkable and glorious of their time and country. The only entrance is through the great iron parclose or reja at the east. This, as well as the corresponding grille work directly opposite, closing off the bay in front of the high altar, are wonderful specimens of the iron-worker’s craft, splendid masterpieces of an art which has never been excelled since the days of its mediæval guilds. The master Domingo de Cespedes erected the grille in the year 1548. The framework seems to be connected by means of tenons and mortices, while the scrolls are welded together. The larger moldings are formed of sheet iron, bent to the shape required and flush-riveted to their light frames. Neither the general design nor the details (both Renaissance in feeling) are especially meritorious, but the thorough mastery of the material is most astonishing. The stubborn iron has been wrought and formed with as much ease and boldness as if it had been soft limestone or plaster. It is characteristic of the age that the craftsman has not limited himself to one material. Certain portions of the smaller ornaments are of silver and copper. Originally their shining surfaces, as well as the gilding of the great portion of the principal iron bars, must have touched the whole with life and color. It was all covered with black paint in the time of the Napoleonic wars to escape the greedy hands of La Houssaye’s victorious mob, and the gates still retain the sable coat that protected them.
Even a more glorious example of Spanish craftsmanship is found in the choir stalls which surround us to the north and south and west as soon as we enter. Here we are face to face with the finest flowering of Spanish mediæval art. Théophile Gautier, generalizing upon the whole composition, says: “L’art gothique, sur les confins de la Renaissance, n’a rien produit de plus parfait ni de mieux dessiné.” The whole treatment of the work is essentially Spanish.
The stalls, the “silleria,” are arranged in two tiers, the upper reached by little flights of five steps and covered by a richly carved, marble canopy, supported by slender Corinthian columns of red jasper and alabaster. All the stalls are of walnut, fifty in the lower row, seventy in the upper, exclusive of the archbishop’s seat. The right side of the altar, that is, the right side of the celebrant looking from the altar, is called the side of the Gospel,—the left, the side of the Epistle. The great carvings, differing in the upper and lower stalls in period and execution, are the work of three artists. The carvings of the lower row were executed by Rodriguez in 1495, those of the upper, on the Gospel side, by Alonso Berruguete, and those on the side of the Epistle, by Philip Vigarny (also called Borgoña), both of the latter about fifty years later (in 1543).
The reading desk of the upper stalls forms the back of the lower and affords the field for their sculptural decoration. The subjects are the Conquest of Granada and the Campaigns of Ferdinand and Isabella. We are shown in the childish and picturesque manner in which the age tells its story, the various incidents of the war, all its situations and groups, its curious costumes, arms, shields, and bucklers, and even the names of the fortresses inscribed on their masonry. We can recognize the Catholic monarchs and the great prelate entering the fallen city amid the grief-stricken infidels.
The spirit of the work is distinctly that of the period which has gone before, without any intimations of that to come. It has the character of the German Gothic, recalling Lucas of Holland and his school. If it has a grace and beauty of its own, there is also a childish grotesqueness without any of the self-assured mastery, so soon to spread its Italian light. The imagination and composition are there, but not the execution,—the mind, but not the hand.
The carvings of the upper stalls were executed by their masters in generous rivalry and in a spirit that shows a decided classic influence.
Many curious accounts of the time describe the excitement which prevailed during their execution and the various favor they found in the eyes of different critics. Looking at them, one’s thoughts revert to that glorious dawn in which Cellini and Ghiberti and Donatello labored. The inscription says of the two artists, “Signatum marmorea tum ligna caelavere hinc Philippus Burgundio, ex adverso Berruguetus Hispanus: certaverunt tum artificum ingenia; certabunt semper spectatorum judicia.”
Berruguete’s work (on the Gospel side) shows distinct traces of Michael Angelo’s influence and his study in Italian ateliers with Andrea del Sarto and Baccio Bandinelli.13 The nervous vigor of the Italian giant and the purity of style which looked back at Greece and Rome, are apparent.
The subjects of Vigarny’s work, as also of Berruguete’s, are taken from the Old Testament. They have a more subtle charm, more grace and freedom. Some of them show strength and an unerring hand, others, delicacy and exquisite subtleness. Where the Maestro Mayor of Charles V is powerful and energetic, Vigarny is imaginative and rich.
Comparing the upper and lower rows of panels, we must see what remarkable steps had been taken in so short a time by the sculptors. A lightness of execution, a victorious self-reliance, seems to follow close on the steps of tentative, even if conscientious, effort. The carving, the bold relief of the chiseling, have a vividness and intensity of expression, surpassing some of the best work of Italy and France.
The niches in the marble canopy above the upper row of stalls are filled with figures standing almost in full relief, and representing the genealogy of Christ.
The outer walls of the choir are also completely covered with sculpture. It is thoroughly Gothic in character, crude, and fumbling for expression, consisting of arcades with niches above containing alto-relievo illustrations of Old Testament scenes and characters. You recognize the Garden of Eden, Abraham with agonized face, Isaac, Jacob, passages from Exodus, and other familiar scenes. Many of the panels depict further the small, everyday occurrences and incidents so loved by mediæval artists, and so full of earnest, religious feeling. Crowning it all, amid the pinnacles, are a whole flock of angels, quite prepared for Ascension Day. It is all very similar to the early fourteenth-century work in French cathedrals.
The bay in front of the high altar, forming with it the Capilla Mayor, and the choir are closed from the transept by a huge reja as fine as the one facing it, and the work of the Spaniard Francesco Villalpando (1548).14
The Capilla Mayor originally consisted of the one bay to the east of the transept, the adjacent terminating portion of the nave being the chapel containing the tombs of the kings. The great Cardinal Ximenez received Isabella’s permission to remove the dividing wall in case he could accomplish the task without disturbing any of the monarchs’ coffins. The walls all round, both internally and externally, are completely covered with sculpture. Many of the figures are faithful portraits; many of the groups tell an interesting story. On the Gospel side there are two carvings, one over the other, the upper representing Don Alfonso VIII, and the lower, the shepherd who guided the monarch and his army to the renowned plains of Las Navas de Tolosa, where the battle was fought which proved so glorious to Christian arms. One likewise sees the statue of the Moor, Alfaqui Abu Walid, who threw himself in the path of King Alfonso and prevailed upon him to forgive Queen Constance and Bishop Bernard for the expulsion of the Moors from their mosque, contrary to the king’s solemn oath.
All around us lie the early rulers of the House of Castile, Alfonso VII, Sancho the Deserted, and Sancho the Brave, the Prince Don Pedro de Aguilar, son of Alfonso XI, and the great Cardinal Mendoza. Below in the vault lie, by the sides of their consorts, Henry II, John I, and Henry III.
At the end of the chapel, acting as a background to the altar, you find a composition constantly met in and characteristic of Spanish cathedrals. The huge “retablo” is nothing but a meaningless, gaudy and sensational series of carved and decorated niches. It is carved in larchwood and merely reveals a love of the cheap and tawdry display of the decadent florid period of Gothic.
Back of the retablo and the high altar, you are startled by the most horrible and vulgar composition of the church. Nothing but the mind of an idiot could have conceived the “transparente.”15 It has neither order nor reason. The whole mass runs riot. Angels and saints float up and down its surface amid doughy clouds. The angel Raphael counterbalances the weight of his kicking feet by a large goldfish which he is frantically clutching. It is a piece of uncontrolled, imbecile decoration, perpetrated to the everlasting shame of Narciso Tomé in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Nothing except the choir and Capilla Mayor disturb the simplicity of the aisles and the great body of the church. All other monuments or compositions are found in the numerous rooms and chapels leading from the outer aisles or situated between the lower arches of the outside walls. There are many of them, some important, others trivial. The Mozarabic chapel, in the southwest corner of the cathedral, is the one place in the world where you may still every morning hear the quaint old Visigothic or Mozarabic ritual recited. The chapel was constructed under Cardinal Ximenez in 1512 for the double purpose of commemorating the tolerance of the Moors, who during their dominion left to the Christians certain churches in which to continue their own worship, and also to perpetuate the use of the old Gothic ritual. It is most curious, almost barbaric: “The canons behind, in a sombre flat monotone, chant responses to the officiating priest at the altar. The sound combines the enervating effect of the hum of wings, whirr of looms, wooden thud of pedals, the boom and rush of immense wings circling round and round.” It is strange to hear this echo a thousand years old of a magnanimous act in so intolerant an age.
In the eleventh century King Alfonso, at the insistence of Bernard and Constance, and the papal legate Richard, decided to abolish the use of the old Gothic ritual and to introduce the Gregorian rite. The Toledans threatened revolt rather than abandon their old form of worship. The King knew no other method of decision than to leave the question to two champions. In single combat the Knight of the Gothic Missal, Don Juan Ruiz de Mantanzas, killed his adversary while he himself remained unhurt. At a second trial, where two bulls were entrusted with the perplexing difficulty, the Gothic bull came off victor. Councils were held and the Pope still persevered in his determination to abolish the old Spanish service book. Outside the walls of the city, in front of the King and churchmen and amid the entire populace of Toledo, a great fire was built, and the two mass-books were thrown into it. When the flames had died down, only the Gothic mass-book was found unscathed. Only after many years, when traditions had gradually altered and even much of the text had become meaningless to the clergy, did the Roman service book become universally introduced into Toledan houses of worship.
Two other chapels are of especial interest: those of Saint Ildefonso and Santiago. Saint Ildefonso, who became metropolitan in 658, is second only in honor to Saint James of Compostella; he was unquestionably the most favored of Toledo’s long line of bishops.
Three natives of Narbonne had dared to question the perpetual virginity of Our Lady. Saint Ildefonso gallantly took up her defense and proved it beyond doubt or questioning in his treatise “De Virginitate Perpetua Sanctae Mariae adversus tres Infideles.” It was a crushing vindication and a discourse of much reason and scriptural light. Shortly afterwards the Bishop, together with the King and court, went to the Church of Saint Leocadia to give public thanks. As soon as the multitude had had sufficient time to kneel at the saint’s tomb, a group of angels appeared amid a cloud and surrounded by sweet scents. Next the sepulchre opened of its own accord. Calix relates, “Thirty men could not have moved the stone which slid slowly from the mouth of the tomb. Immediately Saint Leocadia arose, after lying there three hundred years, and holding out her arm, she shook hands with Saint Ildefonso, speaking in this voice, ‘Oh, Ildefonso, through thee doth the honor of My Lady flourish.’ All the spectators were silent, being struck with the novelty and the greatness of the miracle. Only Saint Ildefonso, with Heaven’s aid, replied to her. Now the virgin Saint looked as if she wished to return into the tomb and she turned around for that purpose, when the King begged of Saint Ildefonso that he would not let her go until she left some relic of her behind, for a memorial of the miracle and for the consolation of the city. And as Saint Ildefonso wished to cut a part of the white veil which covered the head of St. Leocadia, the King lent him a knife for that purpose, and this must have been a poniard or a dagger, though others say it was a sword. With this the saint cut a large piece of the blessed veil, and while he was giving it to the King, at the same time returning the knife, the saint shut herself up entirely and covered herself in the tomb with the huge stone.”
But even this was not a sufficient expression of gratitude to satisfy Saint Mary, for next week she herself came down to enjoy matins with Saint Ildefonso in the Cathedral. She sat in his throne and listened to his discourse with both pleasure and edification. A celestial host dispensed music in the choir, music of heaven, hymns, David’s psalms and chants, such as never had been heard before, either in Seville or in Toledo. To cap it all, the Virgin made her favorite a splendid present of a chasuble worked by the angels with which she invested him with her own hands before she said good-bye. You may still kiss your fingers after having touched the sacred slab upon which the Virgin stood and above which run the words of the Psalmist: “Adorabimus in loco ubi steterunt pedes ejus.” The chapel is, similarly to the screens around the choir, of fourteenth-century work.
The Chapel of Santiago was erected by Count Alvaro de Luna, for more than thirty years the real sovereign of Castile. It is most elaborately decorated throughout with rich Gothic work, interwoven with sparkling filigree of Saracenic character. The tombs of the Lunas are of interest because of the great Count. His own is not the original one. The first mausoleum which he erected to himself was so constructed that the recumbent effigy or automaton could, when mass was said, slowly rise, clad in full armor, and remain kneeling until the service was ended, when it would slowly resume its former posture. This was destroyed at the instigation of Alvaro’s old enemy, Henry of Aragon, who remained unreconciled even after the death of his old minister. At each corner of Alvaro’s tomb kneels a knight of Santiago, at his feet a page holds his helmet, his own hands are crossed devoutly over the sword on his breast, and the mantle of his order is folded about his shoulders. His face wears an expression of sadness.
Alvaro began his career as a page in the service of Queen Catharine (Plantagenet). He ended it as Master of Santiago, Constable of Castile, and Prime Minister of John II, whom he completely ruled for thirty-five years. He lived in royal state, became all-powerful and arrogant. His diplomacy effected the marriage of Henry II and Isabella of Portugal, but he later incurred the enmity of Isabella, was accused of high treason, found guilty, and executed in the square of Valladolid. Pius II said of him, “He was a very lofty mind, as great in war as he was in peace, and his soul breathed none but noble thoughts.”
And thus we may continue all around the Cathedral, past the successive chapels, vestries, sanctuaries and treasuries,—the architecture and sculpture of each connected with great events and telling its own story of dark tragedy or lighter romance.
In one, the Spanish banners used to be consecrated before leading the hosts against the Moors; in another, Spain now keeps her priceless treasures under the locks of seven keys hanging from the girdles of an equal number of canons. There are silver and gold and pearl and precious jewels sufficient to set on foot every stagnant Spanish industry. The 8500 pearls of the Virgin’s cape might alone feed a province for no short time. They are buried in the dark. Outside in the light, the children of Spain are starving and without means of obtaining food. At one’s elbow the whine of the beggar is continually heard, till one recalls Washington Irving’s words: “The more proudly a mansion has been tenanted in the days of its prosperity, the humbler are its inhabitants in the days of her decline, and the palace of the king commonly ends in being the resting-place of the beggar.”
Here and there, in the interior as in the exterior, we find, mixed with or decorating the Gothic, Moorish and Renaissance details and the later extravagances which followed the decline of the Gothic. Even where the carvers are expressing themselves in Gothic or Renaissance details, we frequently observe an extreme richness, a love of chiaroscuro, of sparkling jewel-like light and shade, and intricately woven ornamentation which betrays the influence of the Arab. We see the Morisco, a kind of fusion of French and Moorish, in many places. The triforium of the choir is decidedly Moorish in its design, although it is Gothic in all its details and has carvings of heads and of the ordinary dog-tooth enrichment instead of merely conventionalized leaf and figure ornament. It consists of a trefoil arcade. In the spandrels between its arches are circles with heads and, above these, triangular openings pierced through the wall. The moldings of all the openings interpenetrate, and the whole arcade has the air of intricate ingenuity so usual in Moorish work. Again, in the triforium of the inner aisle we find Moorish influence,—the cusping of the arcade is not enclosed within an arch but takes a distinct horseshoe outline, the lowest cusp near the cap spreading inward at the base. We see Moorish tiles, we find Moorish cupolas as in the Mozarabic chapel, and Moorish doorways, as the exquisite one leading into the Sala Capitular,—here and there and everywhere, we suddenly come upon details betraying the Arab intimacy.
The children of the Renaissance also embellished in their new manner, not only in the magnificent carvings of the choir but in a variety of places, for instance, the doors themselves contained within the Moorish molds leading to the Sala just mentioned, the entire chapel of St. Juan, the Capilla de Reyes Nuevos, portions of the Puerta del Berruguete, and the bronze doors of the Gate of the Lions.
Again, on the capitals and bases of many of the piers, with the exception of those of the central nave, Byzantine influence may be seen.
So each age, according to its best ken, dealt with the Cathedral. In among the varying styles of architectural decoration, the sister arts embellish the stone surfaces or are hung upon them. There are paintings by Titian, Giovanni Bellini, and Rubens, by El Greco, Goya, and Ribera; Italian and Flemish tapestries, and frescoes too. Probably the greater portion of the main walls were covered with them, for here and there traces are still to be seen and a tree of Jesse remains in the tympanum of the south transept, and near it an enormous painting of Saint Christopher.
While the “Tresorio” may have been the treasure-house of the clergy, the church itself was that of the people. Here was their art museum, here were their galleries. The decorations became the primers from which they learnt their lessons. Here they would meet in the afternoon hour as the light fell aslant sapphire and ruby, through the clerestory openings. It would light up their treasures with strange, unearthly glory and form aureoles and haloes of rainbow splendor over the heads of their beloved saints. Cool amethyst and emerald and warmer amber and gold touched the darkest corners, and a gold and purple glory illuminated the high altar.
Some of the earlier glass is as fine as any to be found in Europe. The depth and intensity of the colors are remarkable. Probably none of it was Spanish, but all was imported from France, Belgium, or Germany. The glass in the rose of the north transept and in the eastern windows of the transept clerestory can hold its own beside that of the cathedrals of Paris and Amiens. The subject scheme of the rose in the north transept is truly noble. The earliest glass is that in the nave (a little later than 1400), and this is Flemish. The windows of the aisles are at least a century later. Their composition is simple and broad, the coloring rich and deep, and the interior dusk of the church enhances the value of the sunlight filtering through the glass.
Better than to descend into the immense crypt below the Cathedral, with its eighty-eight massive piers corresponding to those above, is it to stray into the broken sunlight of the green and fragrant cloister arcade.
Bishop Tenorio procured the site for the church from the Jews, who here, right under the walls of the Christian church, held their market. A fresco adjoining the gate explains by what means. It represents on a ladder a fiendish-looking Jew who has cut the heart out of a beautiful, crucified child and is holding the dripping dagger in his hand. This fresco stirred up the fury of the Christian populace to the point of burning the Jewish market, houses and shops, which then were annexed by the Bishop. The fine, two-story Gothic arcade of the cloisters encloses a sun-splashed garden filled with fragrant flowers. Around the walls of the lower arcade are a series of very mediocre frescoes. The architecture itself is not nearly as interesting as that of the cloisters of Salamanca. It ought particularly to be so in this portion of the church, for here is the very climate and place for the courtyard life of the Spaniard.
V
So lies the Cathedral, crumbling in the sunlight of the twentieth century. Beautiful, but strange and irreconcilable to all that is around her, she alone, the Mother Church, stands unshaken, lonely and melancholy, but grand and solemn in the midst of the paltry and tawdry happenings of to-day. She has served giants, and now sees but a race of dwarfs; princes have prostrated themselves at her altars, where now only beggars kneel. Her walls whisper loneliness, desertion, widowed resignation.
Note.—In connection with the remarks on page 160, a Catholic friend has pointed out how rarely, when Peter has been robbed, ostensibly to pay Paul, Paul (otherwise the Poor) has derived any benefit from it. It is willingly conceded that Henry VIII bestowed much of the wealth derived from the dissolution of the religious houses on his own favorites, and recent disclosures in France show as scandalous a diversion of some of the funds similarly obtained.