VII Toledo
A forest of spires and alminar towers rising from a roof-covered hill to pierce the distant azure sky; a ruined cemetery surrounded on three sides by the rushing Tago as it cuts out a foaming path through foothills, and stretching away on the fourth toward the snow-capped Sierra de Gredo in the distance, beyond the fruitful prairies and the intervening plains of New Castile.
Such is Toledo, the famous, the wonderful, the legend-spun primate city of all the Spains, the former wealthy capital of the Spanish Empire!
Madrid usurped all her civic honours under the reign of Philip II., he who lost the Armada and built the Escorial. Since then Toledo, like Alcalá de Henares, Segovia, and Burgos, has dragged along a forlorn existence, frozen in winter and scorched in summer, and visited at all times of the year by gaping tourists of all nationalities.
Even the approach to the city from the mile distant station is peculiarly characteristic. Seated in an old and shaky omnibus, pulled by four thrashed mules, and followed along the dusty road by racing beggars, who whine their would-be French, “Un p’it sou, mouchieur,” with surprising alacrity and a melancholy smile in their big black eyes, the visitor is driven sharply around a bluff, when suddenly Toledo, the mysterious, comes into sight, crowning the opposite hill.
At a canter the mules cross the bridge of Alcántara and pass beneath the gateway of the same name, a ponderous structure still guarding the time-rusty city as it did centuries ago when Toledo was the Gothic metropolis. Up the winding road, beneath the solemn and fire-devastated walls of the Alcázar, the visitor is hurriedly driven along; he disappears from the burning sunlight into a gloomy labyrinth of ill-paved streets to emerge a few minutes later in the principal square.
A shoal of yelling, gesticulating interpreters literally grab at the tourist, and in ten seconds exhaust their vocabulary of foreign words. At last one walks triumphantly off beside the newcomer, while the others, with a depreciative shrug of the shoulders and extinguishing their volcanic outburst of energy, loiter around the square smoking cigarettes.
It does not take the visitor long to notice that he is in a great archæological museum. The streets are crooked and narrow, so narrow that the tiny patch of sky above seems more brilliant than ever and farther away, while on each side are gloomy houses with but few windows, and monstrous, nail-studded doors. At every turn a church rears its head, and the cheerless spirit of a palace glares with a sadly vacant stare from behind wrought-iron rejas and a complicated stone-carved blazon. Rarely is the door opened; when it is, the passer catches a glimpse of a sun-bathed courtyard, gorgeously alive with light and many flowers. The effect produced by the sudden contrast between the joyless street and the sunny garden, whose existence was never dreamt of, is delightful and never to be forgotten; from Théophile Gautier, who had been in Northern Africa, land of Mohammedan harems, it wrung the piquant exclamation: “The Moors have been here!”
Every stick, stone, mound, house, lantern, and what not has its legend. In this humble posada, Cervantes, whose ancestral castle is on yonder bluff overlooking the Tago, wrote his “Ilustre Fregona.” The family history of yonder fortress-palace inspired Zorilla’s romantic pen, and a thousand and one other objects recall the past,—the past that is Toledo’s present and doubtless will have to be her future.
Gone are the days when Tolaitola was a peerless jewel, for which Moors and Christians fought, until at last the Believers of the True Faith drove back the Arabs who fled southward from whence they had emerged. Long closed are also the famous smithies, where swords—Tolesian blades they were then called—were hammered so supple that they could bend like a watchspring, so strong they could cleave an anvil, and so sharp they could cut an eiderdown pillow in twain without displacing a feather.
Distant, moreover, are the nights of capa y espada and of miracles wrought by the Virgin; dwindled away to a meagre shadow is the princely magnificence of the primate prelates of all the Spains, of those spiritual princes who neither asked the Pope’s advice nor received orders from St. Peter at Rome. Besides, of the two hundred thousand souls proud to be called sons of Toledo in the days of Charles-Quint, but seventeen thousand inhabitants remain to-day to guard the nation’s great city-museum, unsullied as yet by progress and modern civilization, by immense advertisements and those other necessities of daily life in other climes.
The city’s history explains the mixture of architectural styles and the bizarre modifications introduced in Gothic, Byzantine, or Arab structures.
Legends accuse Toledo of having been mysteriously founded long before the birth of Rome on her seven hills. To us, however, it first appears in history as a Roman stronghold, capital of one of Hispania’s provinces.
St. James, as has been seen, roamed across this peninsula; he came to Toledo. So delighted was he with the site and the people—saith the tradition—that he ordained that the city on the Tago should contain the primate church of all the Spains.
The vanquished Romans withdrew, leaving to posterity but feeble ruins to the north of the city; the West Goths built the threatening city walls which still are standing, and, having turned Christians, their King Recaredo was baptized in the river’s waters, and Toledo became the flourishing capital of the Visigothic kingdom (512 A.D.).
The Moors, in their northward march, conquered both the Church and the state. Legends hover around the sudden apparition of Berber hordes in Andalusia, and accuse Rodrigo, the last King of the Goths, of having outraged Florinda, a beautiful girl whom he saw, from his palace window, bathing herself in a marble bath near the Tago,—the bath is still shown to this day,—and with whom he fell in love. The father, Count Julian, Governor of Ceuta, called in the Moors to aid him in his righteous work of vengeance, and, as often happens in similar cases, the allies lost no time in becoming the masters and the conquerors.
Nearly four hundred years did the Arabs remain in their beloved Tolaitola; the traces of their occupancy are everywhere visible: in the streets and in the patios, in fanciful arabesques, and above all in Santa Maria la Blanca.
The Spaniards returned and brought Christianity back with them. They erected an immense cathedral and turned mosques into chapels without altering the Oriental form.
Jews, Arabs, and Christians lived peacefully together during the four following centuries. Together they created the Mudejar style tower of San Tomas and the Puerta de Sol. Pure Gothic was transformed, rendered even more insubstantial and lighter, thanks to Oriental decorative motives. In San Juan de los Reyes, the Mudejar style left a unique specimen of what it might have developed into had it not been murdered by the Renaissance fresh from Italy, where Aragonese troops had conquered the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
With the first Philips—and even earlier—foreign workmen came over to Toledo in shoals from Germany, France, Flanders, and Italy. They also had their way, more so than in any other Spanish city, and their tastes helped to weld together that incongruous mass of architectural styles which is Toledo’s alone of all cities. Granada may have its Alhambra, and Cordoba its mosque; Leon its cathedral and Segovia its Alcázar, but none of them is so luxuriously rich in complex grandeur and in the excellent—and yet frequently grotesque—confusion of all those art waves which flooded Spain. In this respect Toledo is unique in Spain, unique in the world. Can we wonder at her being called a museum?
The Alcázar, which overlooks the rushing Tago, is a symbol of Toledo’s past. It was successively burnt and rebuilt; its four façades, here stern and forbidding, there grotesque and worthless, differ from each other as much as the centuries in which they were built. The eastern façade dates from the eleventh, the western from the fifteenth, and the other two from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
But other arts than those purely architectural are richly represented in Toledo. For Spain’s capital in the days following upon the fall of Granada was a centre of industrial arts, where both foreign and national workmen, heathen, Jews, and Christians mixed, wrought such wonders as have forced their way into museums the world over; besides, Tolesian sculptors are among Spain’s most famous.
As regards painting, one artist’s life is wrapped up in that of the wonderful city on the Tago; many of his masterworks are to be seen in Toledo’s churches and in the provincial museum. I refer to Domenico Theotocopuli, he who was considered a madman because he was a genius, and who has been called el Greco when really he ought to have been called el Toledano.
If Toledo is the nation’s architectural museum, the city’s cathedral, the huge imposing Gothic structure, is, beyond a doubt, an incomparable art museum. Centuries of sculptors carved marble and berroqueña; armies of artisans wrought marvels in cloths, metals, precious stones, glass, and wood, and a host of painters, both foreign and national, from Goya and Ribera to the Greco and Rubens, painted religious compositions for the sacristy and chapels.
Consequently, and besides the architectural beauty of the primate church of Spain, what interests perhaps more keenly than the study of the cathedral’s skeleton, is the study of the ensemble, of that wealth of decorative designs and of priceless art objects for which the temple is above all renowned.
Previous to the coming of the Moors in the eighth century, a humble cathedral stood where the magnificent church now lifts its three-hundred-foot tower in the summer sky. It had been built in the sixth century and dedicated to the Virgin, who had appeared in the selfsame spot to San Ildefonso, when the latter, ardent and vehement, had defended her Immaculate Honour before a body of skeptics.
The Moors tore down or modified the cathedral, and erected their principal mosque in its stead. When, three hundred years later, they surrendered their Tolaitola to Alfonso VI. (1085), they stipulated for the retention of their mezquita, a clause the king, who had but little time to lose squabbling, was only too glad to allow.
The following year, however, King Alfonso went off on a campaign, leaving his wife Doña Constanza and the Archbishop Don Bernardo to look after the city in his absence. No sooner was his back turned, when, one fine morning, Don Bernardo arrived with a motley crowd of goodly Christians in front of the mosque. He knocked in the principal door, and, entering, threw out into the street the sacred objects of the Islam cult. Then the Christians proceeded to set up an altar, a crucifix, and an image of the Virgin; the archbishop hallowed his work, and in an hour was the smiling possessor of his see. Strange to say, Don Bernardo was no Spaniard, but a worthy Frenchman.
The news of this outrage upon his honour brought Alfonso rushing back to Toledo, vowing to revenge himself upon those who had seemingly made him break his royal word; on the way he was met by a committee of the Arab inhabitants, who, clever enough to understand that the sovereign would reinstate the mosque, but would ever after look upon them as the cause of his rupture with his wife and his friend the prelate, asked the king to pardon the evil-doers, stating that they renounced voluntarily their mosque, knowing as they did that the other conditions of the surrender would be sacredly adhered to by his Majesty.
Thanks to this noble (cunning) attitude on the part of the outraged Moors, the latter were able to live at peace within the walls of Toledo well into the seventeenth century.
Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century Fernando el Santo was King of Castile, and his capital was the city on the Tago. The growing nation was strong and full of ambition, while the coming of the Cluny monks and Flemish and German artisans had brought Northern Gothic across the frontiers. So it occurred to the sovereign and his people to erect a primate cathedral of Christian Spain worthy of its name. In 1227 the first stone was laid by the pious warrior-king. The cathedral’s outline was traced: a Roman cruciform Gothic structure of five aisles and a bold transept; two flanking towers,—of which only the northern has been constructed, the other having been substituted by a cupola of decided Byzantine or Oriental taste,—and a noble western façade of three immense doors surmounted by a circular rosace thirty feet wide.
The size of the building was in itself a guarantee that it would be one of the largest in the world, being four hundred feet long by two hundred broad, and one hundred feet high at the intersection of transept and nave.
It took 250 years for the cathedral to be built, and even then it was not really completed until toward the middle of the eighteenth century. In the meantime the nation had risen to its climax of power and wealth, and showered riches and jewels upon its great cathedral. Columbus returned from America, and the first gold he brought was handed over to the archbishop; foreign artisans—especially Flemish and German—arrived by hundreds, and were employed by Talavera, Cisneros, and Mendoza, in the decoration of the church. Unluckily, additions were made: the pointed arches of the façade were surmounted by a rectangular body which had nothing in common with the principle set down when the cathedral was to have been purely ogival.
The interior of the church was also enlarged, especially the high altar, the base of which was doubled in size. The retablo of painted wood was erected toward the end of the fifteenth century, as well as many of the chapels, which are built into the walls of the building, and are as different in style as the saints to whom they are dedicated.
As time went on, and the rich continued sending their jewels and relics to the cathedral, the Treasury Room, with its pictures by Rubens, Dürer, Titian, etc., and with its sagrario,—a carved image of Our Lady, crowning an admirably chiselled cone of silver and jewels, and covered over with the richest cloths woven in gold, silver, silk, and precious stones,—was gradually filled with hoarded wealth. Even to-day, when Spain has apparently reached the very low ebb of her glory, the cathedral of Toledo remains almost intact as the only living representative of the grandeur of the Church and of the arts it fostered in the sixteenth century.
Almost up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the building was continually being enlarged, modified, and repaired. Six hundred years since the first stone had been laid! What vicissitudes had not the country seen—and how many art waves had swept over the peninsula!
Gothic is traceable throughout the building: here it is flamboyant, there rayonnant. Here the gold and red of Mudejar ceilings are exquisitely represented, as in the chapter-room; there Moorish influence in azulejos (multicoloured glazed tiles) and in decorative designs is to be seen, such as in the horseshoe arches of the triforium in the chapel of the high altar. Renaissance details are not lacking, nor the severe plateresque taste (in the grilles of the choir and high altar), and neither did the grotesque style avoid Spain’s great cathedral, for there is the double ambulatory behind the high altar, that is to say, the transparente, a circular chapel of the most gorgeous ultra-decoration to be found anywhere in Spain.
Signs of decadence are unluckily to be observed in the cathedral to-day. The same care is no longer taken to repair fallen bits of carved stone; pigeon-lamps that burn little oil replace the huge bronze lamps of other days, and no new additions are being made. The cathedral’s apogee has been reached; from now on it will either remain intact for centuries, or else it will gradually crumble away.
Seen from the exterior, the cathedral does not impress to such an extent as it might. Houses are built up around it, and the small square to the south and west is too insignificant to permit a good view of the ensemble.
Nevertheless, the spectator who is standing near the western façade, either craning his neck skyward or else examining the seventy odd statues which compose the huge portal of the principal entrance, is overawed at the immensity of the edifice in front of him, as well as amazed at the amount of work necessary for the decorating of the portal.
The Puerta de los Leones, or the southern entrance giving access to the transept, is perhaps of a more careful workmanship as regards the sculptural decoration. The door itself, studded on the outside with nails and covered over with a sheet of bronze of the most exquisite workmanship in relief, is a chef-d’œuvre of metal-stamping of the sixteenth century, whilst the wood-carving on the interior is among the finest in the cathedral.
The effect produced on the spectator within the building is totally different. The height and length of the aisles, which are buried in shadows,—for the light which enters illuminates rather the chapels which are built into the walls between the flying buttresses,—astonishes; the factura is severe and beautiful in its grand simplicity.
Not so the chapels, which are decorated in all manner of styles, and ornamented in all degrees of lavishness. The largest is the Muzarab chapel beneath the dome which substitutes the missing tower; except the dome, this chapel, where the old Gothic Rite (as opposed to the Gregorian Rite) is sung every day in the year, is constructed in pure Gothic; it contains a beautiful Italian mosaic of the Virgin as well as frescoes illustrating Cardinal Cisneros’s African wars, when the battling prelate thought it was his duty to bear the crucifix and Spanish rights into Morocco as his royal masters had carried them into Granada.
The remaining chapels, some of them of impressive though generally complex structure, will have to be omitted here. So also the sacristy with its wonderful picture by the Greco, and the chapter-room with the portraits of all the archbishops, the elegant carved door, and the well-preserved Mudejar ceiling, etc. And we pass on to the central nave, and stand beneath the croisée. To the east the high altar, to the west the choir, claim the greater part of our attention. For it is here that the people centred their gifts.
The objects used on the altar-table are of gold, silver, jasper, and agate; the monstrance in the central niche of the altar-piece is also of silver, and the garments worn by the effigy are woven in gold, silk, and precious stones. The two immense grilles which close off the high altar and the eastern end of the choir are of iron, tin, and copper, gilded and silvered, having been covered over with black paint in the nineteenth century so as to escape the greedy eyes—and hands!—of the French soldiery. The workmanship of these two rejas is of the most sober Spanish classic or plateresque period, and though the black has not as yet been taken off, the silver and gold peep forth here and there, and show what a brilliancy must have radiated from these elegantly decorated bars and cross-bars in the eighteenth century.
The three tiers of choir stalls, carved in walnut, are among the very finest in Spain, both as regards the accomplished craftsmanship and the astonishing variety in the composition. The two organs, opposite each other and attaining the very height of the nave, are the best in the peninsula, whilst the designs of the marble pavement, red and white in the high altar, and black and white in the choir, only add to the luxurious effect produced by statues, pulpits, and other accessories, either brilliantly coloured, or else wrought in polished metal or stone.
The altar-piece itself, slightly concave in shape, is the largest, if not the best, of its kind. It is composed of pyramidically superimposed niches flanked by gilded columns and occupied by statues of painted and gilded wood. The effect from a distance is dazzling,—the reds, blues, and gold mingle together and produce a multicoloured mass reaching to the height of the nave; on closer examination, the workmanship is seen to be both coarse and naïve,—primitive as compared to the more finished retablos of Burgos, Astorga, etc.
To conclude: The visitor who, standing between the choir and the high altar of the cathedral, looks at both, stands, as it were, in the presence of an immense riddle. He cannot classify: there is no purity of one style, but a medley of hundreds of styles, pure in themselves, it is true, but not in the ensemble. Besides, the personality of each has been lost or drowned, either by ultra-decoration or by juxtaposition. A collective value is thus obtained which cannot be pulled to pieces, for then it would lose all its significance as an art unity—a complex art unity, in this case peculiar to Spain.
Neither is repose, meditation, or frank admiration to be gleaned from such a gigantic potpourri of art wonders, but rather a feeling—as far as we Northerners are concerned—of amazement, of stupor, and of an utter impossibility to understand such a luxurious display of idolatry rather than of faith, of scenic effect rather than of discreet prayer.
But then, it may just be this idolatry and love of scenic effect which produces in the Spaniard what we have called religious awe. We feel it in a long-aisled Gothic temple; the Spaniard feels it when standing beneath the croisée of his cathedral churches.
The whole matter is a question of race.
The End