Visit to the Escurial.--Imposing site of that regal
convent.--Reception by the Mystagogue of the place.--Magnificence
of the choir.--Charles the Fifth’s organ.--Crucifix by
Cellini.--Gorgeous ceiling painted by Luca Giordano.--Extent and
intricacy of the stupendous edifice.
Thursday, Dec. 19th, 1787.
I hate being roused out of bed by candlelight on a sharp wintry morning;
but as I had fixed to-day for visiting the Escurial, and had stationed
three relays on the road, in order to perform the journey expeditiously,
I thought myself obliged to carry my plan into execution.
The weather was cold and threatening, the sky red and deeply coloured.
Roxas was to be of our party, so we drove to his brother, the Marquis of
Villanueva’s, to take him up. He is one of the best-natured and most
friendly of human beings, and I would not have gone without him upon
any account; though in general I abhor turning and twisting about a town
in search of any body, let its soul be never so transcendent.
It was past eight before we issued out of the gates of Madrid, and
rattled along an avenue on the banks of the Mançanares full gallop,
which brought us to the Casa del Campo, one of the king’s palaces,
wrapped up in groves and thickets. We continued a mile or two by the
wall of this enclosure, and leaving La Sarsuela, another royal villa,
surrounded by shrubby hillocks, on the right, traversed three or four
leagues of a wild, naked country, and, after ascending several
considerable eminences, the sun broke out, the clouds partially rolled
away, and we discovered the white buildings of this far-famed monastery,
with its dome and towers detaching themselves from the bold back-ground
of a lofty, irregular mountain.
We were now about a league off: the country wore a better aspect than
near Madrid. To the right and left of the road, which is of a noble
width, and perfectly well made, lie extensive parks of greensward,
scattered over with fragments of rock and stumps of oak and ash-trees.
Numerous herds of deer were standing stock-still, quietly lifting up
their innocent noses, and looking us full in the face with their
beautiful eyes, secure of remaining unmolested, for the King never
permits a gun to be discharged in these enclosures.
The Escurial, though overhung by melancholy mountains, is placed itself
on a very considerable eminence, up which we were full half an hour
toiling, the late rains having washed this part of the road into utter
confusion. There is something most severely impressive in the façade of
this regal convent, which, like the palace of Persepolis, is
overshadowed by the adjoining mountain; nor did I pass through a vaulted
cloister into the court before the church, solid as if hewn out of a
rock, without experiencing a sort of shudder, to which no doubt the
vivid recollection of the black and blood-stained days of our gloomy
queen Mary’s husband not slightly contributed. The sun being again
overcast, the porches of the church, surmounted by grim statues,
appeared so dark and cavern-like, that I thought myself about to enter a
subterraneous temple set apart for the service of some mysterious and
terrible religion. And when I saw the high altar, in all its pomp of
jasper-steps, ranks of columns one above the other, and paintings
filling up every interstice, full before me, I felt completely awed.
The sides of the recess, in which this imposing pile is placed, are
formed by lofty chapels, almost entirely occupied by catafalques of gilt
enamelled bronze. Here, with their crowns and sceptres humbly prostrate
at their feet, bare-headed and unhelmed, kneel the figures, large as
life, of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and his imperious son, the
second Philip, accompanied by those of their unhappy consorts and
ill-fated children. My sensations of dread and dreariness were not
diminished upon finding myself alone in such company; for Roxas had left
me to deliver some letters to his right reverence the prior, which were
to open to us all the arcana of this terrific edifice, at once a temple,
a palace, a convent, and a tomb.
Presently my amiable friend returned, and with him a tall old monk, with
an ash-coloured forbidding countenance, and staring eyes, the expression
of which was the farthest removed possible from anything like
cordiality. This was the mystagogue of the place--the prior _in propria
persona_, the representative of St. Jerome, as far as this monastery and
its domain was concerned, and a disciplinarian of celebrated rigidness.
He began examining me from head to foot, and, after what I thought
rather a strange scrutiny, asked me in broad Spanish what I wished
particularly to see. Then turning to Roxas, said loud enough for me to
hear him, “He is very young; does he understand what I say to him? But,
as I am peremptorily commanded to show him about, I suppose I must
comply, though I am quite unused to the office of explaining our
curiosities. However, if it must be, it must; so let us begin, and not
dally. I have no time to spare, you well know, and have quite enough to
do in the choir and the convent.”
After this not very gracious exordium, we set forth on our tour. First
we visited some apartments with vaulted roofs, painted in arabesque, in
the finest style of the sixteenth century; and then a vast hall, which
had been used for the celebration of mass, whilst the great church was
building, where I saw the Perla in all its purity, the most
delicately-finished work of Raphael, the Pesce, with its divine angel,
graceful infant; and devout young Tobit, breathing the very soul of
pious, unaffected simplicity. My attention was next attracted by that
most profoundly pathetic of pictures, Jacob weeping over the bloody
garment of his son; the loftiest proof in existence of the extraordinary
powers of Velasquez in the noblest work of art.
These three pictures so absorbed my admiration, that I had little left
for a host of glorious performances by Titian and the highest masters,
which cover the plain, massive walls of these conventual rooms with a
paradise of glowing colours; so I passed along almost as rapidly as my
grumbling cicerone could desire, and followed him up several flights of
stairs, and through many and many an arched passage and vestibule, all
of the sternest doric, into the choir, which is placed over the grand
western entrance, right opposite, at the distance of more than two
hundred feet, to the high altar and its solemn accompaniments. No regal
chamber I ever beheld can be compared, in point of sober harmonious
majesty, to this apartment, which looks more as if it belonged to a
palace than to a church. The series of stalls, designed in a severer
taste than was common in the sixteenth century, are carved out of the
most precious woods the Indies could furnish. At the extremity of this
striking perspective of onyx-coloured seats, columns, and canopies,
appears suspended upon a black velvet pall that revered image of the
crucified Saviour, formed of the purest ivory, which Cellini seems to
have sculptured in moments of devout rapture and inspiration. It is by
far his finest work; his Perseus, at Florence, is tame and laboured in
comparison.
In a long narrow corridor which runs behind the stalls, panelled all
over like an inlaid cabinet, I was shown a beautiful little organ, in a
richly chased silver case, which accompanied Charles the Fifth in his
African expedition, and must often have gently beguiled the cares of
empire, for he played on it, tradition says, almost every evening. That
it is worth playing upon even now I can safely vouch, for I never
touched any instrument with a tone of more delicious sweetness; and
touch it I did, though my austere conductor, the sour-visaged prior,
looked doubly forbidding on the occasion.
The stalls I have just mentioned are much less ornamented than those I
have seen in Pavia, and many other monasteries; the ceiling of this
noblest of choirs, displays the utmost exuberance of decoration--the
richest and most gorgeous of spectacles, the heavens and all the powers
therein. Imagination can scarcely conceive the pomp and prodigality of
pencil with which Luca Giordano has treated this subject, and filled
every corner of the vast space it covers with well-rounded forms, that
seem actually starting from the glowing clouds with which they are
environed.
“Is not this fine?” said the monk; “you can have nothing like it in your
country. And now be pleased to move forward, for the day is wasting, and
you will have little time left to examine our inestimable relics, and
the jewelled shrines in which they are deposited.”
We went down from the choir, I can scarcely tell whither, such is the
extent and intricacy of this stupendous edifice. We passed, I believe,
through some of the lateral chapels at the great church, into several
quadrangles, one in particular, with a fountain under a cupola in the
centre, surrounded by doric arcades, equal in justness of proportion and
architectural terseness to Palladio’s court in the convent of S. Giorgio
Maggiore.