reddish ochre tiles, is, whatever may be the defects of its detail,
almost unique in its lavish richness. The spires rest upon the
house-tops of Burgos like the jeweled points of a monarch's crown. The
detail is so profuse that it well-nigh defies analysis. It seems as if
the four corners of the earth must for generations have been ransacked
to find a sufficient number of carvers for the sculpture. The closer one
examines it, the more astonishing is the infinite labor. Rich, crocketed
cornices support the numerous, crowning balconies. Figure on figure
stands against the many sides of the four great turrets that brace the
angles of the cimborio, against the eight turrets that meet its octagon,
on the corners of spires, under the parapets crowning the transepts,
under the canopied angles of the Constable's Lantern, on balconies, over
railings, and on balustrades. Crockets cover the walls like feathers on
the breast of a bird. It surely is the temple of the Lord of Hosts, the
number of whose angels is legion. It is confused, bewildering, over-done
and spectacular, lacking in character and sobriety, sculptural
fire-works if you will, a curious mixture of the passing and the coming
styles, but nevertheless it is wonderful, and the age that produced it,
one of energy and vitality. Curiously enough, the transepts have no
flying, but mere heavy, simple buttresses to meet their thrusts. The
ornamentation of the lower wall surfaces is in contrast to the
superstructure, barren or meaningless. On the plain masonry of the lower
walls of the Constable's Chapel stretch gigantic coats-of-arms. Knights
support their heads as well as the arms of the nobles interred within.
Life-sized roaring lions stand valiantly beside their wheels like
immortally faithful mariners. Above, an exquisitely carved, German
Gothic balustrade acts as a base for the double clerestory. The angle
pinnacles are surrounded by the Fathers of the Church and crowned by
angels holding aloft the symbol of the Cross. The gargoyles look like
peacefully slumbering cows with unchewed cuds protruding from their
stony jaws. Tufts of grass and flowers have sprung from the seeds borne
there by the winds of centuries.
Outside the Chapel of Sant Iago are more huge heraldic devices: knights
in full armor and lions lifting by razor-strops, as if in some test of
strength, great wheels encircling crosses. Above them, gargoyles leer
demoniacally over the heads of devout cherubim. In the little street of
Diego Porcello, named for the great noble who still protects his city
from the gate of Santa Maria, nothing can be seen of the great church
but bare walls separated from the adjacent houses by a dozen feet of
dirty cobblestones. Ribs of the original chapels that once flanked the
eastern end, behind the present chapels of Sant Iago and Santa Catarina,
have been broken off flat against the exterior walls, and the cusps of
the lower arches have been closed.
Thus the fabric has been added to, altered, mutilated or embellished by
foreign masters as well as Spanish hands. Who they all were, when and
why they wrought, is not easy to discover. Enrique, Juan Perez, Pedro
Sanchez, Juan Sanchez de Molina, Martin Fernandez, Juan and Francisco de
Colonia and Juan de Vallejo, all did their part in the attempt to make
Santa Maria of Burgos the loveliest church of Spain.
The mighty western façade rises in a confined square where acacia trees
lift their fresh, luxuriant heads above the dust. The symmetry of the
towers, the general proportions of the mass, the subdivisions and
relationship of the stories, the conception as a whole, clearly show
that it belongs to an age of triumph and genius, in spite of the
disfigurements of later vandals, as well as essentially foreign masters.
It is of queenly presence, a queen in her wedding robes with jewels all
over her raiment, the costliest of Spanish lace veiling her form and
descending from her head, covered with its costly diadem.
North and south the towers are very similar and practically of equal
height, giving a happily balanced and uniform general appearance. The
lowest stage, containing the three doorways leading respectively into
north aisle, nave, and south aisle, has been horribly denuded and
disfigured by the barbarous eighteenth century, which boasted so much
and created so little. It removed the glorious, early portico, leaving
only bare blocks of masonry shorn of sculpture. No greater wrong could
have been done the church. In the tympanum above the southern door, the
vandals mercifully left a Coronation of the Virgin, and in the northern
one, the Conception, while in the piers, between these and the central
opening, four solitary statues of the two kings, Alfonso VI and Saint
Ferdinand, and the two bishops, Maurice and Asterio, are all that remain
of the early glories. The central door is called the Doorway of Pardon.
One can understand the bigotry of Henry VIII and the Roundheads, which
in both cases wrought frightful havoc in art, but it is truly
incomprehensible that mere artistic conceit in the eighteenth century
could compass such destruction. The second tier of the screen facing the
nave, below a large pointed arch, is broken by a magnificent rose. Above
this are two finely traceried and subdivided arches with eight statues
set in between the lowest shafts. The central body is crowned by an
open-work balustrade forming the uppermost link between the towers. The
Virgin with Child reigns in the centre between the carved inscription,
"Pulchra es et decora." Three rows of pure, ogival arches, delicate, and
attenuated, break the square sides of the towers above the entrance
portals; blind arches, spires and statues ornament the angles.
Throughout, the splays and jambs are filled with glittering balls of
stone. Inscriptions similar in design to that finishing the screen which
hides the roof lines crown the platform of the towers below the base of
the spires.
The towers remained without steeples for over two hundred years until
the good Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena, returning to his city in 1442 from
the Council of Basle, brought with him the German, Juan de Colonia.
Bishop Alfonso was not to see their completion, for he died fourteen
years later, but his successor, Don Luis de Acuna, immediately ordered
the work continued and saw the figures of Saint Peter and Saint Paul
placed on the uppermost spires, three hundred feet above the heads of
the worshipping multitude.
The spires themselves, essentially German in character, are far from
beautiful, perforated on all sides by Gothic tracery of multitudinous
designs, too weak to stand without the assistance of iron tie rods, the
angles filled with an infinite number of coarse, bold crockets breaking
the outlines as they converge into the blue.
When prosperity came again to Burgos, as to many other Spanish cities,
it was owing to the wise enactments of Isabella the Catholic. The
concordat of 1851 enumerated nine archbishoprics in Spain, among which
Burgos stands second on the list.
Such is Burgos, serenely beautiful, rich and exultant, the apotheosis of
the Spanish Renaissance as well as studded with exquisitely beautiful
Gothic work. She is mighty and magnificent, speaking perhaps rather to
the senses than the heart, but in a language which can never be
forgotten. Although various epochs created her, radically different in
their means and methods, still there is a certain intangible unity in
her gorgeous expression and a unique picturesqueness in her dazzling
presence.
III
AVILA
[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid
CATHEDRAL OF AVILA]
I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
With forms of saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays
With splendor upon splendor multiplied.
_Longfellow._
The Cathedral of San Salvador is the strongest link in the chain that
encircles the city of Avila,--"cuidad de Castilla la vieja." Avila lies
on a ridge in the corner of a great, undulating plain, clothed with
fields of grain, bleached light yellow at harvest, occasional groups of
ilex and straggling pine and dusty olives scrambling up and down the
slopes. Beyond is the hazy grayish-green of stubble and dwarfed
woodland, with blue peaks closing the horizon. To the south rises the
Sierra Gredos, and eastwards, in the direction of Segovia, the Sierra de
Guadarrama. The narrow, murky Adaja that loiters through the upland
plain is quite insufficient to water the thirsty land. Thistles and
scrub oak dot the rocky fields. Here and there migratory flocks of sheep
nibble their way across the unsavory stubble, while the dogs longingly
turn their heads after whistling quails and the passing hunter.
The crenelated, ochre walls and bastions that, like a string of amber
beads, have girdled the little city since its early days, remain
practically unbroken, despite the furious sieges she has sustained and
the battles in which her lords were engaged for ten centuries. As many
as eighty-six towers crown, and no less than ten gateways pierce, the
walls which follow the rise or fall of the ground on which the city has
been compactly and narrowly constructed for safest defense. It must look
to-day almost exactly as it did to the approaching armies of the Middle
Ages, except that the men-at-arms are gone. The defenses are so high
that what is inside is practically hidden from view and all that can be
seen of the city so rich in saints and stones[7] are the loftiest spires
of her churches.
To the Romans, Avela, to the Moors, Abila, the ancient city, powerfully
garrisoned, lay in the territory of the Vaccæi and belonged to the
province of Hispania Citerior. During three later centuries, from time
to time she became Abila, and one of the strongest outposts of Mussulman
defense against the raids of Christian bands from the north. Under both
Goths and Saracens, Avila belonged to the province of Merida. At a very
early date she boasted an episcopal seat, mentioned in church councils
convoked during the seventh century, but, during temporary ascendencies
of the Crescent, she vanishes from ecclesiastical history. For a while
Alfonso I held the city against the Moors, but not until the reign of
Alfonso VI did she permanently become "Avila del rey," and the
quarterings of her arms, "a king appearing at the window of a tower,"
were left unchallenged on her walls.
[Illustration: KEY OF PLAN OF AVILA CATHEDRAL
A. Capilla Mayor. B. Crossing.
C. Cloisters.
D. Towers.
E. Main Entrance.
F. Northern Portal.]
By the eleventh century the cities of Old Castile were ruined and
depopulated by the ravages of war. Even the walls of Avila were
well-nigh demolished, when Count Raymond laid them out anew and with the
blessing of Bishop Pedro Sanchez they rose again in the few years
between 1090 and the turning of the century. The material lay ready to
hand in the huge granite boulders sown broadcast on the bleak hills
around Avila, and from these the walls were rebuilt, fourteen feet thick
with towers forty feet high. The old Spanish writer Cean Bermudez
describes this epoch of Avila's history.
"When," he says, "Don Alfonso VI won Toledo, he had in continuous wars
depopulated Segovia, Avila and Salamanca of their Moorish inhabitants.
He gave his son-in-law, the Count Don Raymond of the house of Burgundy,
married to the Princess Doña Urraca, the charge to repeople them. Avila
had been so utterly destroyed that the soil was covered with stones and
the materials of its ruined houses. To rebuild and repopulate it, the
Count brought illustrious knights, soldiers, architects, officials and
gentlemen from Leon, the Asturias, Vizcaya and France, and from other
places. They began to construct the walls in 1090, 800 men working from
the very beginning, and among them were many masters who came from Leon
and Vizcaya. All obeyed Casandro Romano and Florin de Pituenga, Masters
of Geometry, as they are called in the history of this population, which
is attributed to the Bishop of Oviedo, D. Pilayo, who lived at that time
and who treats of these things."
During these perilous years, Count Raymond wisely lodged his masons in
different quarters of the city, grouping them according to the locality
they came from, whether from Cantabria, the Asturias, or the territory
of Burgos.
A nobility, as quarrelsome as it was powerful, must have answered Count
Raymond's call for new citizens, for during centuries to come, the
streets, like those of mediæval Siena and Florence, constantly ran with
the blood of opposing factions. Warring families dared walk only certain
streets after nightfall, and battles were carried on between the
different castles and in the streets as between cities and on
battlefields. In the quarrels between royal brothers and cousins, Avila
played a very prominent part. The nurse and protectress of their tender
years, and the guardian of their childhood through successive reigns of
Castilian kings, she became a very vital factor in the fortunes of
kings, prelates, and nobles. In feuds like those of Don Pedro and his
brother Enrique II, she was a turbulent centre. Great figures in Spanish
history ruled from her episcopal throne, especially during the
thirteenth century. There was Pedro, a militant bishop and one of the
most valiant on the glorious battlefield of Las Navas; Benilo, lover of
and beloved by Saint Ferdinand; and Aymar, the loyal champion of Alfonso
the Wise through dark as well as sunny hours.
The Jews and the Moriscoes here, as wherever else their industrious
fingers and ingenious minds were at work, did much more than their share
towards the prosperity and development of the city. The Jews especially
became firmly established in their useful vocations, filling the king's
coffers so abundantly that the third of their tribute, which he granted
to the Bishop, was not appreciably felt, except in times of armament
and war. With the fanatical expulsion of first one, and then the other,
race, the city's prosperity departed. Their place was filled by the
bloodhounds of the Inquisition, who held their very first, terrible
tribunal in the Convent of Saint Thomas, blighting the city and
surrounding country with a new and terrible curse. The great rebellion
under the Emperor Charles burst from the smouldering wrath of Avila's
indignant citizens, and in 1520 she became, for a short time, the seat
of the "Junta Santa" of the Comuneros.
It is still easy to discern what a tremendous amount of building must
have gone on within the narrow city limits during the early part of its
second erection. The streets are still full of bits of Romanesque
architecture, palaces, arcades, houses, balconies, towers and windows
and one of the finest groups of Romanesque churches in Spain. Of lesser
sinew and greater age than San Salvador, they are now breathing their
last. San Vicente is almost doomed, while San Pedro and San Segundo are
fast falling.
But San Salvador remains still unshaken in her strength,--a fortress
within a cathedral, a splendid mailed arm with its closed fist of iron
reaching through the outer bastions and threatening the plains. It is a
bold cry of Christian defiance to enemies without. If ever there was an
embodiment in architecture of the church militant, it is in the
Cathedral of Avila. Approaching it by San Pedro, you look in vain for
the church, for the great spire that loomed up from the distant hills
and was pointed out as the holy edifice. In its place and for the
eastern apse, you see only a huge gray bastion, strong and secure,
crowned at all points by battlements and galleries for sentinels and
fighting men,--inaccessible, grim, and warlike. A fitting abode for the
men who rather rode a horse than read a sermon and preferred the
breastplate to the cassock, a splendid epitome of that period of Spanish
history when the Church fought instead of prying into men's souls. It
well represents the unification of the religious and military officesdevolving
on the Church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in
Castile,--a bellicose house rather than one of prayer.
All the old documents and histories of the Church state that the great
Cathedral was started as soon as the city walls were well under way in
1091 and was completed after sixteen years of hard work. Alvar Garcia
from Estrella in Navarre is recorded as the principal original
architect, Don Pedro as the Bishop, and Count Raymond as spurring on the
1900 men at work, while the pilgrims and faithful were soliciting alms
and subscriptions through Italy, France, and the Christian portions of
the Spanish Peninsula.
Of the earliest church very little remains, possibly only the outer
walls of the great bastion that encloses the eastern termination of the
present edifice. This is much larger than the other towers of defense,
and, judging from the excellent character of its masonry, which is
totally different from the coarse rubble of the remaining city walls and
towers, it must have been built into them at a later date, as well as
with much greater care and skill. Many hypotheses have been suggested,
as to why the apse of the original church was thus built as a portion of
the walls of defense. All seem doubtful. It was possibly that the
altar might come directly above the resting-place of some venerated
saint, or perhaps to economize time and construction by placing the apse
in a most vulnerable point of attack where lofty and impregnable masonry
was requisite.
[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid
CATHEDRAL OF AVILA
Exterior of the apse turret]
The church grew towards the west and the main entrance,--the transepts
themselves, and all work west of them, with the advent of the new style.
We thus obtain in Avila, owing to the very early commencement of its
apse, a curious and vitally interesting conglomeration of the Romanesque
and Gothic. Practically, however, all important portions of the
structure were completed in the more vigorous periods of the Gothicstyle with
the resulting felicitous effect.
The building of the apse or the chevet westward must, to judge from its
style, have advanced very slowly during the first hundred years, for its
general character is rather that of the end of the twelfth and beginning
of the thirteenth centuries (the reign of Alfonso VIII) than of the pure
Romanesque work which was still executed in Castile at the beginning of
the twelfth century. A great portion of the early Gothic work is, apart
from its artistic merit, historically interesting, as showing the first
tentative, and often groping, steps of the masters who wished to employ
the new forms of the north, but followed slowly and with a hesitation
that betrayed their inexperience. Arches were spanned and windows
broken, later to be braced and blocked up in time to avert a
catastrophe. The transepts belong to the earliest part of the fourteenth
century. We have their definite dates from records,--the northern arm
rose where previously had stood a little chapel and was given by the
Chapter to Dean Blasco Blasquez as an honorable burial place for himself
and his family, while Bishop Blasquez Davila, the tutor of Alfonso IX
and principal notary of Castile, raised the southern arm immediately
afterwards. He occupied the See for almost fifty years, and must have
seen the nave and side aisles and the older portions, including the
northwestern tower, all pretty well constructed. This tower with its
unfinished sister and portions of the west front are curiously enough
late Romanesque work, and must thus have been started before the nave
and side aisles had reached them in their western progress. The original
cloisters belonged to the fourteenth century, as also the northern
portal. Chapels, furnishings, pulpits, trascoro, choir stalls, glazing,
all belong to later times, as well as the sixteenth-century mutilations
of the front and the various exterior Renaissance excrescences.
It is interesting to infer that the main part of the fabric must
virtually have been completed in 1432, when Pope Eugenio IV published a
bull in favor of the work. Here he only speaks of the funds requisite
for its "preservation and repair." We may judge from such wording the
condition of the structure as a whole.
The most extraordinary portion of the building is unquestionably its
"fighting turret" and eastern end. This apse is almost unique in Spanish
architectural history and deeply absorbing as an extensive piece of
Romanesque work, not quite free from Moorish traces and already
employing in its vaulting Gothic expedients. It may be called "barbaric
Gothic" or "decadent Romanesque," but, whatever it is termed, it will be
vitally interesting and fascinating to the student of architectural
history.
Externally the mighty stone tower indicates none of its interior
disposition of chapels or vaulting. The black, weather-stained granite
of its bare walls is alternately broken by slightly projecting pilasters
and slender, columnar shafts. They are crowned by a corbel table and a
high, embattled parapet, that yielded protection to the soldiers
occupying the platform immediately behind, which communicated with the
passage around the city walls. This is again backed by a second wall
similarly crowned. The narrowest slits of windows from the centres of
the radiating, apsidal chapels break the lower surfaces, while double
flying buttresses meet, at the level of the triforium and above the
clerestory windows, the thrusts of the upper walls.
The plan is most curious, and on account of its irregularity as well as
certain inconsistencies, it is difficult to guess how far it was
originally conceived in its present form, or what alterations were made
in the earlier centuries. Some changes must have been made in its
vaulting. The chevet or Capilla Mayor, which at first very properly
contained the choir, is surrounded by a double ambulatory, outside of
which the thick walls are pierced by nine apsidal chapels. It is
probable that these were originally constructed by the engineers to
lighten the enormous bulk of the outer masonry. They are not quite
semicircles in plan, and are vaulted in various simple ways. Where ribs
occur, they meet in the key of the arch separating chapel from
ambulatory. The piers round the apse itself are alternately
monocylindrical and composite; the intermediate ones, subdividing
unequally the "girola," are lofty, slender columns, while those of the
exterior are polygonal in plan, with shafts against their faces. Some of
the caps are of the best Romanesque types, and composed of animals,
birds, and leaves, while others, possibly substituted for the original
ones, have a plain bell with the ornamentation crudely applied in color.
The Capilla Mayor has both triforium and clerestory of exquisite early
work. Dog-tooth moldings ornament the archivolts. Mohammedan influence
had asserted itself in the triforium, which is divided by slender shafts
into two windows terminating in horseshoe arches, while the clerestory
consists of broad, round, arched openings.
The construction and balance of the apse thrusts were doubtless
originally of a somewhat different nature from what we find at present,
as may easily be observed from the materials, the function and positions
of the double flying buttresses. They may have been added as late as
three centuries after the original fabric. Lamperez y Romea's
observations in regard to this are most interesting:--
"We must observe in the two present orders of windows, that the lower
was never built for lights and its construction with double columns
forming a hollow space proves it a triforium. That it was actually so is
further abundantly proved by several circumstances: first, by a parapet
or wall which still exists below the actual roof and which follows the
exterior polygonal line of the girola, as well as by some
semi-Romanesque traceries which end in the wall of the Capilla Mayor,
and finally, by a continuous row of supports existing in the thickness
of the same wall below a gutter, separating the two orders of windows.
These features, as well as the general arrangement of the openings,
demonstrate that there was a triforium of Romanesque character,
occupying the whole width of the girola, which furthermore was covered
by a barrel vault. Above this came the great platform or projecting
balcony, corresponding to the second defensive circuit. Military
necessity explains this triforium; without it, there would be no need of
a system of continuous counterthrusts to that of the vaults of the
crossing. If we concede the existence of this triforium, various obscure
points become clear."
The Capilla Mayor has four bays prior to reaching the pentagonal
termination. The vaulting of the most easterly bay connects with that of
the pentagon, thus leaving three remaining bays to vault; two form a
sexpartite vault, and the third, nearest the transept, a quadripartite.
All the intersections are met by bosses formed by gilded and spreading
coats-of-arms. The ribs do not all carry properly down, two out of the
six being merely met by the keystones of the arches between Capilla
Mayor and ambulatory. The masonry of the vaulting is of a reddish stone,
while that of the transepts and nave is yellow, laid in broad, white
joints.