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 Reloi[c],
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 thegreat 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 oneplace 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.
[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid
CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO