BURGOS.
There are some views of Burgos Cathedral which are constantly met with,
and upon which I confess all my ideas of its style and merits had been
founded, to their no little detriment. The western steeples, the central
lantern, and the lantern-like roof and pinnacles of the chapel of the
Constable at the east end, are all very late in date--the first of the
latest fifteenth century, and the others of early Renaissance work; and
their mass is so important, their character so picturesque, and their
detail so exuberantly ornate, that they have often been drawn and
described to the entire exclusion of all notice of the noble early
church, out of which they rise. The general scheme of the ground-plan of
the cathedral is drawn with considerable accuracy in the illustration
which I give of it.[7] The fabric consists of a thirteenth-century
church, added to somewhat in the fourteenth century, altered again in
the fifteenth, and even more in the sixteenth century. The substratum,
so to speak, is throughout of the thirteenth century, but the two
western steeples, with their crocketed and perforated spires, the
gorgeous and fantastic lantern over the crossing, and the lofty and
sumptuous monumental chapel at the east end, are all later additions,
and so important in their effect, as at first sight to give an entirely
wrong impression both of the age and character of the whole church. The
various dates are, as well as the scale will admit, explained by the
shading of the plan. The early church seems to have consisted of a nave
and aisles of six bays, deep transepts, and a choir and aisles, with
apses and chapels round it. The transepts probably had chapels on the
east, of which one still remains in the north transept; but this is the
only original chapel, none of those round the chevet having been spared.
Externally, the two transept fronts are the only conspicuous portions of
the old church, but, on mounting to the roof, the flying buttresses,
clerestory windows, and some other parts, are found still little damaged
or altered. Never was a church more altered for the worse after its
first erection than was this. It is now a vast congeries of chapels and
excrescences of every shape and every style, which have grown round it
at various dates, and, to a great extent, concealed the whole of the
original plan and structure; and of these, the only valuable Mediæval
portions are the cloisters and sacristies, which are, indeed, but little
later in date than the church, and two of the chapels on the north side
of the chevet, one of which is original, and the other at any rate not
much altered. The rest of the additions are all either of the latest
Gothic, or of Renaissance.
The principal entrances to this church of “Santa Maria la Mayor” are at
the west end and in the north and south transepts--the two last
original, the former a modern alteration of the old fabric, made only a
few years ago, and of the meanest kind. The Archbishop’s palace occupies
the space on the south side of the nave; and the ground on which the
whole group of buildings stands, slopes so rapidly from the south up to
the north, that on the south side a steep and picturesque flight of
steps leads up to the door, whilst on the north, on the contrary, the
door is some fifteen feet above the floor, and has to be reached by an
elaborate flight of winding steps from the transept. Owing to the rapid
rise of the ground, and to the way in which the church is surrounded by
houses, or by its own dependent buildings, it is very difficult to
obtain any good near views of it, with the exception of that of the west
end from the Plaza in front of it; but the views from the Prado, from
the opposite side of the river, and from the distant hills and country,
are all very fine; and it must be allowed that in them the picturesque
richness of the later additions to the fabric produces a very great
effect.
Having thus given some general idea of the plan of the church, I will
now describe its parts more in detail.
[Illustration: Compartment of Nave.]
On entering the nave at the west end, the effect of the arcades,
triforia, and clerestory is very fine, though much damaged by the
arrangement of the choir, which, as in most Spanish churches, is brought
down into the nave, enclosed with close walls or screens, and entered
only from the transept at its eastern end. An altar is placed against
the western entrance of the choir, and the nave being only six bays in
length, and equally divided, the view is--it may easily be
imagined--very confined and cramped. Otherwise, the architectural
features of the nave are thoroughly good. The original scheme evidently
included two western steeples, the piers which support them--large
clusters of engaged shafts--being larger than any of the others, yet of
the same date. The nave columns are circular, with eight engaged shafts
around them. The bases are circular, finished on squares, with knops of
foliage filling in the spandrels. The abaci are all square in plan, and
both bases and caps are set at right angles to the direction of the
arches they support. One of the smaller columns carries the pier arch,
the other three carry the transverse and diagonal groining ribs, whilst
the wall ribs are carried on shafts on each side of the clerestory
window. The pier arches are of ordinary early-pointed character, and
well moulded. There is not much variety in the general design of the
nave and transepts, though some changes of detail occur. The triforium
in both is very peculiar, as will be seen by the illustration which I
give of one bay of the nave. The openings vary considerably in number,
and the piercings of the tympanum and in the enclosing arch are also
singularly arranged. I know nothing like this singular triforium
elsewhere. It is certainly more curious than really beautiful, but at
the same time it is valuable, as seeming to prove this part of the work
to be from the hand of a native artist. The enclosing label is in all
cases a segment of a circle, and filled with sculptured heads at short
intervals apart. At first sight this triforium hardly seems to be of
early date, having suffered by the addition of pinnacles covered with
crockets in front of, and open traceried parapet walls between, the
detached shafts on which the early traceries were carried; the result
is, that one of the most striking features in the church is completely
spoiled, and a general effect of very poor and tawdry design is felt
more or less throughout the whole building.[8]
The original clerestory still, in great part, remains; it is simple, but
good and vigorous in style, and with but one special peculiarity in its
detail. The windows are for the most part of two lights, with a
quatrefoiled circle in the head; and the peculiarity referred to here is
the omission to carry the chamfer round the extrados of the arched heads
to the lights or the circle; the effect produced is peculiar, the
tracery not looking as if it were properly constructed, but as if the
wheel had been loosely placed within the arch without having any proper
connection with it. I have noticed the same arrangement in a church at
Valladolid, and it must, I think, be regarded either as a freak of the
workmen, or more probably as the exhibition of some degree of ignorance
of the ordinary mode of executing the mouldings in window traceries.
But here, with this one exception, as in almost all the details
throughout the original work of this cathedral, there is little, if
anything, to show that we are not in France, and looking at some of its
best and purest thirteenth-century Gothic. There is no trace of Moorish
or other foreign influence, the whole work being pure, simple, and good.
In the aisles two only of the original windows still remain, and these
show that they were lighted originally by a series of well-shaped
lancets, with engaged jamb-shafts inside. The vaults are all slightly
domical in section; the diagonal ribs generally semi-circular, as also
are the wall-ribs. The masonry of the cells is arranged in lines
parallel to the ridge, but considerably distorted near the springing.
The transepts, which, as has been said, are similar in their design to
the nave, are of considerable size, and the view across them is in fact
the best internal view in the church. One early chapel alone
remains,--on the east side of the north transept,--and its groined roof
is remarkable. It is a square in plan, with its vault divided into eight
groining cells, forming two bays on each side, and with two lancet
windows at the east end, each under a division of the vault. No one who
has studied the groining of the churches in Poitou and Anjou--so decided
in their local peculiarities--can doubt, on comparison of them with this
chapel, that it was the work of men who had studied in the same school,
and it is remarkable that we find it reproduced in the lantern of the
great church of the Convent of Las Huelgas, near Burgos, of which I
shall presently have to speak. In both cases the vaulting is very
domical, and the joints of the stone filling-in of the cells are
_vertical_. This chapel suggests, too, the question whether the first
idea was not here, as well as at Las Huelgas, to have a series of
chapels on the east side of the transepts, though I should decide this
in the negative, inasmuch as there is no mark of a chapel in the next
bay to the north, and there was probably from the first a complete
chevet to the choir.
It will be as well, perhaps, to leave the description in detail of the
early features of the exterior for the present, and to complete the
notice of the interior first of all.
And here it is necessary to say a few words as to the cathedral
arrangements commonly seen in Spain, which exist in full force at
Burgos, and must be constantly referred to in all my notices of Spanish
churches.
I have already said that the choir proper (_Coro_) is transferred to the
nave, of which it occupies commonly the eastern half; the portion of the
nave outside, or to the west of the Coro, being called the “_Trascoro_,”
and that to the east of it the “_Entre los dos Coros_;” and in most
great churches the “_Crucero_,” or crossing, and the transept really do
the work of the nave, in the way of accommodating the people. The floor
of the nave proper is, indeed, too often a useless appendage to the
building, desolate, dreary, unused, and cold; whereas in the transepts,
the services at the altar and in the choir are both seen and heard, and
this accordingly is the people’s place. A passage is sometimes, or
perhaps I ought to say is usually, made with low iron or brass screens
or rails leading from the eastern gate of the Coro to the screen in
front of the altar. This is especially necessary here, as the choir
proper is deep, and the people are thus kept from pressing on the clergy
as they pass to and fro in the long passage from the altar to the Coro.
Gates in these screens admit of the passage of the people from one
transept to the other whenever the services in the Coro are not going
on. The Coro is usually fitted with two rows of stalls on its north,
south, and west sides, the front row having no desks before them. The
only entrance is usually through the screen on the eastern side, and
there are generally two organs placed on either side of the western bay
of the Coro, above the stalls. In the centre of the Coro there is always
one, and sometimes two or three lecterns, for the great illuminated
office-books, which most of the Spanish churches seem still to preserve
and use. High metal screens are placed across the nave to the east of
the Coro, and across the entrance to the choir, or “_capilla mayor_,” as
its eastern part is called. These screens are called _rejas_. Above the
crossing of the choir and transepts there is usually an open raised
lantern, called by the Spaniards the _cimborio_; and behind the altar,
at the end of the Capilla mayor, is usually a great sculptured and
painted _retablo_ or reredos. All these arrangements are generally
described as if they were invariably found in all Spanish churches, as
they certainly are at Burgos and many others now; and an acute and
well-informed writer in the ‘Ecclesiologist’ suggests that their origin
may perhaps be looked for in the early churches of the Asturias and
Galicia, since he had looked in vain, in both Spanish and Mozarabic
liturgies, for any peculiar dogma or ritual practice which would have
involved arrangements so different from those common in other countries.
The grounds for my opinion will appear as I describe other churches in
other places; but I may here at once say that what occurred to me at
Burgos was to some extent confirmed elsewhere, namely, that most of
these arrangements have no very old authority or origin, but are
comparatively modern innovations, and that they are never seen in their
completeness save where, as here, they are alterations or additions of
the sixteenth or subsequent centuries, and they are usually Renaissance
in their architectural character. This is particularly the case in
regard to the arrangement of the Coro, as well as to its position in the
church. At present the bishop is generally placed in a central stall at
its western end; yet of this I have seen only one or two really genuine
old examples; for, wherever the arrangement occurs in a choir where the
old stalls remain, it will be found, I believe, that the bishop’s stall
is an interpolation and addition of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or
eighteenth century, and that where the old western screen remains, the
throne blocks up the old door from the nave into the Coro. The word
Cimborio is only the Spanish term for our lantern. The early Spanish
churches were like our own in the adoption of this fine feature, and,
with such modifications as might be expected, the central lantern is
still an invariable feature in most of them. The term Cimborio, however,
seems to have no special significance, and, as I prefer the use of an
English terminology wherever it is appropriate, I shall generally use
the word lantern, rather than Cimborio. There are some of these terms,
however, which it will frequently be convenient to use; such, for
instance, are the words Reja, Coro, Capilla mayor, and Trascoro, all of
which describe Spanish features or arrangements unknown in our own
churches.
At Burgos the Coro occupies the three eastern bays of the nave, and the
only entrance to it is through a doorway in its eastern screen. The
stalls, screens, and fittings are all of early Renaissance work, and
were the gift of Bishop Pascual de Fuensanta, between A.D. 1497 and A.D.
1512. There are about eighty stalls, in two rows, returned at the ends,
and very richly carved, over the lower stalls with subjects from the
New, and over the upper stalls with subjects from the Old Testament. In
the centre of the choir, concealed by the great desk for the books
(which, by the way, are old, though not very fine[9]), lies a
magnificent effigy of Bishop Maurice, the founder of the church. It is
of wood, covered with metal plates, and very sumptuously adorned with
jewels, enamels, and gilding. He was bishop from A.D. 1213 to A.D. 1238,
and his effigy appeared to me to be very little later than the date of
his death.
A special architectural interest attaches to the life of this prelate,
for the tradition in Burgos has always been that he was an Englishman,
who came over in the train of the English Princess Alienor, Queen of
Alfonso VIII., and, having been Archdeacon of Toledo, became in A.D.
1213 Bishop of Burgos. Florez,[10] however, doubts the tradition, and
observes that his parents’ names, Rodrigo and Oro Sabia, were those of
Spaniards. Two years before the cathedral was commenced he went on an
embassy through France to Germany, to bring Beatrice, daughter of the
Duke of Suabia, to marry King Ferdinand; so that, even if he were not of
English birth, he was at any rate well travelled, and had seen some of
the noble works in progress and completed in France and Germany at this
date. In A.D. 1221 he laid the first stone of his new
cathedral:--“Primus lapis ponitur in fundamento novi operis ecclesiæ
Burgens: xx. die mensis Julii _era_ millesima quinquagesima nona die
Sancte Margarite.”[11] Florez gives two other similar statements, one
from the Martyrology of Burgos, and the other from the Chronicle of
Cardeña. The King and the Bishop are said to have laid the first stone
in the grand column on the epistle side of the choir; and the work went
on so rapidly that in November, A.D. 1230, when he drew up directions as
to the precedence of the various members of the chapter, their order of
serving at the altars, and of walking in processions, the Bishop was
able to write, “_Tempore nostræ translationis ad novam fabricam_.”[12]
Bishop Maurice was buried in the church, and his monument was afterwards
moved to the front of the Trascoro (or screen at the west end of the
choir) by Bishop Ampudia, before his death, in A.D. 1512. It has never
been moved from the spot in which it was then placed, and yet, owing to
the rearrangement of the stalls, it is now in the very midst of the
Coro,[13] and affords an invaluable piece of evidence of the fact
already stated, that of old the stalls did not occupy their present
place in the nave.[14]
There is nothing else worthy of note in the Coro. Its floor is boarded,
and a long passage about six feet wide, between rails, leads from its
door through the choir to a screen in front of the high altar. The
people occupy the choir, hemmed in between these rails and the parclose
screens under the side arches. The altar has a late and uninteresting
Retablo, in Pagan style, carved with large subjects and covered with
gold.[15] The steps to the altar are of white, black, and red marble,
counterchanged; and at the entrance to the choir under the lantern are
two brass pulpits or ambons, for the Epistoler and Gospeller, an
admirable and primitive arrangement almost always preserved in Spanish
churches.
The columns of the choir arches have been modernized, and there is
consequently but little of the old structure visible on the inside, the
Retablo rising to the groining, and concealing the arches of the apse.
Between these arches sculptures in stone are introduced, which are said
to have been executed by Juan de Borgoña, in 1540. They are bold and
spirited compositions in high relief, and give great richness of effect
to the aisle towards which they face. The subjects are--(1) the Agony in
the Garden; (2) our Lord bearing His Cross; (3) the Crucifixion; (4) the
Descent from the Cross and the Resurrection; (5) the Ascension. Numbers
1 and 5 are not original, or at any rate are inferior to and different
in style from the others.
When we leave the choir for its aisles, we shall find that everything
here, too, has been more or less altered. Chapels of all sizes and
shapes have been contrived, either by addition to or alteration of the
original ground-plan; and, picturesque as the _tout ensemble_ is, with
dark shadows crossed here and there by bright rays of light from the
side windows, with here a domed Renaissance chapel, there one of the
fourteenth century, and here, again, one of the fifteenth, it has lost
all that simplicity, unity, and harmony which in a perfect building
ought to mark this, the most important part of a church. In truth hardly
any part of the aisles or chapels of the chevet of Bishop Maurice now
remains; for of the two early chapels on the north side (marked _a_ and
_b_ on the plan), the former is evidently of later date, being possibly
the work of Bishop Juan de Villahoz, who founded a chapel here,
dedicated to S. Martin, in A.D. 1268-69.[16] The style of this chapel is
very good middle-pointed; the abaci of the capitals are square, the
tracery is geometrical, the vaulting very domical, and its north-western
angle is arched across, and groined with a small tripartite vault, in
order to bring the main vault into the required polygonal form. This
arrangement occurs at an earlier date, as I shall have presently to
show, at Las Huelgas (close to Burgos), but ought to be noticed here, as
the same feature is seen reproduced, more or less, in many Spanish works
of the fifteenth century, and here we have an intermediate example to
illustrate its gradual growth. It is, in fact, the Gothic substitute for
a pendentive.
The other chapel (_b_) I believe to be the one remaining evidence of the
original plan of the chevet; and, looking at it in connexion with the
other portions of the work, and especially with the blank wall between
which and the cloister the new sacristy is built, it seems pretty clear
that originally there were only three chapels in the chevet, and all of
them pentagonal in plan. Between these chapels and the transepts there
would then have been two bays of aisle without side chapels, and on the
eastern side of each of the transepts a small square chapel, one of
which still remains. This plan tallies to some extent with that of the
cathedral at Leon (with which the detail of Burgos may well be
compared), and is in some respects similar to that of the French
cathedrals of Amiens, Clermont, and some other places. In fact, the
planning of this chevet is one of the proofs that the work was of
French, and not of Spanish origin.
At the east end of the cathedral is a grand chapel, erected about A.D.
1487, by the Constable D. Pedro Fernandez de Velasco and his wife. This
remarkable building was designed by an architect whose work we shall see
again, and of whom it may be as well at once to say a few words. Juan de
Colonia--a German by birth or origin, as his name shows--is said to have
been brought to Burgos by Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena (A.D. 1435 to A.D.
1456) when he returned from the Council of Basle. There is evidence that
he built the chapel of the great Carthusian monastery of Miraflores, on
the hill just outside the town; and there is, I believe, but little
doubt that he wrought here too. His work is very peculiar. It is
essentially German in its endless intricacy and delicacy of detail, but
has features which I do not remember to have seen in Germany, and which
may fairly be attributed either to the Spaniards who worked under him,
or to an attempt on his own part to accommodate his work to Spanish
tastes.
The chapel is octagonal at the east, but square at the west end; and
pendentives of exactly the same kind of design as those of the early
German and French churches are introduced across the western angles of
the chapel, to bring the plan of the central vault to a complete
octagon. They are true pendentives, and quite unlike those three-sided
vaulting bays across the angles of the apse chapels, to which I just now
referred, and which answer precisely the same purpose. They are hardly
at all Gothic, having semi-circular arches, and the masonry below them
being filled in with stones radiating as in a fan, from the centre of
the base of the pendentive. The groining ribs (the mouldings of which
interpenetrate at the springing) form by their intersection a large star
of eight points in the centre, and the cells between the ribs of this
star are pierced with very elaborate traceries. This is a feature often
reproduced in late Spanish works, and it is one which aids largely in
giving the intricate and elaborately lacelike effect aimed at by the
Spanish architects at this date, to a greater extent even than by any of
their contemporaries in other lands; for though this, which is wellnigh
the richest example of the Spanish art of the fifteenth century, was
designed by a German, we must remember that he was following, to a great
extent, Spanish traditions, and was largely aided in all the better
portion of the detail by national artists, among whom the greatest was,
perhaps, Gil de Siloe, whose work in the monuments at Miraflores I shall
presently have to describe. And it is not a little curious, and perhaps
not very gratifying to the _amour propre_ of Spanish artists, that in
this great church the two periods in which the most artistic vigour was
shown, and the grandest architectural works undertaken, were marked, the
first by the rule of a well-travelled bishop--commonly said to be an
Englishman--under an English princess, and who seems to have employed an
Angevine architect; and the second by the rule of another travelled
bishop, who, coming home from Germany, brought with him a German
architect, into whose hands all the great works in the city seem at once
to have been put. I must return, however, to the description of the
detail of the Constable’s chapel. Each bay of the octagonal part of the
chapel below the vaulting is divided in this way: below is a recessed
arch, under which is an enormous coat-of-arms set aslant on the wall,
with coarse foliage round it. These arches have a very ugly fringe of
shields and supporters, and finish with ogee canopies. Above are the
windows, which are of flamboyant tracery of three lights; the windows
being placed one over the other, the outer mouldings of the upper window
going down to the sill of the lower. There are altars in recesses on the
east, north, and south sides of the octagon; and the two latter stand
upon their old foot-paces, formed by flights of three steps, the ends of
which towards the chapel are filled with rich tracery. The monument of
the Constable Velasco is in the centre of the chapel; and a velvet pall
belonging to it is still preserved, adorned with one of those grand
stamped patterns so constantly seen in mediæval German paintings. The
stalls for the clergy are arranged strangely in an angle of the chapel,
fenced round with a low screen, and looking like one of those enclosures
in some of our own churches sacred to archdeacons and their officials.
A quaint little vestry is contrived outside the south-east angle of the
octagon, and in it are preserved some pieces of plate of the same age as
the chapel. Among these are--
A chalice of silver gilt, enamelled in white and red, with its bowl
richly set with pearls strung on a wire: the knop is richly enamelled,
and its edge set with alternate emeralds and sapphires; whilst the
sexfoiled foot is in the alternate compartments engraved with
coats-of-arms, and set with sapphires. It is a very gorgeous work, and,
though all but Renaissance in style, still very finely executed.
A pax; the Blessed Virgin Mary holding our Lord, and seated on a throne
covered with pearls and other jewels. The figure of the Blessed Virgin
Mary is enamelled with blue, and our Lord is in ivory. The old case for
this is preserved, and has a drawer below it which contains papers
referring to the gift of it.
Another small pax; a flat plate enamelled, with crocketed pinnacles at
the side, but no figure.
A fine thurible for incense, in the form of a ship, with Adam and Eve on
the lid.
A very good flagon, richly chased all over, sexfoil in section, and with
a particularly good spout and handle.
There are many other chapels, as will be seen by reference to the plan,
added to various parts of this cathedral, though none of them are of
anything like the same importance as that of the Constable, which gives,
indeed, much of its character to the exterior of the whole church, so
large, lofty, and elaborate is it. On the south side of the south aisle
of the nave is one which in the treatment of its groining cells, which
are filled with tracery, seems to show the hand of Juan de Colonia;
whilst another chapel on the north side of the nave, partly covered with
a late Gothic vault, and partly with a dome, may be either a later work
of his, or, more probably, of his son Simon de Colonia; another to the
east of this is remarkable for the cusps, which come from the moulded
ribs and lie on the surface of the vaulting cells in a way I do not
remember to have seen before. In these chapels[17] we see the dying out
of the old art in every stage of its progress; and I think that both
here and elsewhere in Spain the change was much more gradual than it was
in most other parts of Europe, many of the early Renaissance masters
having availed themselves largely of the picturesque detail of their
predecessors’ work.
The central lantern was the last great work executed in this cathedral,
and its history must be given somewhat at length, as it is of much
interest. In the Royal Library at Madrid[18] there is preserved a MS.,
from which we learn that the “crossing” of the cathedral fell on the 4th
of March, 1539; and that Felipe de Borgoña, “one of the three ‘maestros’
who in the time of our Emperor came to our Spain, from whom we have
learned perfect architecture and sculpture, though in both they say he
had the advantage over the others,” was intrusted with the execution of
the new work erected in its place. This Cimborio or lantern was
completed, according to this MS., in December, A.D. 1567, Maestro
Vallejo being mentioned as having wrought at the work under Felipe de
Borgoña; Cean Bermudez,[19] without giving his authorities, says, that
the Bishop (celebrated for the many buildings he had erected, among
others San Esteban at Salamanca), on the fall of the “crucero,” summoned
Felipe de Borgoña from Toledo, where he was at work with Berruguete on
the stalls, to superintend the cathedral architects Juan de Vallejo and
Juan de Castañeda. Maestro Felipe seems to have died in A.D. 1543, so
that it is probable that after all most of the work was done after his
death by Juan de Vallejo, who was sufficiently distinguished to be
consulted with the architects of Toledo, Seville, and Leon about the
building of the new cathedral at Salamanca in A.D. 1512, and had also,
between the years A.D. 1514-1524, built the very Renaissance-looking
gateway which opens from the east side of the north transept into the
Calle de la Pellegria. The whole composition of this lantern is Gothic
and picturesque; yet there is scarce a portion of it which does not show
a most strange mixture of Pagan and Gothic detail. The piers which
support it are huge, ungainly cylinders, covered with carving in low
relief, and everywhere there is that combination of heaviness of parts
and intricacy of detail, which in all ages marks the inferior artist. I
cannot help lamenting much, therefore, the fall of the old work in A.D.
1539. There is no evidence, so far as I know, as to what it was that
fell,[20] but the nearly coeval church of Las Huelgas has a fine simple
lantern, and it is probable that some such erection existed in the
cathedral, and that Bishop Luis de Acuña y Osorio raised it, and, by
increasing its weight, caused its fall. The central lantern is so
completely a feature of English buildings, or of those built in lands
over which our kings also ruled, that any evidence of their early
existence here would have been most valuable, seeing how close the
connexion was at the time of its erection between the families of the
kings of Castile and of England.
[Illustration: No. 1.
BURGOS CATHEDRAL
P. 25
NORTH-WEST VIEW.]
The groined roofs next to the lantern, on all sides, were of necessity
rebuilt at the same time, and with detail quite unlike that of the
original vault.
The exterior of the cathedral may be described at less length than the
interior, presenting, as it does, fewer alterations of the original
fabric, and much of what has been said of the one necessarily
illustrating the other also.
The west front is well known by the many illustrations which have been
published of it. The ground on which the church stands slopes up, as I
have said, rapidly from south to north, but a level Plaza has been
formed in front of the doors, and part of which is enclosed with
balustrades and pinnacles of a sort of bastard Gothic, which I see drawn
in a view published circa 1770, and which may possibly be of the same
age as the latest Gothic works in the cathedral. On the rising ground to
the north-west stands the little church of San Nicolas, high above the
cathedral parvise, and hence it is that the view which I give from Mr.
Fergusson’s book is taken. Nothing can be more determinately
picturesque, though nothing can be less really interesting, than this
florid work, which everywhere substituted elaboration for thought, and
labour for art. But I need say no more on this point; for if we now look
more closely, we shall see that, underlying all these unsatisfying later
excrescences, the old thirteenth century cathedral is still here,
intact to an extent which I had not at first ventured to hope for.
The western doors are three in number, but have been completely
modernized. Of old the central door, “del Pardon,” had effigies of the
Assumption, with angels and saints; the northern door “the mystery of
the Conception of the Blessed Virgin;” and the southern door her
coronation.[21] Above the side doorways the two steeples rise, whilst in
the centre is a finely-traceried rose-window, which lights the nave; and
above this two lofty traceried openings, each of four lights, with
effigies of saints standing one under each light, the whole forming a
screen connecting the steeples, and entirely masking the roof. The
steeples, up to this level, are of the original foundation, much altered
in parts, and now put to strange uses, their intermediate stages being
converted into dwelling-houses, and lively groups of cocks and hens
being domesticated on a sort of terrace a hundred feet from the floor.
The upper part of the towers and the spires was added in the fifteenth
century, by Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena (1435-56), who employed Juan de
Colonia (the German of whom I have already spoken) to design them.
German peculiarities do not gain in attractiveness by being exported to
Spain, and this part of Juan de Colonia’s work is certainly not a
success. Nothing can be less elegant than the termination of the spires,
which, instead of finishing simply and in the usual way, are surrounded
near the top by an open gallery, and then terminated with the clumsiest
of finials. This work was commenced in A.D. 1442, and when the bishop
died in A.D. 1456, one spire was finished, and the other, being well
advanced, was soon completed under Bishop Luis Acuña y Osorio, the
founder also of the central lantern.[22] Between the two towers is a
figure of the Blessed Virgin, with the words “Pulcra es et decora.” On
the upper part of the towers, “Ecce Agnus Dei,” and “Pax vobis;” and on
the spires, “Sancta Maria,” and “Jesus.” These words are in large stone
letters, with the spaces round them pierced.
The detail of the spires is coarse, and the open stonework traceries
with which they are covered are held together everywhere by ironwork,
most of which appeared to me to have been added since the erection. The
crockets are enormous, projecting two feet from the angles of the
spires, curiously scooped out at the top to diminish their weight, and
with holes drilled through them to prevent the lodgement of water. The
bells are, I think, the most misshapen I ever saw; and, as if to prove
that beauty of all kinds is sympathetic, they are as bad in sound as
they are in form!
The façades of the two transepts are quite unaltered, and as fine as
those of the best of our French or English churches. I particularly
delighted in the entrance to and _entourage_ of the southern transept,
presenting as it does all those happy groupings which to the
nineteenth-century Rue-de-Rivoli-loving public are of course odious, but
to the real lover of art simply most exquisite and quaint.[23] The
cloister and bishop’s palace, built out from the church on the south,
leave a narrow lane between them, not absolutely in face of the great
door, but twisting its way up to it; the entrance to this is through a
low archway, called the Puerta del Sarmental, above which, on the right,
towers one of the enormous and really noble crocketed pinnacles which
mark the angles of the cloister, and then, passing by several old
monuments built into the walls of the passage, the great doorway is
reached by a flight of steps at its end. Above this doorway is a fine
rose window of twenty rays of geometrical tracery, and above this is a
screen in front of the roof, consisting of four traceried openings, each
of four lights, and each monial protected, as are the lights at the west
front, by figures of angels rather above life-size. The angles of the
transepts are flanked by crocketed pinnacles, the crockets here, as
elsewhere throughout the early work, being simple in form and design,
but as perfect in effect as it is possible for crockets to be. The
sculptures of the south door are, in the tympanum, our Lord seated with
the evangelistic beasts around Him, and the four evangelists, one on
either side and two above, seated and writing at desks, whilst below His
feet are the twelve apostles, seated and holding open books. Below,
there is a bishop in front of the central pier, and statues on either
side, of which I made out two on the right to be St. Peter and St. Paul,
and two answering to them on the left Moses and Aaron. The three orders
of the archivolt have--(1) angels with censers, and angels with candles;
(2 and 3) kings seated, and playing musical instruments. Here, as
throughout the early sculpture, the character of the work is very
French, and the detail of the arcading below the statues in the jambs is
very nearly the same as that of the earliest portion of the work in the
west front of the Cathedral at Bourges.
[Illustration: Varieties of Crockets.
A. In Tower Window Jamb.
B. Do. do. Arch.
C. On Pinnacles of South Transept.
]
The north transept differs but little from the other. The doorway--De
Los Apostoles--is reached from the transept floor by an internal
staircase of no less than thirty-eight steps (the sixteenth-century work
of Diego de Siloe), and the whole front is of course much less lofty
than that of the south transept, owing to the great slope of the ground
up from south to north. Above the doorway is an early triplet, and above
this the roof-screen and pinnacles, the same as in the other transept.
The doorway has in the tympanum our Lord, seated, with St. Mary and St.
John on either side, and angels with the instruments of the Passion
above and on either side. Below is St. Michael weighing souls, with the
good on his left, and the wicked on his right. The orders of the
archivolt have--(1) seraphim, (2) angels, and (3) figures rising from
their graves: and the jambs have figures of the twelve apostles.
[Illustration: No. 2.
BURGOS CATHEDRAL.
p. 29
CLERESTORY OF CHOIR.]
The ascent to the roofs discloses the remaining early features. These
are the clerestory windows, and the double flying buttresses, of which I
give an illustration. The water from the main roofs is carried down in a
channel on the flying buttresses and discharged by gurgoyles. There are
some sitting figures of beasts added in front of the buttresses which
are not original. The parapet throughout is an open trefoiled arcade,
with an angel standing guard over each buttress. The detail of the
clerestory windows is very good; they are of two lights, with a cusped
circle above, and a well-moulded enclosing arch. The windows in the apse
are built on the curve. The capitals of the shafts in and under the
flying buttresses are well carved, and there is a good deal of dog-tooth
enrichment. At the back of the screen-walls, in front of the roofs of
the nave and transepts, is seen the old weather-moulding marking the
line of the very steep-pitched roof (which was evidently intended to be
erected), and the stones forming which are so contrived as to form steps
leading up to the ridge, and down again to the opposite gutter. In the
transept, pinnacles take the place of the angels over the buttresses,
and their design is very piquant and original. The moulded stringcourse
at the base of these pinnacles is of a section often seen in French
work, and never, I believe, used by any but French workmen.
All the steep roofs have long since vanished, and in their place are
flat roofs, covered with pantiles laid loosely and roughly, and looking
most ruinous. It may well be a question, I think, whether the steep
roofs were ever erected. The very fact that they were contemplated in
the design and construction of the stonework, appears to me to afford
evidence of the design not having been the work of a Spaniard: and it is
of course possible that, at the first, the native workmen may have put
up a roof of the flat pitch, with which they were familiar, instead of
the steep roofs for which the gables were planned. But, assuming that
the steep roofs were erected, they must, no doubt, have been damaged by
the fall of the lantern in 1539, and as it was reconstructed with
reference to roofs of the pitch we now see, the roofs must have been
altered at the latest by that time.
It is quite worth while to ascend to the roofs, if only to see what is,
perhaps, the most charming view in the whole church; that, namely, which
is obtained from the south-east angle of the lantern, looking down into
the cloister, above the traceries of which rise the quaint pinnacles and
parapets of the old sacristy, and the great angle pinnacles of the
cloister itself, whilst beyond are seen the crowded roofs of the city,
the all but dry bed of the Arlanzon dividing it in two parts, and
beyond, on the one side, the steeple of the Convent of Las Huelgas
rising among its trees, and on the other the great chapel of Miraflores,
crowning a dreary, dusty, and desolate-looking hill in the distance.
I have left to the last all notice of the cloisters, which are said to
have been built in the time of Enrique II. (1379-90), but I can find no
authority for the statement, and believe that they would be more rightly
dated between A.D. 1280 and A.D. 1350.[24] They are entered from the
south transept by the fine doorway, of which a drawing is given by Mr.
Waring in his work on Burgos. This would be thought an unusually good
example of middle-pointed work even in England, and is as fair an
instance as I know of the extreme skill with which the Spanish artists
of the same period wrought. The planning of the jambs, with the
arrangement of the straight-sided overhanging canopies over the figures
which adorn them, are to be noticed as being nearly identical in
character with those of the north transept doorway at Leon, and the
strange feature of an elliptical three-centred arch to the door opening
under the tympanum is common to both. The tympanum is well sculptured
with the Baptism of our Lord, and the well-accentuated orders of the
arch have sitting figures under canopies, and delicately-carved foliage.
The flat surfaces here are, wherever possible, carved with a diaper of
castles and lions, which was very popular throughout the kingdom of
Castile and Leon in the fourteenth century. The figures on the left jamb
of the door are those of the Annunciation, whilst, on the right, are
others of David and Isaiah. The wooden doors, though much later in date,
are carved with extreme spirit and power, with St. Peter and St. Paul
below, and the Entry into Jerusalem and the Descent into Hell above. The
ecclesiologist should set these doors open, and then, looking through
the archway into the cloister, where the light glances on an angle
column clustered round with statues, and upon delicate traceries and
vaulting ribs, he will enjoy as charming a picture as is often seen. The
arrangement of the masonry round this door shows, as also does its
detail, that it is an insertion in the older wall.[25]
[Illustration: No. 3
BURGOS CATHEDRAL
p. 30
VIEW OF CLOISTERS FROM THE ROOF]
The cloisters are full of beauty and interest. They are of two stages in
height, the lower plain, the upper very ornate, the windows being of
four lights, with a circle of ten cusps in the centre, and a
quatrefoiled circle within the enclosing arch over the side lights. The
groining ribs are well moulded, and the details throughout carefully
designed and executed. At the internal angles of the cloister are groups
of saints on corbels and under canopies placed against the groining
shafts, and there is generally a figure of a saint under a recessed arch
in the wall opposite each of the windows;[26] besides which there are
numerous monuments and doorways. Those on the east are the most
noticeable. There is the entrance to the sacristy, with a sculpture of
the Descent from the Cross in its tympanum; the entrance to the room in
which the coffer of the Cid is preserved, with our Lord seated between
SS. Mary and John and Angels; and on the south side are in one bay S.
Joseph of Arimathea laying our Lord in the sepulchre, in another the
Crucifixion; whilst sculptured high tombs, surrounded by iron _grilles_,
abound. Indeed, I hardly know any cloister in which an architect might
be better contented to be confined for a time; for though there are many
which are finer and in better style, I know none altogether more
interesting and more varied, or more redolent of those illustrations of
and links with the past, which are of the very essence of all one’s
interest in such works.
One of the doors on the east side of the cloister opens into the old
sacristy, a grand room about forty-two feet square, the groining of
which is octagonal, with small three-sided vaulting bays filling in the
angles between the square and the octagon. The corbels supporting the
groining shafts are very quaintly carved with the story of a knight
battling with lions.
Here are kept the vestments of the altars and clergy, a right goodly
collection in number, and three of them very fine. These are a blue
velvet cope with orphreys, fairly wrought on a gold ground, and all the
work bound with a twisted cord, which in one part is black and yellow;
another cope, also of blue velvet, has a half-figure of our Lord in the
centre of the orphrey, and angels on the remainder and on the hood, with
wings of green, purple, and blue, exquisitely shaded and lined with
gold; another has St. John the Baptist, the Blessed Virgin, our Lord,
and three saints, under canopies. In all of them the velvet ground was
covered with a large diaper pattern in gold, done before the embroidery
was _appliqué_.
To the south of this sacristy is another groined chamber, in which is
kept the coffer of the Cid,[27] and where the groining ribs are painted
in rich colour for about three feet from the centre boss. A door out of
this leads into the Chapter-house, a room with a flat wooden ceiling of
Moresque character. It is made in parqueterie of coloured woods arranged
in patterns with gilt pendants, and the cornice is of blue and white
majolica, inlaid in the walls: the combination of the whole is certainly
very effective. East of these rooms were others, of which traces still
remain on the outside; but they have been entirely destroyed, and
streets now form, on the east and on the south, the boundaries of the
church and its dependent buildings. Advantage was taken of the rise of
the ground to make a second cloister below that which I have been
describing. In the centre of the enclosure stands a cross, but the
arches are built up, and the cloister is now used for workshops, so that
there is here none of that air of beauty which the gardened cloisters of
Spain usually possess. In the north-west angle of this lower story is a
sacristy, reached by a staircase from one of the choir chapels, and
still in use for it.
I have now in a general way gone over the whole of this very interesting
church, and have said enough, I hope, to prove that popular report has
never overrated its real merits, though no doubt it has regarded too
much those points only of the fabric which to my eye seemed to be least
worthy of praise--the late additions to it rather than the old church
itself. As to the charm of the whole building from every point of view
there cannot be two opinions. It has in a large degree that real
picturesqueness which we so seldom see in French Gothic interiors,
whilst at the same time it still retains much of that fine Early Pointed
work which could hardly have been the work of any but one who knew well
the best French buildings of his day; whoever he was--and amid the
plentiful mention of later artists I have looked in vain for any mention
of him--he was no servile reproducer of foreign work. The treatment of
the triforium throughout is evidently an original conception; and it is
to be noted that the dog-tooth enrichment is freely used, and that the
bells of the capitals throughout are octagonal with concave sides. The
crocketing of the pinnacles is, I believe, quite original; and the
general planning and construction of the building is worthy of all
praise. Nor was the sculptor less worthy of praise than the architect.
The carving of foliage in the early work is good and very plentiful; the
figured sculpture is still richer, and whether in the thirteenth-century
transept doors, the fourteenth-century cloisters, or the
fifteenth-century Retablos, is amazingly good and spirited. The
thirteenth-century figures are just in the style of those Frenchmen who
always conveyed so riant and piquant a character both of face and
attitude to their work. The later architects all seem to have wrought in
a fairly original mode; and even where architects were brought from
Germany, there was some influence evidently used to prevent their work
being a mere repetition of what was being done in their own land; and so
aided by the admirable skill of the Spanish artists who worked under
them, the result is much more happy than might have been expected. Much,
no doubt, of the picturesque effect of such a church is owing to the way
in which it has been added to from time to time: to the large number,
therefore, of personal interests embodied in it, the variety of styles
and parts each of them full of individuality, and finally to the noble
memorials of the dead which abound in it. In France--thanks to
revolutions and whitewash without stint--the noblest churches have a
certain air of baldness which tires the eye of an Englishman used to our
storied cathedrals: but in Spain this is never the case, and we may go
to Burgos, as we may anywhere else in the land, certain that we shall
find in each cathedral much that will illustrate every page of the
history of the country, if well studied and rightly read.
[Illustration]
There is one point in which for picturesque effect few countries can
vie with Spain--and this is the admission of light. In her brilliant
climate it seems to matter not at all how many of the windows are
blocked up or destroyed: all that results is a deeper shadow thrown
across an aisle, or a ray of light looking all the brighter by contrast;
and, though it is often a hard matter to see to draw inside a church on
the brightest day, it is never too dark for comfort, and one comes in
from the scorching sun outside and sits down in the darkest spot of the
dark church with the utmost satisfaction. I saw an evidence here one
night of the natural aptitude of the people for such effects, in the
mode of lighting up the cathedral for an evening service in a large
chapel at the east end. There was one lantern on the floor of the nave,
another in the south transept, and the light burning before the altar:
and in the large side chapel was a numerous congregation, some sitting
on the floor, some kneeling, some standing, whilst a priest, holding a
candle in his hand, read to the people from the pulpit. In this chapel
the only other light was from the lighted candles on the altar. The
whole church was in this way just enough lighted to enable you to see
your way, and to avoid running against the cloaked forms that trod
stealthily about; and the effect would have been inexpressibly solemn,
save for the occasional intrusion of a dog or a cat, who seem to be
always prowling about, and not unfrequently fighting, in Spanish
churches.
Leaving the other churches and buildings of Burgos for the present, let
us now cross the Arlanzon by one of its many bridges, and presently
striking to the left we shall come upon the well-worn path by the side
of the convent-stream, which in less than a mile from the city brings us
to a postern of Las Huelgas.
Santa Maria la Real de las Huelgas was founded by Alfonso VIII., son of
D. Sancho el Deseado, at the instance, it is said, of Leonor (or
Alienor) his Queen, daughter of Henry II. of England, of whom I have
before spoken in referring to Bishop Maurice, the founder of the
cathedral. The dates given for the work are as follow:--The monastery
was commenced in A.D. 1180; inhabited on the 1st June, A.D. 1187;[28]
and in A.D. 1199 formally established as a house of Cistercians. The
first abbess ruled from A.D. 1187 to A.D. 1203; and the second, Doña
Constanza, daughter of the founder, from A.D. 1203 to A.D. 1218; and
from that time forward a large number of noble persons here took the
veil, whilst kings were knighted, crowned, and buried before its
altars. No wonder, therefore, that the postern-gate of Las Huelgas--a
simple thirteenth-century archway--leads, not at once into the convent,
but into the village which has grown up around it, and which, whatever
may have been its aspect in old times, is now as dreary, desolate, and
forlorn-looking as only a Spanish or an Irish village can be, though
still ruled as of yore by the lady abbess,--no doubt with terribly shorn
and shrunken revenues. There is a small church in the village here, but
it is of no interest: and we may well reserve ourselves for the great
church rising from behind the boundary walls which shut in the convent
on all sides, and the people’s entrance to which is from an open
courtyard on its north side through the transept porch.
[Illustration: BURGOS: Ground Plan of Cathedral: Plate 1.
Published by John Murray, Albemarle St. 1865.]
[Illustration]
I give an illustration of the ground plan,[29] from which it will be
seen that the church consists of a nave and aisles of eight bays,
transepts, and choir, with two chapels on either side of it opening into
the transept, whilst a porch is erected in front of the north transept,
and a cloister passage along the whole length of the north aisle. A
tower is placed on the north-east of the north transept, and a chapel
has been added on its eastern side. There is another cloister court, of
which a not very trustworthy lithograph is given in M. Villa Amil’s
work. This is within the convent, from which every one but the inmates
is rigorously excluded, but, as far as I can learn, it is on the south
side of the nave. The central compartment of the transept is carried up
above the rest as a lantern, and groined with an eight-sided vault. The
choir has one bay of quadripartite and one of sexpartite vaulting, and
an apse. The transept chapels are all of them square in the plan but, by
the introduction of an arch across the angle (the space behind which is
roofed with a small vault), the vault is brought to half-octagon at the
east end. This will be best understood by the illustration which I give
of one of these chapels: and here, too, it will be seen that the
masonry of the vaulting cells is all arranged in vertical
lines,--parallel, that is, to the centre of the vault, and that the
transverse section of the vault is in all cases exceedingly domical.
Nothing can be more peculiar than this description of early vaulting,
and it is one which, I believe, originated in Anjou or Poitou, where
numberless examples may be found all more or less akin to this at Las
Huelgas. This fact is most suggestive, for what more probable than that
Alienor, Henry II.’s daughter, should, in the abbey which she induced
her husband to found, have procured the help of some architect from her
father’s Angevine domain to assist in the design of her building? Yet,
on the other hand, there are some slight differences of detail between
the work here and any French example with which I am acquainted, which
make it possible that the architect was really a Spaniard, but if so, he
must have been well acquainted, not only with the Angevine system of
vaulting, but also with some of those English details which, as is well
known, were in common use both in Anjou and in England in the latter
part of the twelfth, and first half of the thirteenth century. A
foreigner naturally gives us an exact reproduction of the work of some
foreign school, just as we see at Canterbury in the work of William of
Sens, and my own impression is strong that he must have been an Angevine
artist who was at work here.
If I am correct in attributing this peculiar church to the Angevine
influence of the Queen, I prove at the same time a most important point
in the history of the development of style in Spain. The planning of the
church at Las Huelgas influenced largely the architects of Burgos, the
capital of Castile and Leon. The groining of the only original chapel in
the transept of the cathedral is a reproduction of the octopartite vault
of the lantern at Las Huelgas; and one may fairly suspect that so, too,
was the original lantern of the cathedral. Then, again, in a
fourteenth-century chapel, north of the choir of the cathedral, we see
the same device (_i.e._ the arched pendentive across the angle) adopted
for obtaining an octagonal vault over a square chamber; and again in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in a chapel on the south of the nave,
in the old sacristy, and finally in the all but Renaissance chapel of
the Constable, we have the Spanish octagonal vault, supported on
pendentives, evidently copied by the German architect from the
pendentives of the Romanesque churches on the Rhine. In these Burgalese
examples we have a typal vault which is extensively reproduced
throughout Spain, and which I last saw at Barcelona, in work of the
sixteenth century. It is a type of vault, in its later form, almost
peculiar to Spain, and when filled in with tracery in the cell, I
believe quite so. And it is undoubtedly more picturesque and generally
more scientific in construction than our own late vaults, and infinitely
more so than the thin, wasted-looking vaults of the French flamboyant
style.
But to proceed with my notice of the church of Las Huelgas. The nave is
groined throughout with a quadripartite vault; but beyond this I can say
but little, as it is screened off from the church for the use of the
nuns,[30] and the only view of it is obtained through the screen. The
main arches between the nave and aisles are very simple, of two orders,
the inner square, the outer moulded. Above these is a string-course
level with the springing of the groining, and then a clerestory of long,
simple lancet windows, the whole forming a noble and impressive
interior. Above the nuns’ stalls on the south I noticed a good
fifteenth-century organ, with pipes arranged in a series of stepped
compartments, and painted shutters of the same shape; below the
principal range of pipes those of one stop are placed projecting
horizontally from the organ. This is an almost universal arrangement in
Spanish organs, and is always very picturesque in its effect, and I
believe in the case of trumpet-stops very useful, though somewhat
costly.[31]
The detail generally of all the architecture here is very good, and in
particular nothing can be more minute and delicate in execution than
some of the sculpture of foliage in the eastern chapels, where also, as
is frequently the case in early Spanish buildings, the dog-tooth
enrichment is freely introduced wherever possible. The design of the
interior of the choir is very good; below are lancet windows, with
semi-circular inside arches; and above, lancets with double internal
jamb-shafts, very picturesquely introduced high up in the walls, and
close to the groining. I could only get a glimpse of the exterior of the
apse, owing to the high walls which completely enclose the convent on
the east. It has simple but good buttresses, but otherwise there seems
nothing worthy of note. The rest of the exterior is, however, very
interesting. The general view which I give shows the extremely simple
and somewhat English-looking west front; the gateway and wall, with its
Moorish battlements, dividing an inner court from the great court north
of the church; and the curious rather than beautiful steeple. An arched
bell-cot rises out of the western wall of the lantern, and a tall
staircase-turret out of the western wall of the north transept. The
cloister, which is carried all along the north aisle of the nave of the
church, is very simple, having two divisions between each buttress, the
arches being carried on shafts, coupled in the usual early fashion, one
behind the other. A very rich first-pointed doorway opens into the
second bay from the west of this cloister, and a much simpler archway,
with a circular window over it, into the fifth, and at its east end a
most ingenious and picturesque group is produced by the contrivance of a
covered passage from the cloister to the projecting transept-porch. The
detail here is of the richest first-pointed, very delicate and
beautiful, but, apparently, very little cared for now. The cloister is
entirely blocked up and converted into a receptacle for lumber, but I
was able to see that it is groined. The rose window in the
transept-porch, with doubled traceries and shafts, set one behind the
other, with fine effect, the elaborate corbel-tables, and the doorway to
the smaller porch--rich with chevron and dog-tooth--ought to be
specially noticed: their detail being tolerably convincing as to their
French origin. There are some curious monuments inside the
transept-porch, which I was not able to examine properly, as when I went
to Las Huelgas a second time, in order to see them, I found the church
locked for the day. To see such a church properly it is necessary to
rise with the lark; for after ten or eleven in the morning it is always
closed.
There is a good simple gateway of the thirteenth century leading into
the western court of the convent, but otherwise I could see nothing old,
though I daresay the fortunate architect who first is able to examine
the whole of the buildings will find much to reward his curiosity.[32]
For there is not only a very fine early cloister, but also, if Madoz
is to be trusted, a chapter-house, the vaulting of which is supported on
four lofty columns, and which is probably, therefore, a square chamber
with nine vaulting bays.
[Illustration: No. 4.
LAS HUELGAS. BURGOS.
p. 38.
NORTH-WEST VIEW.]
A long list of royal personages buried here is given by Florez.[33] In
the choir are the founders, Alfonso VIII. and Alienor; in the nave of
Sta. Catalina, Alfonso VII., the founder’s grandfather, his father, his
son Don Henrique I., and twenty more of his kin; and in the other parts
of the church a similarly noble company.
The king seems to have founded a hospital for men at the same time as,
and in connexion with, the convent; but I saw nothing of this, and I do
not know whether it still exists.
Here took place many solemnities: Alfonso VII., nephew of the founder,
was the first who was made a knight in it (A.D. 1219, Nov. 27); and in
A.D. 1254 Don Alfonso el Sabio knighted Edward I. of England before the
altar; whilst in later days it seems that in A.D. 1330, in A.D. 1341,
and again in A.D. 1366, the kings were here crowned;[34] and in 1367
Edward the Black Prince lodged here after the battle of Navarrete, and
went hence to the church of Sta. Maria to swear to a treaty with the
King Don Pedro before the principal altar.[35]
The convent seems to have been quite independent of the Bishop,[36] save
that each abbess after her election went to ask him to bless the house,
when he always answered by protesting that his consent to do so was in
no wise to be construed in any sense derogatory to his power, or as
binding on his successors. I observe that the abbesses here were elected
for life until A.D. 1593, but that from that time they have held office
for three years only; though in a few instances they have been
re-elected for a second such term.
It was a relief, after the picturesque magnificence of the later
Burgalese architects, to turn to such a simple severe church as this at
Las Huelgas. But I must not detain my readers any longer within its
pleasant walls; and we will imagine ourselves to be there in A.D. 1454,
in the midst of a group of the greatest of the nobles and clergy of
Castile: we should have found the Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena there, and
with him Juan de Colonia, his German architect, and Maestro Gil de
Siloe, the sculptor, and Martin Sanchez, the wood-carver, all of them
invited and ready to take part in a great work just about to be
completed. Juan II. had just died at Valladolid, and forthwith his body
was taken towards the Carthusian convent of Miraflores, by Burgos, where
of old stood a palace, which in A.D. 1441 he had converted into a
convent, and in A.D. 1454, just before his death, had begun to rebuild.
The Bishop met his body at Palenzuela--one day’s journey from
Burgos--and brought it in procession to the “Real Casa de Las Huelgas,”
where he rested the night; and thence he went onward, the coffin borne
by ladies and gentlemen, to San Pablo in the city, where the Dominican
Fathers sung the funeral office, and the next day--the feast of St. John
the Baptist--to Miraflores, where the Bishop himself said the office and
preached. Then the body was deposited with much pomp in the sacristy
until the church should be finished.[37]
Let us follow them thither. The walk is dreary enough on this hot
September day, and terribly deep in dust; but yet, as it rises up the
slope of the hills on the side of the river opposite to the cathedral
and city, good views are obtained of both. It is but a couple of miles
to the convent, which stands desolately by itself, and never was there a
spot which, in its present state, could less properly be called
Miraflores, where not even a blade of grass is to be seen. The church
stands up high above all the other buildings, but its exterior is not
attractive; its outline is somewhat like, though very inferior to that
of Eton College chapel, and its detail is all rather poor. The windows,
placed very high from the floor, are filled with flamboyant tracery, the
buttresses are plain, and the pinnacles and parapet quite Renaissance in
their character, and are, no doubt, additions to the original fabric.
The west gable is fringed with cusping--a very unhappy scheme for a
coping-line against the sky! A court at the west end opens into the
chapel by its west door, which is close to the main entrance to the
convent; but we were taken round by several courts and quadrangles, one
of them a cloister of vast size, surrounded by the houses of the monks.
These are of fair size, each having two or three rooms below, and two
above. Their entrance doorways are square-headed, quaintly cut up into a
point in the centre of the lintel, and by the side of each door is a
small hatch for the reception of food. Another smaller cloister, close
to the south door of the church, has fair pointed windows, with their
sills filled with red tiles, and edged with green tiles. Besides these
remains, the only old work I saw was a good flat ceiling, panelled
between the joists, and richly painted in cinquecento fashion. A good
effect was produced here by the prevalence of white and red alternately
in the patterns painted on the joists.
The chapel is entered from the convent by a door on the south side, in
the third bay from the west. It consists of five bays and a polygonal
apse, and is about 135 feet long, 32 wide, and 63 feet in height. The
western bay is the people’s nave, and is divided from the next by a
metal screen. The second bay forms the Coro, and has stalls at the
sides, and two altars on the east, one on each side of the doorway in
the screen which separates the Coro from the eastern portion of the
chapel. This last is fitted with five stalls on each side against the
western screen, and with twenty on either side, all of them extremely
rich in their detail: there is a continuous canopy over the whole, and
very intricate traceries at the back of each stall.[38]
A step at the east end of the stalls divides the sacrarium from the
western part of the chapel; and nearly the whole of the space here is
occupied by the sumptuous monument of the founder and his second wife,
Isabel or “Elizabeth,” as she is called in the inscription. In the north
wall is the monument of the Infante Alfonso, their son; and against the
south wall is a sort of throne with very lofty and elaborate canopy,
which is said by the cicerone to be for the use of the priest who says
mass. Finally, the east wall is entirely filled with an enormous
Retablo. The groining throughout has, as is usually the case in late
Spanish work in Burgos, a good many surface ribs, and enormous painted
bosses at their intersections. These are so much undercut, so large, and
so intricate in their design, that I believe they must be of wood, and
not of stone. They are of very common occurrence, and always have an
extravagant effect, being far too large and intricate for their
position. The apse is groined in thirteen very narrow bays, and its
groining ribs are richly foliated on the under side. Pagan cornices of
plaster and whitewash have been freely bestowed everywhere, to the great
damage of the walls, and to such an extent as to make the interior look
cold and gloomy. The windows are filled with what looks like poor
Flemish glass, though it may perhaps be native work, as the names of two
painters on glass, Juan de Santillana and Juan de Valdivieso, are known
as residents in Burgos at the end of the fifteenth century,[39] about
the time at which it must have been executed.
The monument of Juan and Isabel is as magnificent a work of its kind as
I have ever seen[40]--richly wrought all over. The heraldic achievements
are very gorgeous, and the dresses are everywhere covered with very
delicate patterns in low relief. The whole detail is of the nature of
the very best German third-pointed work rather than of flamboyant, and I
think, for beauty of execution, vigour and animation of design, finer
than any other work of the age. The plan of the high tomb on which the
effigies lie is a square with another laid diagonally on it. At the four
cardinal angles are sitting figures of the four evangelists, rather
loosely placed on the slab, with which they seem to have no connexion;
the king holds a sceptre, the queen a book, and both lie under canopies
with a very elaborate perforated stone division between the figures;
round the sides of the tomb are effigies of kings and saints, figures of
the Virtues, sculptured subjects, naked figures, and foliage of
marvellous delicacy. A railing encloses the tomb. The whole is the work
of Maestro Gil de Siloe; and from the Archives of the Church it appears
that, in A.D. 1486, he was paid 1340 maravedis for the design of the
work, that he commenced its execution in A.D. 1489, and completed it in
A.D. 1493. The monument cost 442,667 maravedis, exclusive of the
alabaster, which cost 158,252 maravedis.[41]
About the same time the same sculptor executed the monument of Alfonso,
son of Juan and Isabel, in the north wall of the sacrarium. This, though
less ambitious than the other, is a noble work. It consists of a high
tomb with a recessed arch over it, and pinnacles at the sides. The high
tomb has a great shield held by angels, with men in armour on either
side; under the arch above the Infante kneels at a Prie-Dieu. The arch
is three-centred, edged with a rich fringe of foliage and naked figures;
and between it and the ogee gable above it is a spirited figure of St.
George and the Dragon. The side pinnacles have figures of the twelve
apostles, and one in the centre the Annunciation.[42]
The Retablo is no less worthy of notice. Its colour as well as its
sculpture is of the richest kind. Below, on either side of the
tabernacle (which has been modernized), are St. John Baptist and S. Mary
Magdalene, and subjects on either side of them; on the left the
Annunciation, and S. Mary Magdalene anointing our Lord’s feet, and on
the right the Adoration of the Magi, and the Betrayal of our Lord;
whilst beyond, Alfonso and Isabel kneel at faldstools, with their
coats-of-arms above them. Above the Tabernacle is the Assumption of the
Blessed Virgin, and above this a grand circle entirely formed of
clustered angels, in the centre of which is a great crucifix surmounted
by the Pelican vulning her breast. Within this circle are four subjects
from the Passion, and a King and a Pope on either side holding the arms
of the Cross, which is completely detached from the background. On
either side are S. John and S. Mary; and beside all these, a crowd of
subjects and figures, pinnacles and canopies, which it is impossible to
set down at length. The whole of this work was done by the same Gil de
Siloe, assisted by Diego de la Cruz, at a cost of 1,015,613 maravedis,
and was executed between A.D. 1496 and 1499. Behind the Retablo some of
the old pavement remains, of encaustic tiles in blue, white, and red.
The works at this church seem to have made but slow progress owing to
the troubled state of the kingdom after the death of Juan II. His son
gave something towards the works in A.D. 1454, but nothing more until
A.D. 1465. In A.D. 1474 he died, and was succeeded by Isabel the
Catholic, who, in A.D. 1476, confirmed the grants to the monastery, and
completed the church in A.D. 1488; but it was not, as we have seen,
until the end of the century that the whole work was really finished.
Juan de Colonia made the plan for the building in A.D. 1454, for which
he received 3350 maravedis: he directed its construction for twelve
years, and after his death, in A.D. 1466, Garci Fernandez de Matienzo
continued it till he died of the plague in the year 1488, when Simon,
son of Juan de Colonia, completed it.[43]
Having completed my notice of the three great buildings of Burgos and
its neighbourhood, and which in their style and history best illustrate
the several periods of Christian art, I now proceed to give some notes
of the Conventual and Parish Churches, which are numerous and fairly
interesting. In Burgos, however, as is so often the case on all parts of
the Continent, the number of desecrated churches is considerable. The
suppression of monasteries involved their desecration as a matter of
course; and without religious orders it is obviously useless to have
churches crowded together in the way one sees them here. I remember
making a note of the relative position of three of these churches, which
stand corner to corner without a single intervening house; and though
this is an extreme case, the churches were no doubt very numerous for
the population. Unluckily a desecrated church is generally a sealed book
to an ecclesiologist. They are usually turned to account by the
military; and soldiers view with proverbially jealous eyes any one who
makes notes!
Just above the west front of the Cathedral is the little church of San
Nicolas, mainly interesting for its Retablo, which, however, scarcely
needs description, though it is gorgeously sculptured with the story, I
think, of the patron. Its date is fixed by an inscription, which I give
in a note.[44] On either side are monuments of a type much favoured in
Spain, and borrowed probably from Italy, of which the main feature is,
that the figures lie on a sloping surface, and look painfully insecure.
Here too I saw one of the first old western galleries that I met with in
my Spanish journeys; and as I shall constantly have to mention their
existence, position, and arrangement in parochial churches, it may be as
well to say here, that at about the same date that choirs were moved
westward into the naves of cathedrals, western galleries, generally of
stone, carried on groining, and fitted up with stalls round three sides,
with a great lectern in the centre, and organs on either side, were
erected in a great number of parish churches. It cannot be doubted that
in those days the mode of worship of the people was exactly what it is
now; no one cared much if at all for anything but the service at the
altar, and the choir was banished to where it would be least seen, least
heard, and least in the way! At present it seems to me that one never
sees any one taking more than the slightest passing notice of the really
finely-performed service even in the cathedral choirs; whilst in
contrast to this, in the large churches, with an almost endless number
of altars, all are still used, and all seem to have each their own
flock of worshippers; and though it is a constant source of pain and
grief to an ever-increasing body of English Churchmen that the use of
their own altars should be so lamentably less than it ever was in
primitive days, or than it is now in any other branch of the Catholic
Church, it is some comfort to feel that our people have tried to retain
due respect for some of the other daily uses of the Church, inferior
though they be. In Spain, though I was in parish churches almost every
day during my journey, I do not remember seeing the western gallery in
use more than once. Sometimes it has been my fate to meet with men who
suppose that the common objection to galleries in churches is, that
there is no old “authority” for them. Well, here in Spain there is
authority without end; and I commend to those Anglicans who wish to
revive or retain their use in England the curious fact, that the country
in which we find it is one distinguished beyond all others by the very
decided character of its Romanism, and the period in which they were
erected there, one in which Rome was probably more hostile to such as
they than any other in the whole course of her history.[45]
The gallery of San Nicolas is less important than most of its class are;
and there is indeed little to detain any one within its walls.
Externally there is a low tower rising out of the west end of the south
aisle. This has a fine third-pointed south doorway with an ogee
crocketed canopy, and a belfry stage of two lancet-lights on each face,
roofed with a flat roof of pantiles. The remainder of the church has
been much altered; but a good flying-buttress remains on the south side,
and one or two lancet-windows which convey the impression that the first
foundation of the church must have been in the thirteenth century. The
east wall is not square, but built so as to suit the irregular site. The
whole church is ungainly and ugly on the exterior, and its planning and
proportions neither picturesque nor scientific. It is, in short, one of
those churches of which we have so many in England, from which nothing
is to be learnt save on some small matter of detail; and the
alterations of its roofs, windows, and walls have in the end left it an
ungainly and uncouth outline, which is redeemed only by its picturesque
situation on the slope of the hill just above the cathedral parvise,
with which it groups, and from which it is well seen.
Following the steep path of the east end of San Nicolas, I soon reached
the fine church of San Esteban. It stands just below the castle, the
decaying walls of which surround the slope of melancholy hill which
rises from its doorway; these, though now they look so incapable of
mischief, yet effectually thwarted the Duke of Wellington.[46] It is
quite worth while to ascend the hill, if only for the view. San Esteban,
shorn as it is--like all Spanish churches--of more than half its old
external features, with pinnacles nipped off, parapets destroyed,
windows blocked up, and roofs reduced from their old steep pitch to the
uniform rough, ragged, and ruinous-looking flat of pantiles, which is
universal here, forms, nevertheless, a good foreground for the fine view
of the cathedral below it and the other points of interest in the town
beyond. Yet these are fewer than would be expected in such a city, so
long the capital of a kingdom and residence of a line of kings. There
are no steeples worthy of remark save those of the cathedral, the
churches are all, like San Esteban, more or less mutilated, and there
is--as always in cities which have been great and now are poor--an air
of misery and squalor about only too many of the buildings on which the
eye first lights in these outskirts of the city.
I have not been so lucky as to find any record bearing in any way upon
the erection of San Esteban, and I regret this the more, as its place
among the churches of Burgos is no doubt next after the cathedral, and
in all respects it is full of interest.
The ground plan (Plate II.) will explain the general scheme of the
building--a nave and aisles, ended at the east with three parallel
apses, a cloister, and a large hall on the south of and opening into the
cloister. The north side of the cloister has been much mutilated by the
erection of chapels and a sacristy, whilst the north wall of the church
is blocked up by low buildings built against it. The only good view of
the exterior is that from the south-west. Spanish boys did their best to
make sketching it impossible, yet their amusements were after all
legitimate enough for their age, and it is very seldom in Spain that a
sketcher is mobbed and annoyed in the way he commonly is in France or
Italy when he ventures on a sketch in an at all public place.
[Illustration:--BURGOS:--Ground Plans of San Gil: San Esteban: and
Convent of Las Huelgas. Plate II
Published by John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1865.]
The erection of this church may, I believe, be dated between A.D.
1280-1350; and to the earlier of these two periods the grand west
doorway probably belongs. The tympanum contains, in its upper
compartment, our Lord seated, with St. John the Evangelist, the Blessed
Virgin and angels kneeling on either side--a very favourite subject with
Burgalese sculptors of the period; below is the martyrdom of the patron
saint, divided into three subjects: (1) St. Stephen before the king; (2)
Martyrdom of St. Stephen, angels taking his soul from his body; and (3)
the devil taking the soul of his persecutor. The jambs have each three
figures under canopies, among which are St. Stephen (with stones
sticking to his vestments) and St. Laurence. The doorway is built out in
a line with the front of the tower buttresses, and above it a modern
balustrade is placed in advance of the west window, which is a fine rose
of twenty rays. This window at a little distance has all the effect of
very early work; but upon close inspection its details and mouldings all
belie this impression, and prove it to be certainly not earlier than the
middle of the fourteenth century. The whole of the tracery is thoroughly
geometrical, and the design very good. Above it is a lancet window on
each face, and then the lower part only of a belfry window of two
lights, cut off by one of the usual flat-pitched tiled roofs. A
staircase turret is carried up in the south-west angle and finished with
a weathering at the base of the belfry stage. The buttresses are all
plain, and, as I have said, shorn of the pinnacles with which they were
evidently intended to be finished.[47]
This church seems to be always locked up, and I think it was here that
the woman who lives in the cloister and shows the church told me that
there was service in the church once only in the week; and certainly it
had the air which a church misused in this way usually assumes.
We were admitted by the cloister, a small and much mutilated work of
circa A.D. 1300. It opens by four arches into a large hall on its south
side, which is groined at a higher level than the cloister. The
groining of the cloister is good, and the ribs well moulded; but the
window tracery is all destroyed, and most of the windows are blocked up.
The central court is very small, as indeed is the whole work; but a
cloister may be of any size, and in some of our many collegiate
erections of the present day it would be as well to remember this, and
emulate really and fairly the beautiful effects always attained by our
forefathers in this way.[48]
In the western wall of the cloister are two arched recesses for
monuments, one of which has a coped tomb, with eight steps to the foot
of the cross, which is carved upon its lid. The eastern side is later
than the rest, and its groining probably not earlier than A.D. 1500.
Entering the church from hence we find a very solid, simple, and
dignified building, spoilt indeed as much as possible by yellow wash,
but still in other respects very little damaged. It is groined
throughout, and the groining has the peculiarity of having ridge ribs
longitudinally but not transversely. This is common in Spain; but it is
impossible to see why one ridge should require it and the other not, and
the only explanation is that possibly the architect wished to lead the
eye on from end to end of the building. In the groining of an apse this
ridge-rib in its western part always looks very badly, and jars with the
curved lines of all the rest of the ribs. The columns of the nave
arcades are circular, with eight smaller engaged shafts around them,
those under the western tower being rather more elaborate and larger
than the others. Here we see a clear imitation of the very similar
planning of the cathedral nave. The planning of the east end is more
interesting, because, whilst it has no precedent in the cathedral, it is
one of the evidences we have of the connexion of the Spanish
architecture of the middle ages with that of other countries, which we
ought not to overlook. I have said something on this in speaking of the
plan of Las Huelgas. Here, however, I do not think we can look in the
same direction for the original type of plan; for, numerous as are the
varieties of ground-plan which we see in France, there is one--the
parallel-triapsidal--which we meet so seldom that we may almost say it
does not occur at all. In Germany, on the other hand, it is seen
everywhere, and there, indeed, it is the national plan: in Italy it is
also found constantly. In Spain, however, it was quite as much the
national ground-plan as it was in Germany; almost everywhere we see it,
and in any case the fact is of value as proving that the Spaniards
adopted their own national form of Gothic, and were not indebted solely
to their nearest neighbours, the French, for their inspiration and
education in architecture, though undoubtedly they owed them very much.
[Illustration: NO. 5
SAN ESTEBAN, BURGOS.
p. 49.
INTERIOR LOOKING WEST.]
San Esteban is lighted almost entirely from windows set very high up in
the walls. Those in the apses are in the position of clerestory windows,
their sills being level with the springing of the groining. The
consequence of this arrangement--a very natural one in a country where
heat and light are the main things to be excluded from churches--was
that a great unbroken space was left between the floor and the windows;
and hence it happened that the enormous Retablos, rising seldom less
than twenty feet, and often thirty, forty, or even sixty feet from the
floors, naturally grew to be so prominent and popular a feature. In San
Esteban the Retablos are none of them old, but doubtless take the place
of others which were so.
The western gallery is so good an example of its class, that I think it
is quite worthy of illustration. It is obviously an insertion of circa
A.D. 1450, and is reached by a staircase of still later date at the west
end of the south aisle. I cannot deny it the merit of picturesqueness,
and the two ambons which project like pulpits at the north and south
extremities of the front add much to its effect. The stalls are all
arranged in the gallery in the usual fashion of a choir, with return
stalls at the west end and a large desk for office books in the centre.
The organ is on the north side in the bay east of the gallery, and is
reached through the ambon on the Gospel[49] side. This organ, its loft,
and the pulpit against it are all very elaborate examples of
Plateresque[50] Renaissance work.
Of the fittings of the church two only require any notice, and both of
them are curious. One is an iron lectern, just not Gothic, but of very
fair design,[51] and of a type that we might with advantage introduce
into our own churches. The other is a wooden bier and herse belonging to
some burial confraternity, and kept in the cloister; the dimensions are
so small (and I saw another belonging to the confraternity of San Gil of
the same size), that it was no doubt made for carrying a corpse without
a coffin. One knows how in the middle ages this was the usual if not
invariable plan,[52] and as these herses are evidently still in use
(that of San Gil having been repainted in 1850), it has possibly never
been given up.
[Illustration]
The main thing, I think, that struck me in the architecture of San
Esteban, was the very early look of all its proportions and details
compared to what seemed to be their real date, when examined more in
detail and with the aid of mouldings, traceries, and the like; and its
value consists mainly in the place it occupies among the buildings of
Burgos, illustrating a period of which otherwise there would be very
little indeed in the city.
From San Esteban I found my way first through the decayed-looking and
uninteresting streets, and then among the ruined outskirts of the
north-eastern part of the city, to the church of San Gil, situated very
much in the same kind of locality as San Esteban, on the outskirts of
the city. This church is just mentioned in ‘España Sagrada’[53] twice:
first as being named, with ten other churches in Burgos, in a Bull of
A.D. 1163; and subsequently, as having been built by Pedro de Camargo
and Garcia de Burgos, with the approbation of Bishop Villacraces in A.D.
1399; and Don Diego de Soria, and his wife Doña Catalina, are said to
have rebuilt the Capilla mayor in A.D. 1586.
[Illustration: No. 6.
SAN GIL, BURGOS
p. 51.
IRON PULPIT.]
I give the plan of this church on Plate II., and am inclined to doubt
the exact truth of the statements I have just quoted. I believe the
church to be a cruciform structure of the fourteenth century, whose
chancel and chancel aisles reproduced the plan of Las Huelgas, but were
probably rebuilt in A.D. 1399. The so-called Capilla mayor is probably
the chapel on the north side of the north aisle, a very elaborate
semi-Renaissance erection, with an octagon vault, reproducing many of
the peculiarities of Spanish groining, supported upon pendentives
similar to those of which I have spoken in describing the later works in
the cathedral; and it is no doubt the work of one of the descendants or
pupils of Juan de Colonia. The late chapels on each side of the choir
have enormous wooden bosses at the intersection of the groining ribs,
carved with tracery, and with a painting of a saint in the centre. This
mixture of painting and sculpture is very much the fashion in Spanish
wood-carvings, and the altar Retablos often afford examples of it. In
the floor of this church are some curious effigies of black marble, with
heads and hands of white.[54] Two such remain in the east wall of one of
the southern chapels, where they lie north and south.
The Retablos of the two chapels, north and south of the choir, are very
sumptuous works.
Against the north-west pier of the crossing there stands what is perhaps
the most uncommon piece of furniture in the church, an iron pulpit. It
is of very late date, but I think quite worthy of illustration. The
support is of iron, resting on stone, and the staircase modern. The
framework at the angles, top and bottom, is of wood, upon which the
ironwork is laid. The traceries are cut out of two plates of iron, laid
one over the other, and the ironwork is in part gilded, but I do not
think that this is original. The canopy is of the same age and
character, and the whole effect is very rich, at the same time that it
is very novel.[55] I saw other iron pulpits, but none so old as this.
I visited two or three other parish churches, but found little in them
worth notice. San Lesmes is one of the largest, consisting of a nave
with aisles, transepts, apsidal choir, and chapels added in the usual
fashion. The window tracery is flamboyant, and the windows have richly
moulded jambs, and are very German in their design. The south door is
very large and rich, of the same style, and fills the space between two
buttresses, on the angles of which are St. Gabriel and the Blessed
Virgin.[56] Close to San Lesmes are the church of San Juan, and another,
the dedication of which I could not learn, whilst opposite it is the old
Convent of San Juan, now converted into a hospital. The entrance is a
great doorway, remarkable for the enormous heraldic achievements which
were always very popular with the later Castilian architects. The church
of San Juan is now desecrated; it is cruciform in plan, with a deep
apsidal chancel, and seems to have had chapels on the east side of the
transepts. The church is groined throughout, and its window tracery poor
flamboyant work. San Lucas has a groined nave of three bays, and there
is another church near it of the same character. They both appear to
have been built at the end of the sixteenth century.
Of old Convents, the most important appears to have been that of San
Pablo. It is now desecrated, and used as a cavalry store; and though I
was allowed to look, I could not obtain permission to go, into it.
Florez[57] gives the date of the original foundation of the monastery in
A.D. 1219, and says that it was moved to its present site in A.D. 1265,
but not completed for more than 150 years after that date. The
inscription on the monument of Bishop Pablo de Santa Maria, on the
Gospel side of the altar in San Pablo, records him to have been the
builder of the church,[58] and his story is so singular as to be worth
telling. He was a Jew by birth, a native of Burgos, and married to a
Jewess, by whom he had four sons[59] and one daughter. In A.D. 1390, at
the age of forty, he was baptized; and having tried in vain to convert
his wife, “he treated her as though she were dead, dissolving his
marriage legally, and ascending to the greater perfection of the
priesthood.” In A.D. 1415 he was made Bishop of Burgos, and being at
Valladolid at the time, all Burgos went out to meet him as he came to
take possession of his see. “His venerable mother, Doña Maria, and his
well-loved wife Joana, waited for him in the Episcopal Palace, from
whence he went afterwards to adore God in the cathedral.” Doña Joana was
buried near the bishop in San Pablo, with an inscription in Spanish,
ending, “she died (‘falleció’) in the year 1420,” and from the absence
of any religious form in the inscription, I infer that she died
unconverted. The bishop died in A.D. 1435.
The church of San Pablo consists of a nave and aisles of five bays,
transepts and apsidal choir, with many added chapels. The nave groining
bays are square, those of the aisle oblong, a mode of planning which
marks rather an Italian-Gothic than a French or German origin. The
church is vaulted throughout, with very domical vaults, and lighted with
lancets in the aisles, circular windows in the clerestory, and traceried
windows in the choir. Part of the old western gallery still remains. The
vaulting has transverse, diagonal, and ridge ribs. The apse is well
buttressed, but, like all the churches in Burgos, San Pablo has lost its
old roofs, and has been so much spoilt by the additions which have been
made to it, that its exterior is very unprepossessing. Not so the
interior, which, both in scale and proportion, is very fine. The
architect of San Pablo is said to have been Juan Rodriguez, who
commenced it in 1415, and completed it before 1435.[60]
Another convent, that of La Merced, has been treated in the same way,
and is now a military hospital. Its church is on the same plan as that
of San Pablo, with the principal doorway in the north wall instead of
the west, and this opening under the usual vaulted gallery. There is,
too, a small apsidal recess for an altar in the north wall of the north
transept. The window tracery and details here are all of very late
Pointed, but the buttresses and flying buttresses are good. Flat roofs,
destroyed gables, and the entire absence of any steeple or turret to
break the mass, make the exterior of little value. This convent was
moved to its present site in A.D. 1272, but I doubt whether any part of
the exterior now visible is so old as this.
I saw no other churches worthy of mention in Burgos; but there are
others which ought to be examined in the neighbourhood, among which one
a little beyond Las Huelgas, of large size, surrounded by trees, and
apparently belonging to a convent, seemed to be the most important.[61]
There are but few remains of old Domestic Architecture. The Palace has
been modernized, but is still approached by a groined passage from the
south door of the cathedral. The Palace of the Constable Velasco is a
bald and ugly erection of the sixteenth century, in the very latest kind
of Gothic; its walls finished with a strange parapet of crocketed
pinnacles and stones cut out into a sort of rude fork; its entrance a
square-headed doorway, with a large space above it, enclosed with
enormous chains carved in stone, within which are armorial bearings. The
internal courtyard is surrounded by buildings of three stages in height,
with open arcades to each, and traceried balconies. The arcades and
windows throughout have debased three-centred arches.
The principal town gateway, that of Sta. Maria, is close to the
cathedral; its rear is a very simple but massive work of the thirteenth
century, and rather Italian in its design. The front facing the Prado
and the river was so much altered by Charles V. that it is doubtful
whether any of the old work remains; it is now a very picturesque jumble
of circular towers and turrets, battlemented and crenellated, and
looking rather like one of those mediæval castles which are seen either
in an illumination, or in a canopy over a figure in stained glass, than
like a real and useful fortified gateway.
It will be seen how full of interest to the ecclesiologist Burgos is. My
notes are, I have no doubt, not by any means exhaustive; and I have
equally little doubt that one who had more time at his disposal would
discover much more than I found; besides which, I was under the
impression, when I was at Burgos, that the Monastery of San Pedro de
Cardeña, so intimately connected with the story of the Cid, and where he
lay peacefully till the French invasion, had been entirely destroyed,
whereas, in truth, I believe the church founded in the thirteenth
century still remains; and, if so, must certainly reward examination. It
is but a few miles from Burgos.
The great promenade here is along the river-side, where the houses are
all new, bald, and uninteresting; but the back streets are picturesque,
and there is a fine irregularly-shaped Plaza, surrounded by arcades in
front of the shops, where are to be found capital blankets and _mantas_,
useful even in the hottest weather if any night travelling is to be
undertaken, and invariably charming in their colour.