TOLEDO.
Toledo is now extremely easy of access from Madrid, a branch from the
main line of the Alicante railway turning off at Castellejon, and
reducing the journey to one of about two or three hours only, from the
capital. Of old the road passed through Illescas, and the picturesque
church there, illustrated by Villa Amil, made me regret that the less
interesting railroad rendered the journey by road out of the question.
The country traversed by the railway is very uninteresting, and
generally looks parched and arid to a degree. Near Aranjuez the waters
of the Tagus have been so assiduously and profitably used, that a great
change comes over the scene, and the train passes through woods where
elms and other forest trees seem to thrive almost as well as they do in
damp England; and one can easily understand how this artificial verdure
in the plain must delight the Castilian, who otherwise, if he wishes to
enjoy such sights, must leave the heat of the plain for the cold winds
of the mountain ranges of the Guadarrama. Aranjuez is, however, but an
oasis in this Castilian desert, and the railway, soon leaving it behind,
wends its way along the treeless, leafless plain to the ecclesiastical
capital of the kingdom. On the opposite or right bank of the Tagus, the
hills rise to a considerable height, and here and there their dull brown
outlines are marked, though hardly relieved, by large clusters of houses
surrounding the lofty and apparently uninteresting churches which mark
the villages, whose _tout ensemble_ seems everywhere on nearer
inspection most uninviting to the eye. The banks of the Tagus are more
refreshing, for here the water-wheels for raising water, which line the
margin of the stream, suggest some desire on the part of the people to
make the most of their opportunities, and they are rewarded by the
luxuriant growth which always attends irrigation in Spain.
I looked out long and anxiously for the first view of Toledo, but the
hills, which nearly surround it, conceal it altogether until one has
arrived within about two or three miles distance; and here, with the
Tagus meandering through its _vega_ in the foreground, the great mass
of the hospital outside and below the city to the right hand, and the
wall-encircled rock on which the city is perched, crowned by the vast
mass of the Alcazar to the left, the view is certainly fine and
impressive.
From most points of view, both within and without the city, the
cathedral is seldom well, and sometimes not at all, seen, standing as it
does on much lower ground on the side of the rock which slopes towards
the least accessible part of the river gorge, and much surrounded by
other buildings, whilst the Alcazar, which occupies the highest ground
in the whole city, is so vast and square a block of prodigiously lofty
walls (old in plan, but modern in most of their details), as to command
attention everywhere. The other side of the river is edged by bold
hills, and all along its banks are to be seen water-wheels so placed as
to raise the water for the irrigation of the land on either side. It is
not, however, until after more intimate knowledge of the city has been
gained, that its extreme picturesqueness and interest are discovered.
The situation is, indeed, most wild and striking. The Tagus, winding
almost all round the city, confines it much in the fashion in which the
Wear surrounds Durham. But here the town is far larger, the river banks
are more rocky, precipitous, and wild than at Durham: whilst the space
enclosed within them is a confused heap of rough and uneven ground, well
covered with houses, churches, and monasteries, and intersected
everywhere by narrow, Eastern, and Moorish-looking streets and alleys,
most of which afford no passage-room for any kind of carriage, and but
scanty room for foot passengers. It is, consequently, without exception,
the most difficult city to find one’s way in that I have ever seen, and
the only one in which I have ever found myself obliged to confess a
commissionaire[202] or guide of some sort to be an absolute necessity,
if one would not waste half one’s time in trying to find the way from
one place to another.
The railway station is outside the city, which is entered from it by the
famous bridge of Alcantara, which has a single wide and lofty arch above
the stream, guarded on the further side by a gateway of the time of
Charles V., and on the town side by one of semi-Moorish character. Above
it are seen, as one enters, the picturesque apses of the old church of
Santiago, and the tolerably perfect remains of the double _enceinte_ of
the city walls; whilst on the opposite side of the river, as a further
guard to the well-protected city, was the Castle of San Cervantes[203]
(properly San Servando), of which nothing now remains but a few rugged
towers and walls crowning the equally rugged rocks.[204]
The road from the bridge, passing under the gateway which guards it into
a small walled courtyard, turns sharply to the right under another
archway, and then rises slowly below the walls until, with another sharp
turn, it passes under the magnificent Moorish Puerta del Sol, and so on
into the heart of the city.
The Alcazar is the only important building seen in entering on this
side; but from the other side of the city where the bridge of San Martin
crosses the Tagus, the cathedral is a feature in the view, though it
never seems to be so prominent as might be expected with a church of its
grand scale. From both these points of view, indeed, it must be
remembered that the effect is not produced by the beauty or grandeur of
any one building; it is the desolate sublimity of the dark rocks that
bound the river; the serried phalanx of wall, and town, and house, that
line the cliffs; the tropical colour of sky, and earth, and masonry;
and, finally, the forlorn decaying and deserted aspect of the whole,
that makes the views so impressive and so unusual. Looking away from the
city walls towards the north, the view is much more _riant_, for there
the Tagus, escaping from its rocky defile, meanders across a fertile
_vega_, and long lines of trees, with here a ruined castle, and there
the apse of the curious church of the Cristo de la Vega, and there
again the famous factory of arms, give colour and incident to a view
which would anywhere be thought beautiful, but is doubly grateful by
comparison with the sad dignity of the forlorn old city.
The buildings to be studied here are of singular interest, inasmuch as
they reflect in a great degree the striking history of the city itself,
as well as of the kingdom of which it was so long the capital. There is
no doubt that there was a cathedral, as well as some churches,[205] here
before the conquest of this part of Spain, in A.D. 711, by the Moors;
and in the course of the long period of nearly four centuries during
which the Mahomedan rule lasted, many buildings were erected, and a
Moorish population was firmly planted, which, when Alonso VI. regained
the city in 1085, was still protected, and continued to live in it as
before. The Moors had, indeed, set an example of toleration[206] worthy
of imitation by their Christian conquerors; for though it is true that
they converted the old cathedral into their principal mosque, they still
allowed the Christians to celebrate their services in some other
churches[207] which existed at the time of the Conquest; and during the
greater part of the Christian rule, their tolerant example was so far
followed, that the Moors seem to have enjoyed the same freedom, and to
have lived there unmolested, whilst they built everywhere, and acted, in
fact, as architects, in the old city, not only for themselves, but also
for the Christians and the Jews, down to the establishment of the
Inquisition. It is a very remarkable fact, indeed, that with one grand
exception nearly all the buildings of the twelfth, thirteenth, and
fourteenth centuries, which are to be seen here, are more or less
Moorish in their character;[208] and though the cathedral, which is the
one exception, is an example of thoroughly pure Gothic work almost from
first to last, there never seems to have been any other attempt to
imitate the Christian architectural idea of which it was so grand an
exponent. I have purposely avoided going to those parts of Spain in
which the Moors were undisputed masters during the middle ages; but here
it is impossible to dismiss what they did without proper notice, seeing
that, after Granada and Cordoba, perhaps nowhere is there so much to be
seen of their work as in Toledo.
The buildings to be examined will be best described under certain heads,
reserving the cathedral for the last, because some of the Moorish
buildings are the oldest in the city, and these lead naturally on to the
later works of the same class. The order in which I shall attempt to
take them will be therefore as follows:--
I. The Moorish mosque;
II. The Jewish synagogues;
III. The Moorish houses;
IV. The Moorish work in churches;
V. The gateways, walls, and bridges;
VI. The cathedral and other examples of Christian art.
There are, indeed, some works anterior to the rule of the Moors, for
below the walls, in the _vega_, are said to be some slight remains of a
Roman amphitheatre;[209] in addition to which there are still some
fragments of work _possibly_ Visigothic, and anterior therefore to the
Moorish Conquest of 711. These are confined to a few capitals which have
some appearance of having been re-used by the Moors in their own
constructions, such _e.g._ as the capitals of the Mosque now called the
“Cristo de la Luz,” and those of the arcades on either side of the
church of San Roman, together with some fragments preserved in the court
of the hospital of Sta. Cruz. They are very rudely sculptured, and bear
so slight a resemblance to the early Romanesque work of the same period,
that it is difficult, I think, to decide positively as to their age. It
is certain, however, that the earliest distinctly Moorish capitals are
entirely unlike them in their character, and quite original in their
conception; and it is, of course, very possible that the Moors, pressed
by the necessity of the case, would, after their conquest, not only have
retained some of the existing buildings, but also have re-used the best
of their materials in their new works.
[Illustration: S. Cristo de la Luz, Toledo.]
The earliest of the distinctly Moorish buildings is a little
mosque--now called the church of “Cristo de la Luz”--which was standing
at the time of the entrance of Don Alonso VI. into the city, on Sunday,
May 25, 1085. He entered by the old Puerta de Visagra, and, turning into
this the first mosque on his road, ordered mass to be said, and hung up
his shield there before he went further. No doubt the nave of the
building is still very much in the state in which he found it; it is
very small, only 21 ft. 7¼ in. by 20 ft. 2 in., and this space is
subdivided into nine compartments by four very low circular columns,
which are about a foot in diameter. Their capitals are some of those of
which I have just spoken; they are all different, and, it seemed to me,
more like Moorish work than the other capitals of the same class at San
Roman and Sta. Cruz. The arches, of which four spring from each capital,
are all of the round horseshoe form; above them is a string-course, and
all the intermediate walls are carried up to the same height as the main
walls. They are all pierced above the arches with arcades of varied
design, generally cusped in very Moorish fashion, and supported on
shafts; and above these each of the nine divisions is crowned with a
little vault, formed by intersecting cusped ribs, thrown in the most
fantastic way across each other, and varied in each compartment. The
scale of the whole work is so diminutive that it is difficult, no doubt,
to understand how so much is done in so small a space; but, looking to
the early date of the work, it is impossible not to feel very great
respect for the workmen who built it, and for the ingenious intricacy
which has made their work look so much larger and more important than it
really is.[210] It is, indeed, an admirable instance of the skill and
dexterity in design which seem to have marked the Moors so honourably
from the first, and which must have made them, as far as one can judge,
in every respect but their faith so much the superiors of their
Christian contemporaries. An apse has been added for the altar, but this
is evidently a much later addition to the old mosque. The exterior face
of the walls is built of brick and rough stone. The lower part of the
side wall being arcaded with three round arches, within the centre of
which is a round horseshoe arch for a doorway; above is a continuous
sunk arcade of cusped arches, within which are window openings with
round horseshoe heads. The lower part of the walls is built with single
courses of brick, alternating with rough stonework; the piers and arches
of brick, with projecting labels and strings also of unmoulded brick.
The arches of the upper windows are built with red and green bricks
alternated. The horseshoe arches here are built in the usual Moorish
fashion, the lower part of the arch being constructed with bricks laid
horizontally, and cut at the edge to the required curve; and about
halfway round the arch they are cut back to receive the arch, which is
there commenced. In the same way the cinquefoiled arches of the upper
arcade have their lowest cusps formed by the stone abacus, the
intermediate cusps by bricks laid horizontally and cut at the edge, and
the upper central cusp alone has any of its masonry constructed as an
arch.
The upper stage of the mosque called De las Tornerias is Moorish work of
the same plan as the Cristo de la Luz; but I am much inclined to doubt
whether it is equally ancient. The rosettes cut in the vaults, and the
cusped openings, give this impression, and the vaults are quadripartite
and domical in section, the centres of the nine small bays of vaulting
being raised higher than the others, and having two parallel ribs
crossing each other both ways, in the way I have already noticed in the
Chapter-house at Salamanca, and the Templars’ Church at Segovia.
There is, so far as I know, no other mosque in the city so little
altered as these; but among the churches some are said to have been
first of all built for mosques. San Roman is one of these. It was
converted into a parish church at the end of the eleventh century,[211]
and the column and arches between the nave and aisles are probably of
this date. The arches are of the horseshoe form, and the capitals are, I
think, commonly quoted as some of the earlier works re-used by the
Moors. But I very much doubt whether their style justifies my
attributing to them any date earlier than the eleventh century. The
church was not consecrated until June 20th, 1221, but there can be no
doubt that it was built before this date. The noble steeple is one of
the works built by Moorish architects for Christian use, and it will be
better, perhaps, to reserve it for description with other works of the
same class.
Of the two synagogues the older is that which was founded in the twelfth
century, but seized in A.D. 1405 by the Toledans--instigated by the
preaching of San Vicente Ferrer--and dedicated as a church under the
name of Sta. Maria la Blanca.[212] The modernized exterior is of no
interest, but the interior is fairly preserved by the zeal, I believe,
of some Spanish antiquaries, having long been disused as a church. In
plan it consists of a nave, with two aisles on either side. A
quasi-chancel was formed at the east end (in the sixteenth century
apparently) by the prolongation of the central compartment or nave
beyond the aisles, and the intermediate aisles were also lengthened to a
less extent at the same time. There are eight horseshoe arches rising
from octagonal columns in each of the arcades, and the whole of them, as
well as their capitals, are executed in brick, covered with plaster. The
capitals are exceedingly elaborate, but very slightly varied in pattern:
they have but little connexion with any of the usual types of Byzantine
or Romanesque capitals, though they have rather more, perhaps, of the
delicate intricacy of the former than of any of the features of the
latter, and they are, I imagine, very much later than the original
capitals which they overlay. All the Moorish decorative work seems to
have been executed in the same way in plaster. This was of very fine
quality, and was evidently cut and carved as if it had been stone, and
seldom, if ever, I think, stamped or moulded, according to the mistaken
practice of the present day. The consequence is that there is endless
variety of design everywhere, and--wherever it was desired--any amount
of undercutting. The spandrels above the arches are filled in with
arabesque patterns, and there is a cusped wall arcade below the roof;
but almost all of this is evidently of much later date than the original
foundation, as the patterns are all of that large class of Moorish
devices which, though they retain many of their old peculiarities,
borrow largely at the same time from the traceries and cusping of late
Gothic work. Unfortunately in such work the material affords so small an
assistance in the detection of alterations, that it requires the
exercise of considerable caution to ascertain their exact limits; and in
Toledo, as in most places, people seem always disposed to claim the
highest possible antiquity in all cases, seldom allowing anything to
have been done by the Moors after the restoration of the Christian rule,
though, in fact, the exact converse of this would be nearer the truth.
The roof has coupled tie beams--placed a very slight distance apart--an
arrangement of which the Moorish carpenters seem to have been always
very fond. The pavement is very good, but must, I imagine, be of about
the date of the conversion of the synagogue into a church. It is divided
into compartments by border tiles, laid down the length of the church on
either side of the columns. The spaces between these are filled in with
a rich diaper of encaustic and plain red tiles, whilst the general area
between these richer bands is paved with large red, relieved by an
occasional encaustic tile. The latter have patterns in white, dark blue,
and yellow, and in all cases they are remarkable for the beautiful
inequality both of the colours and of the surface of the tiles. Both
colour and material are in themselves better than the work of our
tile-manufacturers at the present day, and illustrate very well the
difference between hand-work and machine-work, which I have already
noticed in comparing the old and new modes of dealing with plaster. The
Moorish tiles are very commonly seen in Toledo, and were used both for
flooring and inlaying walls, and in some cases for the covering of
roofs. This synagogue of Sta. Maria la Blanca is on the whole
disappointing. I went to it expecting to see a building of the ninth or
tenth century, and found instead a fabric possibly of this age, but in
which--thanks to the plasterers of the fourteenth or fifteenth
centuries--nothing of the original building but the octagonal columns
and the simple form of the round horseshoe arches is still visible.
Nevertheless it well deserves examination, and a more accurate
knowledge of the detail of Moorish work would, I dare say, have enabled
me to separate more clearly the work of the original church from the
additions with which it has been overlaid.
[Illustration: No. 29.
STA. MARIA LA BLANCA, TOLEDO. p. 318.
INTERIOR, LOOKING EAST.]
The other synagogue is now converted into the church called “del
Transito,”[213] and about the date of this there is no doubt. It was
erected by Samuel Levi,[214] a rich Jew, who held the office of
treasurer to Pedro the Cruel, and was completed in A.D. 1366; but it did
not long retain its first purpose, the Jews having been expelled the
kingdom in 1492,[215] and this synagogue having then been given by
Ferdinand and Isabella to the order of Calatrava.
The building is a simple parallelogram, 31 feet 5 inches wide, by 76
feet in length. The lower portion of the side walls is quite
unornamented for 20 or 25 feet in height; but above this is very richly
adorned with plaster-work. There is, first, a broad band of foliage,
with Hebrew inscriptions above and below it, and above this on each side
an arcade of nineteen arches, springing from coupled shafts, eight of
its divisions being pierced and filled with very elaborate lattice-work.
The end wall (now the altar end) has a very slight recess in the centre,
and the whole of it to within some seven feet of the floor is covered
with rich patterns, inscriptions, and coats of arms, whilst above the
arcade is continued on from the side walls in eight divisions. The
arcades are all cusped in the usual Moorish fashion, the outline of the
cusps being horseshoe, but without an enclosing arch. The end opposite
to the altar has two windows pierced in the upper arcade, and three
windows below breaking up into the band of foliage and inscriptions.
The whole is now whitewashed, and though the detail is all fantastic and
overdone, the effect is nevertheless fine, owing to the great height of
the walls and to the contrast between the excessive enrichment of their
upper and the plainness of their lower part.
The Retablo over the principal altar is a work of the end of the
fifteenth century, but not of remarkable merit, having paintings of
Scripture subjects under carved canopies; there is another of the same
class against the north wall. The roof is a grand example of the Moorish
“_artesinado_”[216] work. It has coupled tie-beams, and a deep cornice,
which is carried boldly across the angles, so as to give polygonal ends
to the roof, which is hipped at the ends, the rafters sloping equally on
all four sides. These rafters are only introduced to improve the
appearance of, and--it may be--the possibility of hearing what was read
in, the synagogue. The pitch of the real roof is very flat, and where a
flat roof is absolutely necessary, this kind of ceiling is undoubtedly
very effective. At some height above the plate the sloping rafters are
stopped by a flat ceiling below the collar rafters, panelled all over in
the ingeniously intricate geometrical figures of which the Moorish
architects were so fond, and in the device of which they were always
only too ingenious. The rafters as well as the tie-beams are used in
pairs placed close to each other, and the space between them is divided
into panels by horizontal pieces at short intervals, with patterns sunk
in the panels. There is a western gallery, and some seats made of glazed
encaustic tiles on each side of the sanctuary.
The exterior has arcades answering to those of the interior: it is built
mainly of brick, with occasional bands of rough stonework. The bricks
are 11 in. by 7¾ in. by 1¼ in. in size, and are used with a mortar joint
1¼ in. in thickness.
It is impossible to deny the grandeur of the internal effect of this
room. The details are entirely unlike what I should wish to see
repeated; but the proportions, the contrasted simplicity and intricacy
of the lower and upper part of the walls, the admission of all the light
from above, and the magnificence of the roof, might all be emulated in a
Gothic building, and I have seen few rooms which have appeared to me to
be more suggestive of the right form and treatment for a picture gallery
or saloon for any state purpose.
The two synagogues I have described stand now in the most deserted and
melancholy part of Toledo. The old _Juderia_, or Jews’ quarter, is
decayed and abandoned. The Jews, of course, are all expelled from it,
and the Christians seem to have avoided their quarter as though there
were a curse on it. Samuel Levi, the founder of El Transito, built for
himself a magnificent palace near it, of which, I believe, some part
still exists, though I did not see it.
The Moorish houses, which I must now shortly describe, appear to be very
numerous and of all dates, from the twelfth century down to the conquest
of Granada; and it seemed to me that up to this time almost _all_ the
houses must have been the work of Moorish architects. The Jews and Moors
were both very numerous bodies--so much so that Toledo is charged by an
old writer with having had in it none others,--and there is nothing to
show that the Christians ever employed any other architects. The common
type of house is one which is completely Moorish in plan, even when the
details are not so. It almost always had a long dark entrance passage,
with an outer door to the street, studded thickly with nails of the most
exaggerated size, and furnished with great knockers. The outer room or
passage--ceiled with open timbers, boarded or panelled between--opens
into the _patio_ or central court, over which in hot weather an awning
or curtain could be hung. This _patio_ is surrounded by open passages on
all sides, supported by wooden posts, or sometimes on granite columns,
and the staircase to the upper floors rises from one angle of it. The
woodwork is generally well wrought with moulded ends to the joists and
moulded plates. Here are usually one or two wells, the court having been
the impluvium where all the water from the roof was collected in a large
cistern below the pavement, Toledo is still a clean city, and Ponz,[217]
defending its credit from an attack by an Italian writer, maintains that
the women are so clean that they wash the brick-floors of their houses
as often as they do their dishes!
[Illustration: Knocker and Nails on Door, Toledo.]
This is the type of house to be seen probably in every street in the
city; but here and there are still left other houses of distinctly
Moorish architecture, and of extreme magnificence in their adornment,
Looking to the frail material of all these enrichments, the wonder is,
not that so few houses remain, but rather that anything at all exists;
and even in their present forlorn state there is something very
interesting in these houses and rooms and decorations, so utterly
unlike anything to which a northern eye is ever accustomed at home. The
examples of this class which I saw seemed to be all of the same
date--either of the fourteenth or fifteenth century--and though full of
variety in their detail, extremely similar in their general effect. A
room in the Casa de Mesa is the finest I saw, and I suppose that even in
the South of Spain there are few better examples of its class. Its
dimensions are 20 ft. 3 in. in width, by about 55 ft. in length and 34
ft. in height. The walls are lined at the base with very good encaustic
tiles, rising nearly 4 ft. from the floor; above this line they are
plain up to the cornice, save where the elaborately-decorated entrance
archway--an uncusped arch, set in a frame, as it were, of the most
fantastic and luxuriant foliage, arcading, and tracery--occupies a
considerable part of one of the side walls. A very deep cornice of but
slight projection, with a band of enrichment below it, surrounds the
room, and this is interrupted by the doorway at the side, and by a small
two-light window at one end. This window of two lights, with a cusped
round-arched head to each light and some delicate tracery above, is
framed in a broad border of tracery work, copied from the latest Gothic
panelling, so that the whole design is a complete mixture of Gothic and
Moorish detail. The ceiling is in its old state and of the usual
_artesinado_ description. Its section is that of a lofty-pointed arch,
truncated at the top, so as to give one panel in width flat, the rest
being all on the curve. The roof is hipped at both ends and panelled
throughout, each panel being filled in with a most ingenious star-like
pattern, of the kind which one so commonly sees in Moorish work. The
patterns are formed by ribs (square in section) of dark wood, with a
white line along the centre of the soffeit of each. The sides of the
ribs are painted red, and the recessed panels have lines of white beads
painted at their edges, and in the centre an arabesque on a dark blue
ground. The colours are so arranged as to mark out as distinctly as
possible the squares and patterns into which it is divided, and the
sinking of some panels below the others allows the same pattern to be
used for borders and grounds with very varied effect. The reds are
rather crimson in tone, and the blues very dark. The plaster enrichments
on the walls seemed, as far as I could make out, to have been originally
left white, with the square edges of the plaster painted red; but I
cannot speak quite positively on this point.
A room in a garden behind the house No. 6, in the Calle la Plata, is an
almost equally good example, though on a smaller scale, and with a flat
ceiling. The great entrance archway in the middle of one side is fringed
with a crowd of small cusps, but otherwise it is treated very much in
the same way as the door in the Casa de Mesa. The cornice here also is
very deep, and the band of plaster enrichment below it is filled with
Gothic geometrical tracery patterns. The ceiling is particularly good,
being diapered at regular intervals with figures formed by two squares
set across each other, with an octagonal cell sunk in the centre of
each. This room is about 36 ft. long by 11 ft. 8 in. wide, and 11 ft. 5
in. high to the band below the cornice, and a little over 16 ft. in
total height.
The “Taller del Moro,” so called because it was turned into a workshop
for the cathedral, and is in the Calle del Moro, is a more important
work, consisting of three apartments, lavishly decorated. Don Patricio
de la Escosura, in the letterpress to ‘España Artistica y Monumental,’
considers the date of this building to be between the ninth and tenth
centuries;[218] but I see no reason whatever for believing that its
plaster decorations are earlier than 1350, or thereabouts.
The list which I have already given of Moorish works will show how many
I have to leave undescribed; but I had not time to see all, and it is
not worth while to describe with any more detail those that I did manage
to see, for they are all extremely similar in the character of their
decorations.
The work of the same kind in the churches of Toledo is of more interest,
because here it is of that partly Moorish and partly Christian
character, which shows that the Mahomedan architects, to whom no doubt
we owe most of it, wrought under the direction to a considerable extent
of their Christian masters, and in some respects with very happy
results. In most of the general views of Toledo, some steeples which are
attached to churches of this class are to be seen, and they give much of
its character to the city. I saw six of these, namely, those of San
Tomé, San Miguel, San Pedro Martyr, Sta. Leocadia, San Roman, and La
Concepcion; whilst among the churches in the same style are parts of
Sta. Isabel, San Eugenio, San Bartolomé, Sta. Ursula, Sta. Fé, Santiago,
and San Vicente.
The whole of these works are very similar in their general character,
being built rather roughly of brick, with considerable use of cusped
arcades in a succession of orders one over the other, the churches
generally being finished with apses at the east end, and the towers
being built without buttresses, and roofed with tiled roofs of moderate
pitch.
The steeple of San Roman is the finest example of its class to be seen
here. For half its height it is perfectly plain, built of rough stone,
with occasional courses of brick, and quoined with brick. The
string-courses are all of brick, unmoulded. The character of the three
upper stages will be best understood by the illustration which I give.
The cusped arch of the lower of these stages is certainly very pretty,
but the common form of trefoiled Moorish arch enclosed within it seems
to me to be the most frightful of all possible forms. It is neither
graceful in itself, nor does it convey the idea of repose or strength;
and it is so completely non-constructional, that the lower portion of
the apparent arch is never built as an arch, but always with horizontal
courses. In the belfry stage the bold variation of the openings is
worthy of notice; and throughout the whole the utmost praise is due to
the architect who, with none but the commonest materials, and at the
least possible expense in every way, has, nevertheless, left us a work
much more worthy of critical examination than most of the costly works
in brick erected by ourselves at the present day. It is amazing how much
force is given by the abandonment of mouldings and chamfers, and the
trust in broad, bold, square soffeits to all the openings. I must not
omit to mention that the small red shafts in the arcade below the
belfry seem to be made of terracotta.
[Illustration: San Roman. Toledo.]
The construction of the steeple is very peculiar. In the lowest stage it
is divided by two arches springing from a central pier, and the two
compartments thus formed are roofed with waggon-vaults. In the next
stage the central pier is carried up, and has four arches springing from
it to the walls. The four spaces left between these arches are vaulted
with barrel-vaults at right angles to each other. The steps of the
ascent to this tower are carried on arches against the side walls, with
occasional openings in the vaults when necessary for passing.
San Roman has a nave and aisles, with arcades of two arches between
them; a chancel, mainly of Renaissance style, covered with a dome, but
with some late Gothic groining to its apse; and a south chancel aisle
ending without an apse. The tower is on the north side of the chancel.
The whole church is plastered and whitewashed most painfully, but still
retains one or two interesting features. The footpace in front of the
altar has a good pavement of large plain red tiles, laid diagonally,
with small encaustic blue and white glazed tiles at intervals. The whole
pavement is divided into a number of strips by rectangular bands of blue
stone. The altar at the east end of the south choir aisle also deserves
a note, being built with a solid black stone front, carved in imitation
of embroidery and fringes, with an inscription on the superfrontal, and
a shield suspended in the centre of the frontal. This strange device for
economizing altar vestments was not common, I think, here, but several
examples remain in the new cathedral at Salamanca. The reredos over this
altar has a very sweet painting of the Last Supper, the figure of our
Lord being much raised above those of the apostles, and the table at
which He sits being polygonal.
[Illustration: Santa Magdalena. Toledo.]
Sta. Magdalena has a smaller and simpler tower of the same class; it is
perfectly plain below the belfry stage, which has two windows in each
face. The bells hang here, as is so often the case in Southern
buildings, in the window; and in all these buildings, as in most other
old examples of brickwork, the putlog-holds (or holes for the insertion
of the scaffold-poles) are left open. The bricks, too, are used very
roughly and picturesquely with a very thick mortar-joint, and the
consequence is that every part of this work has a value in texture and
light and shade undreamt of by those who have never seen anything but
our own smooth, smart, and spiritless modern brick walls, built with bad
bricks and no mortar.[219]
The steeple of San Tomé is so absolutely identical in its details--save
that its shafts of glazed earthenware are alternately green and
yellow--with that of San Roman, that it is unnecessary to describe
it.[220]
San Pedro Martyr has a steeple which is much wider on one side than on
the other, but is otherwise similar to that of San Roman in its general
design. San Miguel, and Sta. Leocadia, and La Concepcion, have steeples
more like that of La Magdalena, the towers being small, and with only
one arcaded stage below the belfry. The masonry and brickwork is the
same in all these examples, but their scale differs considerably, the
steeple of San Roman being by far the largest and loftiest, that of San
Tomé the next, and the others a good deal smaller.
All these steeples seem to me to illustrate not only the proper use of
brick, already mentioned, but also the great difference between old and
new works in the degree of simplicity and amount of cost with which
their authors appear to be satisfied. It is seldom, indeed, at the
present day, that we see a steeple erected which has not cost twice as
much, in proportion to its size and solidity, as either of these old
Toledan examples; and it is to be feared that few of us now have the
courage to trust entirely in the virtue of doing only what the money
given to us to spend will properly allow, without raising that silly and
too-frequently-heard wail about our work having been spoilt for want of
money, which no medieval work, however poor, ever was!
I have been unable to satisfy myself, by any documentary evidence, as to
the age of these buildings. There is some record of extensive works in
the church of San Tomé, in the beginning of the fourteenth century,[221]
but, as we see that the church has since been paganized without damage
to the town, it is possible that they may also have escaped the previous
works. On the other hand, the king Don Alonso VIII. is said to have been
proclaimed from the steeple window of San Roman, in 1166; and, looking
to the character of the Puerta Visagra--an undoubted work of the
commencement of the twelfth century--I do not know whether we should be
justified in refusing to give the steeple of San Roman the date claimed
for it, though my impression when I was looking at it, without
consulting any authorities, was, that this work was none of it older
than the end of the thirteenth century. The first impressions of an
English eye in looking at this Moorish work are not, however, much to be
depended on, the profusion of cusped arches, in which the Moorish
architects so early indulged, always giving their work a rather late
effect.
Among the churches of Moresque character that I saw, I may specially
mention those of Santiago and Sta. Leocadia. The former appeared to me
to be a work mainly of the fourteenth century. It is a
parallel-triapsidal church, and has some old brick arcading on the
exterior of the chancel aisle, but is generally so bedaubed with plaster
and whitewash as to be uninteresting. It is said to have an _artesinado_
ceiling, but I do not recollect this, and I believe it has a plaster
ceiling below the old one. The pulpit is a rather striking work of that
mixed Moorish and Gothic detail which prevailed in the fifteenth
century. One fact I noticed here, and again at Valencia Cathedral, was,
that the pulpit had no door, and the only access seemed to be over the
side, by aid of a ladder! When pulpits were erected, it is fair to
suppose that they were meant to be used; but in the Spain of the present
day it is, perhaps, not of much consequence if they are unusable, as
sermons do not seem to be very much in vogue.
Of the other churches in the city Sta. Isabel has a polygonal apse, with
each side arcaded with a Moorish trefoil arch. San Eugenio has a similar
apse, with a second stage, with multifoil arcading all along it; and San
Bartolomé has three of these cusped and arcaded stages in its apse. Sta.
Ursula has a stone apse, circular in plan, coursed with brick, and
pierced with three Moorish windows. La Concepcion has a polygonal apse
of rude stonework below, and is coursed with bricks from mid-height
upwards, with three Moresque windows set within square recessed panels;
whilst Sta. Fé presents the unusual feature of buttresses to the apse,
and has an interlacing arcade below the eaves, and long lancet windows
set within Moresque cusped panels. Sta. Leocadia (commonly called Cristo
de la Vega), just outside the city, and in the valley below its walls,
also retains the apse of its church, erected on a site which is said to
have been first built upon as early as the fourth century. This is
entirely covered with arcading from the ground to the eaves, arranged in
three equal orders, the lower cusped, the next having the common Moorish
trefoil, and the upper being round-arched. Some of the panels of these
arcades are pierced for light. The existing building is probably in no
part earlier than the twelfth century; it consists of a small modern
nave, a sanctuary of two bays with round transverse arches, and cusped
Moresque arches in the side walls. The apse at the east end is roofed
with a semi-dome. At the west end is a small modern cemetery, full of
gravestones, inscribed at least as fully, fondly, and foolishly, as
those we indulge in in our own cemeteries.
In addition to these more important works there are, in the cathedral, a
door leading into the chapter-room, and a recessed arch in one of the
chapels on the south side of the nave, executed by Moorish artists
probably in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It has been absurdly
enough suggested that these are parts of the ancient mosque which stood
on the same site; but there is no ground whatever for the idea, the work
being evidently of much later date, and it being at the time a common
fashion to introduce some work of this kind into buildings which
otherwise are purely Gothic.
The last head under which I have to describe Moorish work, is, perhaps,
also the most interesting. The walls, gateways, and bridges of Toledo
are, I think, the finest I have anywhere seen; in part, at least, of
extreme age, very perfectly preserved, and on a grand scale. There is a
double line of wall on the unprotected side of the city towards the
_Vega_, the inner line said to be the work of the Visigoths, before the
Moorish conquest, in 711,[222] and the outer built in 1109, by Alonso
VI. Both walls seem to go from the Bridge of Alcantara on one side of
the city, to the Bridge of St. Martin on the other. Outside the wall the
hills and walls slope down rapidly to the valley; whilst within them the
uneven surface is covered thickly with houses everywhere, until the
Tagus, winding round three parts of the city in its deep, savage, and
solitary defile--a solitariness all the more impressive from being so
near to the busy hive of men--encloses it, and makes defensive erections
almost unnecessary.
[Illustration: Puerta del Sol. Toledo.]
I have already given some account of the Bridge of Alcantara.[223] It is
of two lofty arches, with a bold projecting pier between them. Here is
one of the best points of view of the two lines of wall, which are
broken constantly by round or square projecting towers, and ascend and
descend in the most picturesque fashion, to suit the rugged inequality
of the rocks on which they are built. I know no view more picturesque
and magnificent. The first gateway reached is the Puerta del Sol, which
is so admirable an example of the picturesqueness of which the style is
capable, that I cannot resist giving an illustration of it. It is,
indeed, not only picturesque, but in all respects a dignified and noble
work of art. The variety of arches, one behind the other, which is seen
here, was a very favourite device with the Moorish architects. Here, I
think, there are four, two pointed and two round, but all horseshoe in
their outline. The outer gateway on the old Bridge of St. Martin has
five such arches, two of them being round and one pointed horseshoe, one
a plain round, and one a plain pointed arch. In the Puerta del Sol the
intersecting arcades in brickwork over the arch, and the projecting
turrets on a level with them, are extremely picturesque. The materials
used are wrought stone, rough walling stones, and brick. The battlements
are of a type which was repeated by the Christians in most parts of
Spain, but was, no doubt, derived first of all from the Moors. The
situation of the gateway is charming; with due regard to military
requirements it turns its side to the enemy, and is reached by a winding
road, which bends round at a sharp angle just before reaching it. To the
left is seen the sweet view over the _Vega_, watered and made green by
the kind river; a view which gains immensely on one’s liking, compared,
as it always is, with the dreary arid hills beyond, and with
recollections of the weary waste over which so much of the traveller’s
road to Toledo must needs lie. The age of this gateway is not known, but
it dates probably from the end of the twelfth, or beginning of the
thirteenth century. So, at least, I judge by comparing it with the next
gateway, that called the Puerta de Visagra, the finest gateway in the
outer wall (which was erected circa 1108-26), and which cannot,
therefore, be earlier than the beginning of the twelfth century.
The design of this Puerta de Visagra is clearly due to a Moorish
architect, and it is extremely interesting to find the Christian king,
so soon after his conquest of the city, making use of the Moors for his
work, and to find them doing their best, apparently in their capacity as
builders, to second his endeavours to make the recapture of the city by
the Infidels impossible. The materials of this gate are the same as
those of the other, but its character is much heavier and ruder. The
contrast between the grand outer arch and the extremely small inner arch
is very curious; the ground has, however, risen considerably in front of
it, so that its real proportions are very much concealed. The wall is
carried out in advance of this gateway, and has an angle-tower, which
was schemed, no doubt, to secure the proper defence of the entrance.
Further along, beyond the point at which the two walls unite, we reach
the Bridge of St. Martin--a noble arch of even grander scale than that
of Alcantara, and, like it, guarded at either end by gateways, of which
that on the further side has the remains of Moorish work in the arches
which span it, and which have been already mentioned; it is finished
with the Moorish battlement. This bridge has five arches, of which the
largest is magnificent in scale,--no less than 140 (Spanish) feet wide
by 95 high. The arches are very light and lofty, and spring from grand
piers, behind which the rocky defile is seen in its greatest grandeur.
It seems to have been built in 1212, and repaired, the central arch
being rebuilt,[224] by Archbishop Tenorio, circa 1339.
My notice of these various works has been, as it were, only the preface
to the real glory of Toledo; for interesting and unique as some of them,
and strange and novel as all of them are, there is a higher value and a
greater charm about the noble metropolitan church of Spain than about
any of them: a charm not due only to its religious and historical
associations, but resulting just as much from its own intrinsic beauty
as an example of the pure vigorous Gothic of the thirteenth century,
such as when I left France on my first Spanish journey I supposed I
should not see again till my eyes rested once more on Chartres, Notre
Dame, Paris, or Amiens! Here, however, we have a church which is the
equal in some respects of any of the great French churches; and I
hardly know how to express my astonishment that such a building should
be so little known, and that it should have been so insufficiently if
not wrongly described whenever any attempt at a description has been
made by English travellers who have visited it.
The cathedral is said to have occupied the present site before the
capture of the city by the Moors.[225] They converted it into a mosque,
and in course of time enlarged and adorned it greatly. At the
capitulation to Alonso VI., in 1085, it was agreed that the Moors should
still retain it; but this agreement was respected for a few months only,
when the Christians, without the consent of the king, took it forcibly
from them and had it consecrated as their cathedral.[226] Of this
building nothing remains. The first stone of the new cathedral was laid
with great ceremony by the king Don Fernando III., assisted by the
Archbishop, on the 14th of August, A.D. 1227;[227] and from that time
to the end of the seventeenth century additions to and alterations of
the original fabric seem to have been constantly in hand.
The cathedral is built east and west, “according to the universal
tradition of the Church,” says Blas Ortiz, forgetting apparently that
this is no tradition of the Roman Church. I think it is always attended
to in Spain, save in cities like Barcelona, where the commercial
intercourse with Italy perhaps introduced the Italian tradition. The
feeling about the Orientation of churches was stronger among the English
and Germans than anywhere else, and possibly the Spanish tradition dates
from the time of the Visigothic kings.
It was the same king who laid the first stone of Burgos Cathedral in
1221, and it will be remembered that Maurice, the then Bishop of Burgos,
is said to have been an Englishman, and had been Archdeacon of Toledo.
Ferdinand’s first wife was a daughter of the Duke of Suabia, his second
a Frenchwoman. The name of the architect was preserved on his epitaph,
which I copy from Blas Ortiz:--
“Aqui: jacet: Petrus Petri: magister
Eclesia: Scte: Marie: Toletani: fama:
Per exemplum: pro more: huic: bona:
Crescit: qui presens: templum: construxit:
Et hic quiescit: quod: quia: tan: mire:
Fecit: vili: sentiat: ire: ante: Dei:
Vultum: pro: quo: nil: restat: inultum:
Et sibi: sis: merce: qui solus: cuncta:
Coherce: obiit: x dias de Novembris:
Era: de M: et CCCXXVIII (A.D. 1290).”
I did not see this inscription, and am unable to say, therefore, whether
it is original; but I believe there is little doubt of this.[228] I
should have much more doubt as to the nationality of the architect. The
Spanish writers all talk of him as “_Pedro Perez_;” but as the Latin
inscription is the only authority for his name, he may as fairly be
called Pierre le Pierre, and so become a Frenchman; and I cannot help
thinking that this is, on the whole, very much more likely than that he
should have been a Spaniard. This, at any rate, is certain: the first
architect of Toledo, whether he were French or Spanish, was thoroughly
well acquainted with the best French churches, and could not otherwise
have done what he did. In Spain itself there was, as I have said before,
nothing to lead gradually to the full development of the pointed style.
We find, on the contrary, buildings, planned evidently by foreign hands,
rising suddenly, without any connexion with other buildings in their own
district, and yet with most obvious features of similarity to works in
other countries erected just before them. Such, I have shown, is the
case with the cathedrals at Burgos, at Leon, and at Santiago, and such
even more decidedly is the case here. Moreover, in Toledo, if anywhere,
was such a circumstance as this to be expected. In this part of Spain
there was in the thirteenth century no trained school of native artists.
Even after the conquest the Moors continued, as has been said before, to
act as architects for Christian buildings whether secular or
ecclesiastical, and, indeed, to monopolize all the science and art of
the country which they no longer ruled. In such a state of things, I can
imagine nothing more natural than that, though the Toledans may have
been well content to employ Mahomedan art in their ordinary works, yet,
when it came to be a question of rebuilding their cathedral on a scale
vaster than anything which had as yet been attempted, they would be
anxious to adopt some distinctly Christian form of art; and, lacking
entirely any school of their own, would be more likely to secure the
services of a Frenchman than of any one else; whilst the French
archbishop, who at the time occupied the see, would be of all men the
least likely to sympathise with Moresque work, and the most anxious to
employ a French artist. But, however this may have been, the church is
thoroughly French in its ground-plan and equally French in all its
details[229] for some height from the ground; and it is not until we
reach the triforium of the choir that any other influence is visible;
but even here the work is French work, only slightly modified by some
acquaintance with Moorish art, and not to such an extent as to be
recognized as Moresque anywhere else but here in the close neighbourhood
of so much which suggests the probability of its being so. The whole
work is, indeed, a grand protest against Mahomedan architecture, and I
doubt whether any city in the middle ages can show anything so
distinctly intended and so positive in its opposition to what was being
done at the same time by other architects as this. It is just what we
see at the present day, and we owe an incidental debt of gratitude to
this old architect for showing us that in the thirteenth century, just
as much as in the nineteenth, it was possible for an artist to believe
in the fitness and religiousness of one style as contrasted with
another, and steadily to ignore the fantastic conceits of the vernacular
architecture of the day and place in favour of that which he knew to be
purer and truer, more lovely and more symbolical.
From A.D. 1290, the date of the death of the first architect, to A.D.
1425, I have not met with the name of any architect of this cathedral;
but from that year to the end of the last century the complete list is
known and published,[230] and contains of course many well-known names.
The plan of the cathedral is set out on an enormous scale, as will be
seen by the table of comparative dimensions which I give below, as well
as by comparison with the other plans in this volume.[231] In width it
is scarcely exceeded by any church of its age, Milan and Seville
cathedrals--neither of them possessing any other great claim to
respect--being, I think, the only larger churches in Christendom; and
the area covered by the cloisters, chapels, and dependencies of Toledo,
being on the same large scale, is of course in excess altogether of
Milan, which has none. The original plan consisted of a nave with double
aisles on either side, seven bays in length; transepts of the same
projection as the aisles; a choir of one bay; and the chevet formed by
an apse to the choir of five bays, with the double aisles continued
round it, and small chapels--alternately square and circular in
plan--between the buttresses in its outer wall. Two western towers were
to have been erected beyond the west ends of the outer aisles;[232] and
there were grand entrances in each transept, and three doorways at the
west end. The great cloister on the north side, and all the chapels
throughout (save two or three of the small chapels already mentioned,
which still remain in the apse), are later additions. Scarcely a
fragment of the lower and visible part of the exterior of the cathedral
has been left untouched by the destructive hands of the architects of
the last three centuries; and the consequence is, that it is after all
only the interior of this noble church that is so magnificent, there
being very little indeed that is either attractive or interesting on the
exterior. There is absolutely no good general view to be had of it; for
a network of narrow winding lanes encompasses the building on all sides,
leaving no open space anywhere, save at the west end; and here the
exterior has been so much altered as to deprive the view of its value. I
had some difficulty in mounting to the roof, the canon in authority
sternly and rudely refusing me permission; but as the sacristan
considered that I had done my duty in asking, and that the canon had
exceeded his in refusing, in the end he took me everywhere. We ascended
by a staircase in the archbishop’s palace, which leads by a gallery
thrown over the road to the upper cloister. This extends above the whole
of the great cloister, and has a timber roof carried on stone shafts,
which appear by their mouldings to be of the fifteenth century. This
upper cloister is entirely surrounded by houses occupied, some by
clergy, and some by the servants of the church, and where little
choristers in red _capotes_ and white laced albs run about playing in
their spare moments. Nothing that I have met with in Spain exceeds the
intolerable stench which everywhere pervades these ecclesiastical
tenements! But the look-out is rather pleasant, for the cloister court
is planted thickly with fine shrubs and trees which shoot up as high as
the top of the walls.
[Illustration: Stone Roof of Outer Aisle and Chapels, Toledo.]
The exterior of the church, seen from this point, is altogether in a
great mess--no other word so well describes its state! So far as I could
make it out, I think the original mode of roofing the church was as
follows: the aisle next the nave was covered with a timber roof sloping
down from the clerestory windows; whilst the outer aisle and the chapels
beyond it were roofed with stone roofs laid to a flat pitch, and sloping
down to a stone gutter between the two, which again carried the water
east and west till it discharged in a pipe through each buttress. In
place of this, a gabled roof now covers both aisles with a gutter
against the clerestory and overhanging eaves on the outside. The main
roofs were probably steep and tiled; that of the choir appears to have
been carried on stone columns or piers, in front of which was the
parapet, so that there was a current of air throughout. In the apse I
was able to see my way a little more clearly; for here the stone roofs
of the chapels and outer aisle are still perfect, and most ingeniously
contrived, as the accompanying diagram will explain. Here again I was
unable to find out what was the original roof of the inner aisle; but it
was possibly of stone like the others, though my impression on the spot
was that it must have been of wood, and covered with tiles. The diagram
shows the roof over one of the circular and two of the square chapels of
the apse, and the three corresponding bays of the outer choir aisle. The
triangular bays and square chapels have stone roofs sloping down to a
gutter between them; whilst the bay between them had a square roof
sloping slightly all ways, and over the outer chapel a roof sloping back
to the same gutter. The water is all carried away by stone
channel-drains to the outside of the walls. The whole of this
contrivance is now obscured by an extraordinary jumble of tiled roofs
one over the other, added, I suppose, from time to time as the original
roof required repair.[233] There are double flying-buttresses wherever
there are transverse arches in the groining. These were altered in the
fifteenth century by the addition of a fringe of cusping on the edge of
their copings, which of course spoilt their effect, though this is not
of much consequence now, as they are never seen. The nave also has
double flying-buttresses; and its clerestory and triforium were thrown
into one, and large windows inserted, in the fourteenth century in place
of the original work. The only portion of the original external walls of
the aisle that I could see was on the south side of the choir. Here in
the apse chapels there are good and rather wide lancet-windows with
engaged shafts in the jambs, well moulded, and labels adorned with
dog-tooth. The old termination of the buttresses seems to be everywhere
destroyed. The flying-buttresses in the apse were finely managed. Owing
to the arrangement of the plan two flying-buttresses support each of the
main piers, and they are double in height. Their arches are moulded with
a very bold roll-moulding, with a smaller one on either side, and the
piers which receive them are faced with coupled shafts with carved
capitals. The arrangement of the buttresses follows exactly (and of
necessity) the planning of the principal transverse arches of the
groining. From each angle of the apse there are two flying-buttresses;
these each abut against a pinnacle, which is again supported by two
diverging flying-buttresses. It might be expected that the effect would
be confused, as it is in the somewhat similar plan of the chevet of Le
Mans; but here the buttresses and pinnacles seem to have been less
prominent, and therefore to have interfered less with the general
outline of the church which they support. The pinnacles to the
buttresses of the central apse are tolerably perfect, but they appear to
be not earlier than the fifteenth century. Those of the intermediate
aisle are all destroyed, but many of those in the outer aisle still
remain. The chapel of San Ildefonso, too, beyond the chevet, retains its
pinnacles and parapets; and behind these rises a flat-pitched tiled
roof, which, as everywhere else throughout the cathedral, has the air of
being a modern substitute for the old roof: undoubtedly the whole work
wants steep roofs to make it equal in effect to the French churches from
which it was derived, and in which this feature is usually so marked.
The external mouldings of the windows in this part of the church are
very good, and of the best early-pointed work; among others I saw that
the external label of the rose-window in the north transept is filled
with quaint crockets formed of dogs’ heads projecting from the hollow
member of the moulding.
All these remains of the original design of the early church can only be
seen by ascending to the roofs; and as they illustrate the most
interesting portion of the whole work, I have taken them first in order.
It is now time to take the rest of the fabric in hand; and for this
purpose it will be necessary to confine myself henceforth almost
entirely to the interior. The doorways will be mentioned further on,
because they are all additions to, and not coeval with, the original
fabric; and, similarly, the window-traceries--except in the case of one
or two of the apse windows, and the openings of the triforium and
clerestory of the choir--are none of them original.
[Illustration: No. 30.
TOLEDO CATHEDRAL. p. 241.
INTERIOR OF TRANSEPT, &c., LOOKING NORTH-WEST.]
The first view of the interior is very impressive. The entrance most
used is that to which the narrow, picturesque, and steep Calle de la
Chapineria leads--that of the north transept. The buildings on the east
side of the cloister rise on the right hand, and chief among them the
fine fifteenth-century chapel of San Pedro, which, in entire contempt of
all rules as to orientation, runs north and south, and opens into the
aisle of the church by a sumptuous archway. Near the end of this chapel
an old and very lofty iron _grille_ crosses the road; and passing
through this, and by the group of beggars ever clustered round it, the
fine fourteenth-century north doorway, rich in sculpture, is passed, and
the transept is reached. The view across this, as is usually the case in
Spain, is the great view of the church; for here only is there any
really grand expanse of unoccupied floor, and without such a space real
magnificence of effect can never be secured. The view hence into the
double aisles round the choir, across the gorgeously decorated Capilla
mayor, and down the side aisles of the nave, is truly noble, and open, I
think, to but one criticism, viz., that it is somewhat wanting in
height. Judged by English examples, its height is unusually great; but
all the other dimensions are so enormous that one requires more than
ordinary height, and the vast size of the columns throughout the church,
as well as the fact that most of the perspectives are those of the side
aisles, which are of necessity low, gives perhaps an impression of
lowness to the whole which is certainly not justified by the measurement
in feet and inches of the central vault.
If my readers will refer to the engraving of the ground-plan, they will
be struck by the extreme simplicity and uniformity of the original
outline of the cathedral, and the entire absence of all excrescences,
whether of transepts or chapels. In this respect it is not a little like
some of the finest French examples, such as Notre Dame, Paris, and
Bourges, and extremely unlike the ordinary early Spanish plan, in which
the transepts, the lantern, and the three eastern apses, are always
distinctly and emphatically marked. Here the excrescences are all later
additions. The chapels of the chevet were very small, and almost
contained within the semi-circle which forms its outline. There is no
lantern, and the transepts are hardly recognized on the ground-plan. The
aim of the great French architects of the period was to reduce their
work to an almost classic simplicity and uniformity; and their ambition
was evidently shared by the architect who presided over the erection of
this Cathedral at Toledo.
Let us now examine with some minuteness the arrangement of the plan of
the chevet. This is rightly the first point to be considered; for this
is always the keynote, so to speak, of the whole scheme of such a
church; and it is here that the surest evidence is afforded of what I
believe to be the foreign origin of the design; for not even in details
is there anything by which it is more easy in some cases to trace the
origin of an old church than in the general scheme of the ground-plan;
and in large churches the plan of the chevet is that which regulates
every other part. To this part therefore I must now address myself.
[Illustration: Diagrams of Vaulting.]
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the ingenuity of the greatest
French architects--the greatest school perhaps the world has ever
seen--was taxed to the utmost to devise means for obviating all the
difficulties attendant on the plan of an apse with an aisle or aisles
continued round it.[234] The arrangement of the central vault is easy
enough; but the great flying-buttresses which support this have to be
carried in part on the columns which form the divisions of the aisles
surrounding the apse. From the centre of the apse, therefore, a number
of lines drawn through its angles represent the lines of the
flying-buttresses, and mark the position for the outer orders of
columns. These lines diverge so rapidly from each other that the
compartments enclosed within them become extremely irregular in their
outline; and this renders it very difficult to cover them with vaults
which shall look thoroughly well, and in which the arched ribs shall not
be crippled or irregular in their lines. The French architects had from
the first realized the necessity for making the diagonal vaulting rib a
semi-circle. They saw that the line thus obtained was a continuous line
of the utmost value, leading the eye on in succession from one bay of
vaulting to another without any interruption--gradually from one end of
the vastest vault to the other. Whenever this form is given up the
effect of vaulting is half destroyed; and it matters not whether we turn
to the domical pointed vaults of the Angevine architects, or the vaults
of some of our own cathedrals, with their pointed diagonal ribs, we
shall at once see how inferior they are to the old French mode.[235] In
these unequal vaulting bays in the apse it was impossible to make a
straight diagonal rib a semi-circle, for then (I) the highest part of
the vault would be higher than the intersection of the ribs, and the
connexion of the intersection with the highest part of the transverse
arch would be extremely bad, and all but unmanageable. To get over this
difficulty, we find the architect of Bourges (A.D. 1230) planning his
diagonal ribs on a curve (II); whilst at Chartres (A.D. 1220) the
architect planned this rib on a broken line (III). The architect of the
choir of Le Mans (just later in date than Chartres--circa A.D. 1230)
improved enormously upon what his brethren had done by the introduction
of a triangular compartment in the outer aisle, which enabled him to
make the vaulting bays between them nearly square, and to obtain a light
between each of the chapels of the apse, which vastly increased its
beauty. The architect of Bourges had indeed introduced
triangular-vaulting compartments in his outer aisle, but so clumsily,
that he had increased rather than diminished the difficulty with which
he was dealing; and the earlier architect of Notre Dame, Paris (A.D.
1170), had ingeniously planned almost all the vaults of his apse in
triangular compartments, with great gain over the systems of those who
had preceded him; but his plan had the grave defect of placing a column
behind the eastern central arch of the apse, and so stopping all view
eastward from the choir. It remained for the architect of Toledo
Cathedral to resolve all these difficulties by a disposition of his
columns so ingenious and so admirable as to be certainly beyond all
praise. His plan looks indeed simple and very obvious; yet how many
attempts had been made in vain to accomplish what he did; and how
completely has he not overcome all his contemporaries! I hold it to be
in the highest degree improbable that anyone could have devised this
improvement who had not been actively engaged in the study of the French
Cathedrals.[236] No churches exist in Spain which in the least degree
lead up to the solution of the problems involved. And indeed almost at
the same time that this church was commenced, we have Spaniards at work
at other churches, as, _e.g._, at Lérida and Tarragona, in an entirely
different and in a much more primitive style. The architect
therefore--if he was a Spaniard--was one who had spent much time upon
French buildings; but was much more probably a Frenchman, who also,
unless I am mistaken, brought with him some of his countrymen to direct
the sculpture of the capitals, &c., which, as well as the mouldings, are
thoroughly good, pure examples of French Gothic of the date.
The engraving of the plan will best explain the beauty of the
arrangement of the chevet.[237] There are twice as many columns between
the aisles as there are round the central apse, and the points of
support in the outer wall are again double the number of the columns
between the aisles. The alternate bays throughout are thus roofed with
triangular compartments, and the remaining bays are, as nearly as
possible, perfectly rectangular, whilst the vista from west to east is
perfectly preserved, and the distance from centre to centre of the outer
row of columns is, as nearly as possible, the same as that of the inner
order. The outer wall of the aisle was occupied alternately by small
square chapels opposite the triangular vaulting compartments, and
circular chapels opposite the others. Very few of these remain
unaltered; but the sketch and plan which I give will show what their
character was. The analogy of the small chapels in the chevets of Paris,
Bourges, and Chartres, would seem to prove that originally there was no
larger chapel at the east end, and the similar arrangement of the
vaulting compartments throughout seems to confirm this view.
In the eastern portion of the church a good deal of dog-tooth enrichment
is introduced. I have noticed the same fact in the account of Burgos
Cathedral, and suggested that it was imported there from Anjou. Here,
however, the architect clearly knew not much, if anything, of Angevine
buildings, and probably borrowed the dog-tooth from Burgos, though of
the other peculiarities of detail in that church I see no trace.
[Illustration: Chapels of the Chevet. Toledo Cathedral.]
The planning of the whole church was uniform throughout. The columns are
all circular, surrounded by engaged shafts, which, in the great piers in
the transept, are trefoiled in section. There do not appear to have been
chapels anywhere in the side walls of the nave, save on the south side
of the south aisle, where the chapel of Sta. Lucia appears to be of the
same age as the church, and is recorded to have been founded by
Archbishop Rodrigo, with an endowment for two chaplains to say masses
for the soul of Alonso VI.[238] This chapel has triple groining-shafts
in the angles, a good triplet, with dog-tooth and engaged jamb-shafts,
in the south wall, and a window of two lancets, with a circle in the
head, in the east wall. On the west side of this chapel is an extremely
rich recessed arch in stucco, of late Moorish work--a curious contrast
to the fine pointed work of the chapel.
[Illustration: No. 31.
TOLEDO CATHEDRAL p. 246.
INTERIOR OF NORTH AISLE OF CHOIR]
The original scheme of the church is only to be seen now in the choir
and its aisles. These are arranged in three gradations of height,--the
choir being upwards of a hundred feet, the aisle round it about sixty
feet, and the outer aisle about thirty-five feet[239] in height. The
outer wall of the aisle is pierced with arches for the small chapels
between the buttresses, the design and planning of which are shown
clearly in the illustration which I give. The intermediate aisle has in
its outer wall a triforium, formed by an arcade of cusped arches; and
above this, quite close to the point of the vault, a rose window in each
bay. It is in this triforium that the first evidence of any knowledge on
the part of the architect of Moorish architecture strikes the eye. The
cusping of the arcade is not enclosed within an arch, and takes a
distinctly horseshoe outline, the lowest cusp near to the cap spreading
inwards at the base. Now, it would be impossible to imagine any
circumstance which could afford better evidence of the foreign origin of
the first design than this slight concession to the customs of the place
in a slightly later portion of the works. An architect who came from
France, bent on designing nothing but a French church, would be very
likely, after a few years’ residence in Toledo, somewhat to change in
his views, and to attempt something in which the Moorish work, which he
was in the habit of seeing, would have its influence. The detail of this
triforium is notwithstanding all pure and good; the foliage of the
capitals is partly conventional, and, in part, a stiff imitation of
natural foliage, somewhat after the fashion of the work in the
Chapter-house at Southwell; the abaci are all square; there is a
profusion of nail-head used in the labels; and well-carved heads are
placed in each of the spandrels of the arcade. The circular windows
above the triforium are filled in with cusping of various patterns.
The main arches of the innermost arcade (between the choir and its
aisle) are, of course, much higher than the others. The space above them
is occupied by an arcaded triforium, reaching to the springing of the
main vault. This arcade consists of a series of trefoil-headed arches on
detached shafts, with sculptured figures, more than life-size, standing
in each division; in the spandrels above the arches are heads looking
out from moulded circular openings, and above these again, small pointed
arches are pierced, which have labels enriched with the nail-head
ornament. The effect of the whole of this upper part of the design is
unlike that of northern work, though the detail is all pure and good.
The clerestory occupies the height of the vault, and consists of a row
of lancets (there are five in the widest bay, and three in each of the
five bays of the apse) rising gradually to the centre, with a small
circular opening above them. The vaulting-ribs in the central division
of the apse are chevroned, and, as will be seen on the plan, increased
in number, this being the only portion of the early work in which any,
beyond transverse and diagonal ribs, are introduced. There is a weakness
and want of purpose about the treatment of this highest portion of the
wall that seems to make it probable that the work, when it reached this
height, had passed out of the hands of the original architect. It is
strange that, so far as I have been able to learn, no record exists of
the date of the consecration of the church; so that it is quite
impossible to give, with certainty, the date at which any part of it had
been finished and covered in. In the nave the original design (if it was
ever completed) has been altered. There is now no trace of the original
clerestory and triforium which are still seen in the choir; and in their
place the outer aisle has fourteenth-century windows of six lights, with
geometrical tracery, and the clerestory of the nave and transepts great
windows, also of six lights, with very elaborate traceries. They have
transomes (which in some degree preserve the recollection of the old
structural divisions) at the level of the springing of the groining. The
groining throughout the greater part of the church seems to be of the
original thirteenth-century work, with ribs finely moulded, and vaulting
cells slightly domical in section. The capitals of the columns are all
set in the direction of the arches and ribs they carry, and their abaci
and bases are all square in plan.
The great rose-window of the north transept, though later, is not much
more so than the work I have been describing. It has an outer ring of
twelve cusped circles, six within these, and one in the centre. The
whole is filled with old glass. The centre circle has the Crucifixion;
the six circles round it St. Mary, St. John, and four Angels; and the
outer circles figures of the twelve greater prophets, pointing towards
our Lord. The ground of the centre circles within the cusps is a light
pure blue, and the cusps are filled with conventional foliage. The whole
is fastened to rings of iron, in the usual way, and is the best example
of stained glass now remaining in the cathedral.
The works undertaken here in the fourteenth century were very
considerable. The north doorway, the doorway of St. Catherine, leading
from the cloisters; the clerestory in the nave and nave-aisles and
transepts, and probably the whole of the four western bays of the nave;
the screens round the Coro, the chapel of San Ildefonso, and some other
portions, were all of this period; and the dates of many of them being
certain, they give admirable opportunities for the study of the detail
of the Spanish middle-pointed style. The north door has three statues in
each jamb, and a central figure of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord. The
arch has in its three orders different orders of angels, and the
tympanum is divided into four spaces by horizontal divisions, containing
the following subjects: (1) The Annunciation, the Salutation, the
Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents; (2)
the Marriage at Cana, the Presentation, the Dispute with the Doctors,
the Flight into Egypt; (3) the Marriage at Cana continued all across;
and (4) the Death of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The whole is good work of
the end of the fourteenth century. The doorway of St. Catherine, which
opens into the cloister, is mainly remarkable for its elaborate
mouldings, but has a central figure of the saint and two others standing
on capitals, and under canopies, on either side of the doorway. The arch
is crocketed and covered with a profusion of small carving, and with
coats-of-arms of Castile and Leon. The label is crocketed, and between
the doorway and the vault of the cloister a rose window and two windows
of two lights each are picturesquely grouped. The other great doorways
are almost all modernized and uninteresting.
The screen round the Coro is a feature of as great interest as any in
the church. It encloses the whole of the two eastern bays of the nave;
and, as far as I could judge by the way in which it finishes against the
transept column, where the old work ends abruptly, and is completed
with a later carving of lions and castles, it seems possible that it
crossed the transepts and completely shut them out from the choir. There
is, however, no certain evidence of this; and the main fact proved, is
that from the very first the choir-stalls were locally in the nave. In a
plan such as this, with an extremely short choir, founded evidently,
like so many of the Spanish churches, on the plan of the great Abbey of
Citeaux, it must, from the first, have been intended that this should be
the arrangement; but, as I have observed before, the present use of the
choir and the old use are unlike in the only point in which the Spanish
plan is distinctly national. For, in the western face of this old
screen, the doorway into the choir remains; and this has since been
blocked up, in order to put the archbishop’s throne in the centre of the
west end of the Coro, the only access to which is now from the transept
crossing through the eastern Reja or screen. The screen-work is
continued on round the apse, but much mutilated by Berruguetesque and
other alterations, the work of which at the east, behind the altar, is
the worst in the world--_el trasparente_--where angels, clouds, and rays
of light, all painfully executed in marble, are lighted by a big hole,
wickedly pierced right through the old thirteenth-century vault!
The nave-screen consists of an arcade filled with rich tracery, and
carried upon marble and jasper shafts (said, but on what authority I
know not,[240] to have come from the seventh-century Basilica of Sta.
Leocadia). The wall above the capitals is divided by pinnacles; between
each of which is a niche containing a subject sculptured in high relief
under a canopy. The detail of the whole is of the richest kind of
middle-pointed, and altogether very similar in the amount of work and
delicacy of design to the arcades round some of the richest of our own
buildings, as, for instance, round the Chapter-house at Ely. The
sculptures are many of them admirable, full of the natural incidents so
loved by, and the _naïveté_ so characteristic of, the best mediæval
sculptors of their age. I give a complete list of these subjects in the
Appendix, and strongly recommend careful study of them to those who
visit Toledo. I feel the more bound to do this, because in all the
Spanish Guide-books they will find them spoken of with the utmost
contempt, whilst all the praise is reserved for a vile gilt creation by
Berruguete, which has taken the place of the three central western
subjects over the choir-door, and for two statues of Innocence and Sin,
which seem to me to be innocent of art, and to sin against nature!
In addition to the western doorway there were four others in these
screens, two on the north and two on the south; these opened into small
chapels contrived in the space left between the screen just described,
outside the columns, and the wooden screen inside the columns and behind
the choir-stalls.
The screen on the south side of the apse--the remains of what no doubt
once went all round it--is even more elaborate than that round the Coro:
it is pierced below, so that the altar may be seen, and has large
statues of saints above, and an open-gabled parapet, finished with
angels everywhere, and truly a most gorgeous work! This is in the
south-west arch of the choir only, a late flamboyant screen having been
added afterwards beyond it to the east, whilst on the north side a
Berruguetesque monument has taken the place of the old screen.
The last great middle-pointed feature is the chapel of San Ildefonso, at
the extreme east end of the church. It is a most elaborate work, groined
with an eight-sided vault; its windows and arches full of rich
mouldings, and enriched by ball flowers and some of the other devices
commonly seen in our own work of the same age. Each side of this chapel
had an elaborate tomb with an arched recess in the wall over it,
surmounted by a gabled canopy between pinnacles, and under which
sculptured subjects are introduced.[241] These tombs were evidently all
erected at the same time, and help to make the _tout ensemble_ of the
chapel very rich and striking. A string-course is carried round above
them; and above this there are large traceried windows, alternately of
three and four lights. The vaulting-ribs are treated in an unusual and
rather effective way, being fringed with a series of cusps on their
under side, which give great richness to the general effect. There are
small triangular vaulting compartments in the two western angles, which
are necessary in order to bring the main vault to a true octagon in
plan.
The works added in the fifteenth century were both numerous and
important. The cloister and chapel of San Blas, on its north side, are
the first in importance. They owe their origin, indeed, to the previous
century, the first stone having been laid on the 14th of August, A.D.
1389, by Archbishop Tenorio,[242] Rodrigo Alfonso being the master of
the works. In the chapel is a fine monument of the Archbishop; and in
the cloister walls a door which, in the capricious cusping and
crocketing of its traceried work, illustrates the extreme into which the
Spanish architects of this age ran in their elaboration of detail and
affectation of novelty. The traceries of the whole of the windows of the
cloister are destroyed, but the groining remains, and the proportions
and scale of the whole work are both very fine.
The west front was commenced in A.D. 1418, and the north-west tower in
A.D. 1425, one Alvar Gomez being the architect employed upon them; and
in A.D. 1479 the upper part of the west front was completed; but the
whole of this was again repaired and altered in A.D. 1777, so that now
it presents little if anything really worthy of notice. The circular
west window seems to be of the earlier half of the fourteenth century,
and the later works were carried out in front of it. Between this window
and the gable of the great doorway is an enormous sculpture of the Last
Supper: the table extends from buttress to buttress; and our Lord and
the Apostles sit each in a great niche. The steeple is certainly rather
imposing in outline: a simple square tower at the base, and for some 170
feet from the ground, it is then changed to an octagon with bold turrets
and pinnacles; and above this is a low spire, chiefly to be noticed for
the three rows of metal rays which project from its sides. The upper
part of the steeple was built when Alonso Covarrubias was the master of
the works, but rebuilt after a fire in A.D. 1660.[243]
The chapel of Santiago, to the north-east of the chevet, was another
great work of this period. It is similar in plan to that of San
Ildefonso, by the side of which it is built, and has in its centre a
grand high tomb, carrying recumbent effigies of the Constable D. Alvaro
de Luna and his wife Doña Juana.[244] Each of the tombs has life-size
kneeling figures, one at each angle, looking towards the tomb, and
angels holding coats of arms--that most unangelic of operations, as it
always seems to me--in panels on the sides. Here, as in the chapel of
San Ildefonso, the sides of the chapel were each provided with a great
canopied tomb, whilst on one side a mediæval carved and painted wooden
Retablo to an altar conceals the original altar arrangement. The
exterior of this chapel is finished with a battlement and circular
overhanging turrets at the angles; above which is a tiled roof of flat
pitch. Don Alvaro de Luna died in A.D. 1453, and his wife in A.D. 1448;
and the chapel bears evidence in the “perpendicular” character of its
panelling, arcading, and crocketing, of the poverty of the age in the
matter of design. At this period, indeed, the designers were sculptors
rather than architects, and thought of little but the display of their
own manual dexterity.
I have already described the external screens of the Coro. Its internal
fittings must not be forgotten, being very full of interest, and of much
magnificence. The lower range of stalls all round (fifty in number) are
the work of Maestro Rodrigo, circa A.D. 1495; and the upper range were
executed, half by Berruguete, and half by Felipe de Borgoña, in A.D.
1543.[245] The old stall ends are picturesque in outline, very large,
and covered with tracery, panels, and carvings, with monkeys and other
animals sitting on them. The upper range of stalls is raised by four
steps, so that between the elbows of the lower stalls and the desk above
them are spaces which are filled in with a magnificent series of
bas-reliefs illustrating the various incidents of the conquest of
Granada. They were executed whilst all the subjects depicted in them
must have been fresh in the minds of the people; and they are full of
picturesque vigour and character. The names of the fortresses are often
inscribed upon the walls: in some we have the siege, in others the
surrender of the keys, and in others the Catholic monarchs, accompanied
by Cardinal Ximenes, riding in, in triumph, through the gates. It may be
a fair complaint that the subjects are rather too much alike; but in
subjects all of which were so similar in their story, it was, of course,
difficult to avoid this. Their effect is in marked contrast to the heavy
dull Paganism of the sculptures by Berruguete, whose work took the
place, no doubt, of some more ancient stalls. The canopies in his work
rest on columns of jasper, a material which seems to be very abundant
here.
In the centre of the Coro stands the great Eagle, a magnificent work in
brass. The enormous bird, with outstretched wings, is fighting a dragon
which struggles between its feet: its eyes are large red stones, and it
stands upon a canopied, buttressed, and pinnacled pedestal, crowded with
statues, among which are those of the twelve apostles. Six lions
couchant carry the whole on their backs, and serve to complete the
family likeness to other brass eagles, of which, however, this is, I
think, by far the most grandiose I have ever seen.
Here as elsewhere throughout Spain the iron and brass screens are very
numerous. The two Rejas, east of the Coro and west of the Capilla mayor,
were finished in A.D. 1548. There is little to admire in their detail;
but they are massive and bold pieces of metal-work, for the dignified
simplicity of which there is much, no doubt, to be said, when we think
of the terribly over-ornamented work--semi-renaissance in its
feeling--which is so unfortunately fashionable among some of our own
church restorers now-a-days.[246] The great iron screen outside the
north transept door is an earlier work, and fine in its way. The detail
of this is very much like the screens already described at Palencia.
There are also many Retablos, and some of them ancient. That behind the
high altar is a grand work, of so great height that it rises quite from
the floor to the roof, being filled with subjects from our Lord’s life,
arranged with the most complete disregard to their chronology, and, so
far as I could see, without any other better system of arrangement. The
whole, however, is most effective, the subjects being richly painted
and gilded, and the whole of the canopies and niches covered with gold,
so that the effect is one of extreme richness and perfect quietness
combined, the usual result of the ample use of gold. Many other small
Retablos exist elsewhere, and many have been destroyed.[247]
The difficulty in the way of seeing to sketch anything inside the
cathedral is as great as it usually is in Spain, but not at all in
consequence of the absence of windows; for, as will have been seen from
my description, the windows are both many and large: all of them,
however, are filled with stained glass, and hence, in addition to the
wonderful charm of contrasted lights and shades, which we have here in
marvellous perfection, we have also the charm of seeing none but
coloured rays of light where any fall through the windows on the floor
or walls.
Most of the glass appeared to me to be of the fifteenth century, and
later. The rose of the north transept, which is earlier, has already
been described; and the glass in the eastern windows of the transept
clerestory (single figures under canopies) looked as if it were of the
same date, or at any rate earlier than A.D. 1350. The rest of the church
is glazed rather uniformly with cinquecento glass of extreme brilliancy
and unusual depth of colour, the upper windows having generally single
figures, the others subjects in medallions. I had not time to make out
the scheme of their arrangement; but I observed that the medallions of
the clerestory of the intermediate aisle began at the west end, with the
Expulsion from Paradise, and went on with subjects from the Old
Testament.
Of colour on the walls, little, alas! remains. They have been
whitewashed throughout, and in the choir coarsely diapered with broad
gilt masonry lines, edged with black. The internal tympanum of the south
transept door has a tree of Jesse, and close to it is an enormous
painting of S. Christopher; and the cloister walls had remains of
paintings which used to be attributed (but without the slightest
foundation, I believe) to Giotto, but these have now given way to new
wall-paintings of poor design and no value of any kind.
The stateliness of the services here answers in some degree to the
grandeur of the fabric in which they are celebrated. At eight o’clock
every morning there appears to be mass at the high altar, at which the
Epistle and Gospel are read from ambons in the screen in front of it,
the gospeller having two lighted candles; whilst the silvery-sounding
wheels of bells are rung with all their force at the elevation of the
Host, in place of the single tinkling bell to which our ears are so used
on the Continent.[248] The Revolution in Spain, among other odd things,
has enabled the clergy here to sing the Lauds at about four o’clock in
the afternoon instead of at the right time. The service at the Mozarabic
Chapel at the west end of the aisle goes on at the same time as that in
the Coro, and anything more puzzling than the two organs and two choirs
singing as it were against each other can scarcely be conceived. There
are neither seats nor chairs for the people; the worshippers, in so vast
a place, seem to be few, though no doubt we should count them as many in
one of our English cathedrals. I always wish, when I see a church so
used, that we could revive the same custom here, and let a fair
proportion, at any rate, of the people stand and kneel at large on the
floor. Our chairs, benches, and pews are at least as often a nuisance to
their occupiers as the contrary; and for all parts of our services, save
the sermon, all but superfluous. Some day, perhaps, when we have
discovered that it is not given to every one to be a good preacher, we
may separate our sermons from our other services, and may live in hopes
of then seeing the floors of our churches restored to the free and
common use of the people, whilst some chance will be given, at the same
time, to our architects of exhibiting their powers to the greatest
advantage.
It would be easy to elaborate the account which I have given of this
cathedral, to very much greater length; for there are other erections
in connexion with it besides all those that I have noticed, of a grand
and costly kind, owing their foundation to the builders of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and everywhere affording the same
exhibition of magnificence and wealth; but these works are all worthless
from the point of view which I have taken for my notes of Spanish
architecture, and if I were to chronicle them I should be bound to
chronicle all the works of Berruguete, Herrera, and Churriguera
elsewhere, for which sad task I have neither space nor inclination. I
cannot, indeed, forgive these men, when I remember that to them it is
due that what remained before their time of the original design of the
exterior of this church was completely modernized or concealed
everywhere by their additions.
The only other great Gothic work in the city, after the cathedral, seems
to be the church of San Juan de los Reyes,[249] which was erected by
order of Ferdinand and Isabella, in A.D. 1476, to commemorate their
victory in the battle of Toro over the King of Portugal. Nothing can be
much more elaborate than much of the detail of this church, yet I have
seen few buildings less pleasing or harmonious. It was erected in the
age of heraldic achievements, and angels with coats of arms are crowded
over the walls. There is a nave of four bays, a Cimborio or raised
lantern at the Crossing, roofed with an octagonal vault with groined
pendentives, quasi-transepts (they are in fact mere shallow square
recesses), and a very short apsidal choir of five unequal sides. The
western bay of the nave has a deep groined gallery, of the same age as
the church, and in which are the stalls and organs, with two small
ambons in its western balustrade: chapels are formed between the nave
buttresses. Other ambons are placed at some height from the floor
against the north-west and south-west piers of the Cimborio. The lantern
on the outside is octagonal with pinnacles at the angles and a pierced
parapet.
The bald panelling of the external wall of the south transept is
furnished with a ghastly kind of adornment in the chains with which
Christians are said to have been confined by the Moors in Granada.
The ruling idea of the interior of this church is evidently that which,
unfortunately I think, is somewhat fashionable at the present day--the
bringing of the altar forward among the people without reserve or
protection. The removal of the Coro to the western gallery, the shallow
recess in which the altar is placed, and the broad, unbroken area of the
nave, are all evidences of this, and could only have been adopted when
all desire to interest the people in any but the altar services had been
given up, and with it that wholesome reverence which, in earlier days,
had jealously guarded, fenced around, and screened these the holiest
parts of holy buildings.
A blue velvet canopy still hangs above the altar; it is a square tester,
with hangings at the back and on either side. The velvet is marked with
vertical lines of gold lace, and the eagle of St. John--the crest of
Ferdinand and Isabella--is introduced in the embroidery.
The pulpit was against one of the piers on the south side of the nave;
the door into it is now stopped up, and another pulpit has been erected
below the Gospel ambon. There is a gallery corbelled out from the
clerestory, in front of one of the south windows, the use of which did
not seem to be at all clear, unless, indeed, it was similar in object to
such an example as the minstrels’ gallery at Exeter Cathedral.
The old cloister, though falling down through neglect and bad usage, is,
on the whole, the finest portion of the whole work; it is groined
throughout, and covered with rich sculpture of foliage and animals, and
saints in niches. It has been much damaged, mainly, I believe, by French
soldiers during the war, and is now used in part as a picture gallery,
and in part as a museum of antiquities. The pictures, like those in most
of the inferior Spanish collections, are very sad, ghastly, and gloomy;
but among the antiquities are many of value, including a good deal of
Moorish work of various ages. The cloister is of two stages in height,
the lower having traceried openings, the upper large open arches in each
bay.
The refectory also remains, with ogee lierne ribs on its groining: over
the entrance to it is a great cross, recessed within an arch, with a
pelican at the top, and statues of St. Mary and St. John[250] on either
side, but without the figure of our Lord.
And now I bid farewell to Toledo. Few cities that I have ever seen can
compete in artistic interest with it; and none perhaps come up to it in
the singular magnificence of its situation, and the endless novelty and
picturesqueness of its every corner. It epitomizes the whole strange
history of Spain in a manner so vivid, that he who visits its old nooks
and corners carefully and thoughtfully, can work out, almost unassisted,
the strange variety which that history affords. For here, Romans,
Visigoths, Saracens, and again Christians, have in turn held sway, and
here all have left their mark; here, moreover, the Christians, since the
thirteenth century, have shown two opposite examples,--one of toleration
of Jews and Moors, which it would be hard to find a parallel for among
ourselves, and the other of intolerance, such as has no parallel out of
Spain elsewhere in Europe.
I need hardly say that in such a city the post-Gothic builders have also
left their mark. They have built many and imposing houses of various
kinds, chief among which are the altered Alcazar, now destroyed and
ruined, and the Convent of Sta. Cruz. But there was nothing in these
works specially appropriate to the locality, and nothing, therefore,
which takes them out of the position which their class holds elsewhere
in Spain.
I believe that Toledo, in addition to all its other charms, is a good
starting-point for visits to several of the best examples of mediæval
Castilian castles. I have not been able to afford the time necessary for
this work, and was unluckily obliged, therefore, to neglect it
altogether; but the Spanish castles are so important that they deserve a
volume to themselves; and it is to be hoped that ere long some one will
undertake the pleasant task of examining and illustrating them.
[Illustration: TOLEDO Ground Plan of Cathedral &c. Plate XIV.
W. West, Lithr.
Published by John Murray, Albemarle St. 1865.]