Cathedrals of Spain Part 15

CATHEDRAL OF GRANADA

The exterior cornices of the Royal Chapel]

The building operations thus extended over a period of two hundred and fifty years. Alfonso de Cano's reputation was of various kinds; the son of a carpenter and a native of Granada, as soon as his talents were recognized, he was apprenticed to the great Montanes. To judge from contemporaneous accounts, he must have been as hot-headed and quarrelsome as the Florentine goldsmith of similar talents and versatility. He was always ready to exchange the paint-brush or chisel for his good sword, and there was scarcely a day during the years of his connection with the Cathedral in which he was not enjoying a hot controversy with the Chapter. His favor with the weak monarch and the powerful ruling Conde-Duc was so great that they had the audacity to appoint him a prebendary of the Chapter after he had been forced to fly from justice in Valladolid on a charge of murder, as well as for having beaten his wife on his return from a meeting of the ecclesiastical body.

The Chapter deprived him of his office as soon as they dared, which was six years after his appointment.

Egas' original plan, like the work he actually carried out in the Royal Chapel, was undoubtedly for a Gothic edifice, as this style was understood and executed in Spain. From the fact that the original Gothic intention was abandoned for a Spanish Renaissance church, many authorities give the date of its commencement as 1529, when Diego de Siloe's Renaissance work was under way. In the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, the great turning-point had come.

Italian influences were beginning to predominate over earlier styles and the last exquisite flames of the Gothic fire were slowly dying out to give place to the heavy Renaissance structure of ecclesiastical inspiration. Spaniards who had returned fresh from Italian soil and tutelage evolved with their ornate sense and characteristic love for magnificence, the style, or rather decorative treatment, which marks the first stage of Spanish Renaissance architecture called "Estilo Plateresco." This is a happy name for it, its derivation being from "plata," or silver plate, and indicating that architects were attempting to decorate the huge superficial s.p.a.ces on their churches with the same intricacy and sparkle as the silversmiths were hammering on their ornaments. There was evolved the same lace-like quality, the same sparkling light and shade. Wonderful results were indeed obtained by the stone-cutters of the sixteenth century.

The Cathedral of Granada is not at all remarkable. Its interest is derived from the city of which it is the chief Christian edifice and the great bodies which it contains; to students of architecture it is in a manner a connecting link between the Gothic building of the middle ages and the modern revival of cla.s.sical building methods.

It is the death of the old and the birth of the new; it marks the advent of stagnant, uninspired formalism in constructive forms. Its sarcophagi and much of its decoration are both in design and execution most exquisite and appropriate examples of Renaissance art in Spain. Its easy victory in decorative forms was owing to the fact that there had practically been evolved little or no Spanish ornamental design outside of that produced by the ingenuity and peculiar skill of the Moors. The influence of Moorish design is long traceable in Christian decoration.

The Spanish nature craves rich adornment in all material. The art of the great sculptors who, like Berruguete, returned at the beginning of the new century with inspiration gained in the workshops of the Florentine Michael Angelo, soon found a host of pupils and followers. Not only in stone, but in wood, metal, plaster, and on canvas, the new forms were carried to a gorgeous profusion never dreamt of before. Charles V stands out amid its glories in as clear relief as in the tumult of the battlefield. The decline and frigid formality did not set in until the reign of his unimpa.s.sioned and repulsive son. The grandest epoch in Spain's history thus corresponds to the most inspired period of its sculpture. The first architects of this period worked on Granada Cathedral; the work of the greatest sculptor, the Burgundian Vigarny, is found in inferior form on the retablo of the Royal Chapel. In Spain, where the climate made small window openings desirable, the churches offered great wall s.p.a.ces to the sculptor. The splendid portals, window frames, turrets and parapets, the capitals and string courses and niches all became rich fields for Spanish interpretation of the exquisite art of Lombardy.

The new art first found tentative expression in decorative forms, then in more radical and structural changes. The world-empire of which Ferdinand had dreamed, and which his grandson almost possessed, placed untold wealth and the art of every kingdom at the disposal of Spain.

Granada Cathedral has a strange exterior, meaningless except in certain portions, which are essentially Spanish. To the Granadines it is as marvelous as Saint Peter's to the Romans. Its view is obstructed on all sides by a maze of crumbling walls, yellow hovels, and shop fronts shockingly modern and out of keeping. It is all very, very provincial.

The stream of the world has left it behind and its pageants and glories had departed centuries ago. Donkeys heavily laden with baskets of market produce stand--personifications of wronged and unremonstrating patience--hitched to the iron rails before its main portals. Goats browse on the gra.s.s in its courtyards, and are milked between the b.u.t.tresses. Immediately to the south of it lies the old episcopal palace, where the archbishop preached the sermons criticized by the ingenuous Gil Blas.

The main entrance is to the west. This front is the latest portion of the building with the exception of certain portions of the interior.

Though not as corrupt as some of the surgical decorations in the trascoro, it is the heaviest and least interesting part of the church.

It bears no relation to the sides of the building, but seems to have been clapped on like a mask. The central portion is subdivided into three huge bays, the spring of the arch, which rises from the intermediate piers, being considerably higher in the centre than those of the two to the north and south. Diego de Siloe probably designed the composition, intending that it should be flanked and terminated by great towers. Three stages, rising to a height of some 185 feet, stand to the north. Corinthian and Ionic orders superimpose a Doric entablature over a plain and restrained base. Arches frame more or less meaningless and unpierced designs between the pilasters and engaged columns of the orders. The whole is as painfully dry as the transfer of a student's compa.s.s from a page of Vignola. Old cuts and descriptions represent this northern tower crowned by an octagonal termination with a height of 265 feet. Despite the apparent ma.s.siveness of the substructure, this soon made the whole so alarmingly insecure that it was pulled down. The present tower scarcely reaches above the broken lines and flat surfaces of the roof tiles and, particularly at a distance, has the effect of a huge b.u.t.tress. The southern tower was never erected, but in place of it the front was supported by a makeshift portion of base. The northern tower is the work of Maeda, the facade princ.i.p.ally by Cano, although much of the sculpture, such as the Incarnation over the central doorway, and the Annunciation and a.s.sumption over the side portals, are by other inferior eighteenth-century sculptors.

Statues, cartouches and ornamental medallions relieve the paneled surfaces of the stonework, the masonry of which has been laid and jointed with the utmost conceivable mechanical skill. The whole central composition fizzles out in a meaningless ma.s.s of parapets and variously carved stone terminations. One feels as if the original designer had started on such a gigantic scale that he either had to give up finishing his work proportionately or keep on till it reached the sky,--he wisely chose the former alternative.

In Granada, as in most of the Spanish cathedrals, the decoration of the doorways and portals forms one of the princ.i.p.al features of exterior interest. Their ornamentation, with that of the parapets crowning the outer walls of chapels and aisles, is practically all that relieves the huge surfaces of ochre masonry. The walls themselves indicate in no manner the interior construction; the windows which pierce them are very low and narrow and Gothic in outline. The north and south facades,--if despite their many obstructions they may be spoken of as such,--differ radically. The northern is to a great extent executed in the same ponderous magnificence as the western. Two doorways pierce it, the Puerta de San Jeronimo with mediocre sculpture by Diego de Siloe and his pupil and successor, Juan de Maeda, and the Puerta del Perdon, leading into the transept. The decoration of this doorway is as good pure Renaissance work as was executed in Spain during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. It consists of a double Corinthian order crowned by a broken pediment. The shafts of both orders are wreathed. The pilasters, the moldings of the arch, the archivolt and jambs are all, in the lower order, most profusely covered with exquisite designs, admirably fitted to their respective fields, full of imagination and virility. They are as good as the best corresponding work in Italy.Above the arch key of the main door, splendidly treated bas-reliefs of Faith and Justice support from the spandrels an inscription recounting the defeat of the Moors. The frieze band of both lower and upper orders is profusely filled with ornament, while small cherubs in excellent scale replace the conventional volutes of the Corinthian capitals. In the upper order the niches have unfortunately been left uncompleted. A bas-relief of G.o.d the Father fills the semicircle of the main arch; Moses and David occupy the lunettes.

The huge pilasters or b.u.t.tresses of the church which run up east and west of the entire composition are decorated with the enormous imperial shields of Charles V, overshadowing in their vulgar predominance all the exquisitely proportioned and delicate detail adjacent to them.

Some of the bays on the southern side of the Cathedral can be better seen, as a small courtyard separates them from the adjacent building, the episcopal palace. The others are choked by the Capilla del Pulgar, the Royal Chapel and the sagrario.

This side of the church exhibits in its bal.u.s.trades, its ornamentation and the crocketed terminations and finials to the exterior b.u.t.tresses, what is far more interesting in the Plateresque style of Spain than the purely borrowed and imitative features of the west and northern fronts.

Here appear in jeweled play of light and shade, in all their imaginative and exquisite intricacy, those forms of carved string courses which were developed by the Spanish Renaissance and were essentially Spanish and national. You feel somewhere back of it the Moorish influence. It presents all the richness, the magnificence and exuberant fancy which characterizes the spirit in which its masters worked. The labor it involved must have been enormous. The splendor of the solid lacework ten to twelve feet high is thrown out by contrast with the naked walls which it crowns.

The Capilla del Pulgar, which blocks the most westerly corner of the south elevation, was named in honor of Hernan Peres del Pulgar, the site of whose brave exploit it marks. In 1490, during the last siege of Granada, he determined on a deed which should outdo all feats of heroism and defiance ever performed by Moslem warriors. At dead of night, some authorities say he was on horseback, others that he swam the subterranean channel of the Darro, he penetrated to the heart of the enemy's city and fastened with his dagger to the door of their princ.i.p.al mosque a scroll bearing the words "Ave Maria." Before this insult to their faith had been discovered, he had regained Ferdinand's camp.

A double superimposed arcade faces the southern side of the sagrario: the lower story has been brutally closed and defaced by modern additions, almost concealing its original carving. The upper story, however, which forms a balcony, strongly recalls by its fancifully twisted shafts, elliptical arches and Gothic traceried bal.u.s.trade, similar early Renaissance work at Blois, where the Gothic and early Italian work were so charmingly blended.

The Royal Chapel is entered through an Italian Renaissance doorway of good general design and decoration, but the Spanish cornice and bal.u.s.trade crowning the outer walls are much more interesting in details. The princ.i.p.al member consists of a band of crowned and encircled F's and Y's, the initials of the Catholic Kings. It is broken over the window by three gigantic coats-of-arms. To the left is Ferdinand's individual device of a yoke, the "yugo," with the motto "Tato Mota" (Tanto Monta) tantamount, a.s.sumed as a mark of his equality with the Castilian Queen; to the right Isabella's device of a bundle of arrows or "flechas," the symbol of union. In the centre is the common royal shield, proudly adopted after the union of the various kingdoms of the Peninsula had been cemented. The Eagle of Saint John the Evangelist and the common crown surmount the arms of Castile and Leon, of Aragon, Sicily, Navarre, and Jerusalem and the pomegranate of Granada.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid

CATHEDRAL OF GRANADA

The reja enclosing the Royal Chapel and tombs of the Catholic Kings]

The various roofs of the Cathedral are covered with endless rows of tiles, which in the furrowed, overlapping irregularity of their surfaces add to the general play of light and shade. Above them all spreads the umbrella-shaped dome which crowns the Capilla Mayor.

At the period when Gothic church-building was disappearing, we find not a few edifices where the old and new styles are curiously blended. A Renaissance facade added in later days might encase a practically complete Gothic interior. In Granada, with the exception of the Royal Chapel, very little of the interior contained traces of the expiring style. In the Cathedral proper, it is princ.i.p.ally found in a groined vaulting of the different bays, which is covered with varying and most elaborate schemes of ornamental Gothic ribs, which seem strangely incongruous to the architect as he looks up from the cla.s.sical shafts in the expectation of finding a corresponding form of building and decoration in the later vaulting.

The general plan of the church is more Renaissance than Gothic, exhibiting rather the form of the "Rundbau" than the "Langbau" of the Latin cross. Its main feature is likewise the great dome rising above and lighting the Capilla Mayor. The Spanish cimborio has at last reached its fullest development in the Renaissance lantern.

The church is divided into nave and double side aisles, outside of which is a series of externally ab.u.t.ting chapels. East and west it contains six bays. The choir blocks up the fifth and sixth bays of the nave, and in the customary Spanish manner it is separated from the high altar in the Capilla Mayor by the croisee of the transept. Back of this, forming the eastern termination, runs an ambulatory.

The vaulting, one hundred feet high, is carried by a series of gigantic white piers consisting of four semi-columns of Corinthian order with their intersecting angles formed by a triple rectangular break. The vaulting springs from above a full entablature and surmounting pedestals, the latter running to the height of the arches dividing the various vaulting compartments. The church is about 385 feet long and 220feet wide.

The choir is uninteresting; the carving of its stalls and organs in nowise comparing with the "silleria" of Seville or Burgos. The Capilla Mayor, the princ.i.p.al feature of the interior, is circular in form, and separated from the nave by a splendid "Arco Toral." The dome, which rises to a height of 155 feet, is carried by eight Corinthian piers. In general scheme it is pure Italian Renaissance, of n.o.ble and harmonious proportions and very richly decorated. At the foot of the pilasters stand colossal statues of the Apostles. Higher up there is a series of most remarkable paintings by Alfonso Cano and some of his pupils. Cano's represent seven incidents in the life of the Virgin,--the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, a.s.sumption, etc. Though some of his carvings, and especially the dignified and n.o.ble Virgin in the sacristy, are admirable, still, to judge from this series, it was as a painter that he excelled. They show, too, how essentially Spanish he was, like his great master, Montanez. The careless, lazy quality of his temperament is sufficiently apparent, but he cannot be denied a place among the great masters of Spanish painting who immediately preceded the all-eclipsing glory of Velasquez, Murillo, and Ribera.

The lights of the dome which rises over the paintings are filled with very lovely stained gla.s.s, representing scenes from the Pa.s.sion by the Dutchmen, Teodor de Holanda, and Juan del Campo. On the two sides of the choir below are colossal heads of Adam and Eve carved by Cano and kneeling figures of Ferdinand and Isabella.

There are endless chapels outside the outer aisles, but, in spite of some good bits of sculpture and painting here and there, one longs to sweep them out of the way and free the edifice from their enc.u.mbrance.

The interior of the great sagrario is an expressionless jumble of the later Renaissance decadence,--and it is a shame that no more fitting architecture surrounds the tomb of the good Talavera, here laid to rest by his friend Tendilla, the first Alcaide of the Alhambra, with the inscription over his tomb, "Amicus Amico."

The general color scheme in the interior of the Cathedral is white and gold. One feels that it is handsome, even harmonious and magnificent, but that all the mystery and religious awe that pervaded the great churches of the previous centuries have vanished forever.

The Royal Chapel, although the oldest part of the building, should be considered last of all, as it is by far the most interesting portion and leaves an impression so vivid as to overshadow all other parts of the great edifice. It is situated between the sagrario and the Sacristia and is entered through the southern arm of the transept. The chapel itself is the very last Gothic efflorescence from which the spirit has fled, leaving only empty form. It consists of a single big nave flanked by lower chapels. The ornamentally ribbed vaulting with gilt bosses and keystones is carried by cl.u.s.tered shafts engaged in its side walls. The shafts are too thin and the capitals too meagre. A broader and more generous string course runs, at the height of the capitals, across the wall surfaces between the upper clerestory and the lower arcades.

Portions of this reveal a strong Moorish influence, as the manner in which the great Gothic lettering is employed to decorate the band.

Similarly to the invocations to Allah running round the walls of the Alhambra, we read here that "This chapel was founded by the most Catholic Don Fernando and Dona Isabel, King and Queen of the Espanos[d], of Naples, of Sicily, and Jerusalem, who conquered this kingdom and brought it back to the faith, who acquired the Canary Isles and Indies, as well as the cities of Ican, Tripoli, and Bugia; who crushed heresy, expelled Moors and Jews from these realms, and reformed religion. The Queen died Tuesday, November 26, 1504. The King died January 25, 1516.

The building was completed 1517." Enrique de Egas had, at Ferdinand's order, commenced building two years after Isabella's death. The grandson enlarged it later, finding it "too small for so much glory."

The high altar with its retablo and the royal sarcophagi are separated from the rest of the chapel by the most stupendous and magnificent iron screen or reja ever executed. Spaniards have here surpa.s.sed all their earlier productions in this their master craft. Not even the screens of the great choir and altar of Seville or Toledo can compare with it. With the possible exception of the curious Biblical scenes naively represented by groups of figures near the apex, which still tell their story in true Gothic style, it is a burst of Renaissance, or Plateresque glory. It is not likely that the crafts, with all their mechanical skill, will ever again produce a work of such artistic perfection. It represents the labor of an army of skilled artisans,--all the sensitive feeling in the finger-tips of the Italian goldsmith, the most cunning art of the German armorer and a combination of restraint and boldness in the Spanish smith and forger. The difficulty naturally offered by the material has also restrained the artisan's hand and imagination from running riot in vulgar elaboration. The design, made by Maestro Bartolome of Jaen in 1523, is as excellent as the technique is astonishing. It may be said that in grandeur it is only surpa.s.sed by the fame of the Queen whose remains lie below. The material is princ.i.p.ally wrought iron, though some of the ornaments are of embossed silver plate and portions of it gilded as well as colored. Bartolome's design consists in general of three superimposed and highly decorated rows of twisted iron bars with molded caps and bases. Each one must have been a most ma.s.sive forging, hammered out of the solid iron while it was red hot. The vertically aspiring lines of the bars are broken by horizontal rows of foliage, cherubs' heads and ornamentation, as well as two broad bands of cornices with exquisitely decorated friezes. Larger pilasters and columns form its panels, the central ones of which const.i.tute the doorway and enclose the elaborate arms of Ferdinand and Isabella and those of their inherited and conquered kingdoms. The screen is crested by a rich border of pictorial scenes, of flambeaux and foliated Renaissance scrollwork, above which in the centre is throned the crucified Saviour adored by the Virgin and Saint John. The crucifix rises to the height of the very capitals which carry the lofty vaulting.

Inside the reja, a few steps above the tombs, rises Philip Vigarny's, or Borgona's, elaborate reredos. To the Protestant sense this is gaudy and theatrical, a strikingly garish note in the solemnity and grandeur of the chapel. To the right and left of its base are, however, most interesting carvings, among them the kneeling statues of Ferdinand and Isabella. Behind the former is his victorious banner of Castile. The figures are vitally interesting as contemporaneous portraits of the monarchs, aiming to reproduce with fidelity their features and every detail of their dress. There is also a series of bas-reliefs portraying incidents in the siege of Granada,--the Cardinal on a prancing charger, behind him a forest of lances, the lurid, flaming sky throwing out in sharp silhouette the pierced walls and rent battlements. The Moors, very much like dogs shrinking from a beating, are being dragged to the baptismal font;--the gesticulating prelates hold aloft in one hand the cross and in the other, the sword, for the tunicked figures to make their choice. The scene has been described by Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, who tells us "that in one day no less than three thousand persons received baptism at the hands of the Primate, who sprinkled them with the hyssop of collective regeneration."

Again, in another, the cringing Boabdil is presenting the keys of the city to the "three kings." Isabella is on a white genet, and Mendoza, like the old pictures of Wolsey, on a trapped mule. Ferdinand is there in all his magnificence; the knights, the halberdiers and hors.e.m.e.n, all the details of the dramatic moment, full of the greatest imaginable historic and antiquarian interest, perpetuated by one who was probably an eye-witness of the scene.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid

CATHEDRAL OF GRANADA

The tombs of the Catholic Kings, of Philip and of Queen Juana.]

At the foot of the altar, in the centre of the chapel, stand the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Philip and Joan. They are as gorgeous specimens of sepulchral monuments as the reja is of an ecclesiastical iron screen. Both sarcophagi are executed in the softest flushed alabaster; that of Ferdinand and Isabella by the Florentine Dominico Fancelli; that of their daughter and her son by the Barcelonian Bartolome Ordenez, "The Eagle of Relief," who carved his blocks at Carrara. The tomb of poor crazy Jane, and the unworthy, handsome husband whom she doted on to the extent of carrying his body with her throughout the doleful wronged insanity of her later years, is somewhat more elevated than that of the Catholic Kings, though its general design is very similar. Philip of Austria sleeps vested with the Order of the Golden Fleece.

Isabella's celebrated will begins with her desire that her body may be taken to Granada and there laid to rest in the Franciscan monastery of Santa Isabella in the Alhambra, with a simple tomb and inscription: "but should the King, my lord, prefer a sepulchre in some other place, then my will is that my body be there transported, and laid where he can be placed by my side, that the union we have enjoyed in this world, and which through the mercy of G.o.d may be hoped for again when our souls are in heaven, may be symbolized by our bodies being side by side on earth."

The humble burying-ground designated by Isabella, and where she was first laid to rest with the simple rites she desired, was, however, no fitting place for the grandparents of Imperial Charles. Here, in the Cathedral's princ.i.p.al chapel, he had them laid in the year 1525.

The sarcophagus consists of three stages, containing the ornamental motives so characteristic of the best sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. No other form of statuary brought out their skill and genius so fully as a sepulchral monument. Medallions, statues, niches,saints, angels, griffins and garlands are all woven into a magnificent base to receive the rec.u.mbent effigies. Apostles and bas-reliefs of scenes from the life of Christ surround the base, while winged griffins break the angles. Above are the four Doctors of the Church, the arms of the Catholic Kings and the proud and simple epitaph, "Mahometice secte prostratores et heretice pervicacie extinctores: Fernandus Aragonium et Helisabetha Castelle, vir et uxor unanimes, catholici appelati, marmoreo clauduntur tumulo."[22] In tranquil crowned dignity above lie Ferdinand in his mantle of knighthood, his sword clasped over his armored breast, and Isabella with the cross of her country's patron saint. The rec.u.mbent figures are extremely fine; the faces, which are portraits, convey all we know of their prototypes'

characteristics. Ferdinand's proud, pursed lips whisper his selfish arrogance, his iron will, and the greatness and fulfillment of his dreams. The hard, masterful jaw confirms the character given him by the shrewd French cynic as one of the most thorough egotists who ever sat on a throne, as well as that of his English son-in-law, who knew enough to call him "the wisest king that ever ruled Spain."

Beside Ferdinand sleeps his lion-hearted consort. It is her lofty soul which broods over the sepulchre and heightens the feeling of reverence already inspired by reja and sarcophagus. She is still the brightest star that ever rose in the Spanish firmament and shone in clear radiance above even the lights of Ximenez, of Columbus, or the Great Captain. Her smile is now as cold and her look as placid as moonlight sleeping on snow.

n.o.ble, tender-hearted and true, dauntless, self-sacrificing and faithful, she rose supreme in every relation of life and the great crisis of her people's history. "In all her revelations of Queen or Woman," said Lord Bacon, "she was an honour to her s.e.x, and the corner stone of the greatness of Spain."

Standing before her tomb, on the battlefield of her victorious armies, the clear perspective and calm judgment of four centuries still declare her "of rare qualities,--sweet gentleness, meekness, saint-like, wife-like government, the Queen of earthly queens."