Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain Part 12

Moreover, I do not know where in Spain we are to find the evidence of the existence of a school in which such artists could have been trained, whilst at Toulouse no one can wander through the Museum in the desecrated convent of the Augustines without recognizing the head-quarters of a school of artists from among whom the sculptor of Santiago might well have come thoroughly educated for his great work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELLA:--Ground Plan of the Cathedral &c. Plate IX.]

From Galicia I travelled back by the same road along which I had already journeyed as far as Leon; and from thence by Medina del Rio Seco--a poor, forlorn, and uninteresting town--to Valladolid. The plain between Leon and Valladolid is most uninteresting; and the whole journey from the coast of Galicia to the last-named city is one of the most wearisome I ever undertook. The occasional beauty of the scenery,--and on this road it is oftentimes very beautiful,--does not prevent one's feeling rather acutely a diligence journey of sixty-six hours with few and short pauses for meals; and the only solace--if solace it is--one has, is that the _adalantero_ or postilion, who has to ride the whole distance, is in infinitely worse case than oneself! Fortunately the least interesting part of the road is now superseded by the opening of the railway from Palencia to Leon.

CHAPTER VIII.

MEDINA DEL CAMPO--AVILA.

In going by the railroad from Valladolid to Madrid the decayed old town of Medina del Campo is pa.s.sed, and few travellers can have failed to be struck by the size and magnificence of the great castle, under whose walls they are hurried along--the Castle "de la Mota," founded in 1440, and built under the direction of Fernando de Carreno, as master of the works.[166]

The castle founded at this time evidently took the place of one of much earlier date; for at some distance from its walls there still remain great fragments of old concrete walls lying about, mis-shapen, decayed, and unintelligible; whilst the greater part of the existing castle is a uniform and simple work entirely executed in brick, incorporating and retaining, however, in one or two parts, portions of the walls of the earlier building. The outline is a very irregular square, with round towers at all its angles rising out of the sloping base of the walls, and overlooking the moat which surrounds the whole. Within these outer walls rise the lofty walls of the castle, flanked by occasional square towers, and with an unusually lofty keep at one angle. The entrance is protected with much care, the gateways always opening at right angles to each other, so as to give the best possible chance of easy defence.

Entering by the gateway in the centre of the princ.i.p.al front, across the now destroyed bridge, the path turned round the walls of the keep, and then through a small gate by its side into the great inner courtyard, the shape of which is very irregular, and the buildings opening into which are almost all destroyed. There seems to be no direct mode of getting into the keep save by climbing up the face of the wall some twenty feet from the ground; and to this I was unequal, though it was evident, from the well-worn holes in the brick-work, that some of the natives are not so. Possibly there may have been an entrance from below, for the whole of the walls surrounding the castle, and looking out upon the moat, are honeycombed with long vaulted galleries at various levels, along which I tramped for a long time, looking in vain for an outlet towards the keep. The architectural detail here is all of the simplest possible kind; the arches are pointed, but square in section, and only remarkable for the great depth of their archivolts, which gives them an air of strength very fitting to such a building. The bricks are generally a foot long, eight inches wide, and an inch and three-eighths thick, and the mortar-joints are generally an inch and three-quarters wide. Little as such a work affords for mere technical description, I have seldom seen one of its kind altogether more magnificent. The great height of the walls, the simplicity of the whole detail, and the bold vigour of the outline sufficiently account for this.

[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 20.

MEDINA DEL CAMPO. p. 160.

THE CASTLE.]

Medina del Campo is the dullest and saddest of towns now, though three hundred years ago it seems to have been one of the most important places in the district. Nor is there much to detain the ecclesiologist or architect. The princ.i.p.al church--S. Antholin--seems to have been founded in the sixteenth century. An inscription round the chancel gives the date of its erection as A.D. 1503,[167] and the church was probably built at the same time. The plan consists of nave and aisles of three bays in length, and a chancel of one bay. The nave and aisles cover an area of about ninety feet each way, the dimensions being, as they usually are here, very considerable. The columns are really cl.u.s.ters of groining-ribs banded together with a very small cap at the springing, and then branching out into complicated vaulting-bays, most of which are varied in pattern. The Coro is near the west end of the nave, and about equal in length to one of its bays, nearly two bays between its Reja and the Capilla mayor being left for the people; its fittings are all of Renaissance character, and there is a very picturesque organ above it, on the south, bristling with projecting trumpet-pipes, and altogether very well designed. The columns are lofty, and the church is lighted by small round-headed windows of one or two lights placed as high as possible from the floor; there is one light in each southern bay, and two in each on the north side; evidently therefore the whole work is carefully devised for a hot country; and it is an undoubted success in spite of the extremely late character of all its detail. Twenty years only after the foundation of the chancel, and just about the time that Segovia Cathedral was being commenced, a chapel was added on the north side of the altar, covered with a dome, and thoroughly Pagan in almost all its details.

There are three pulpits in this church--one on each side of the chancel, and one in the nave; and low rails keep the pa.s.sageway from the Coro to the Capilla mayor.

There is a good painting of the Deposition in the sacristy of S.

Antholin; and a still more interesting work is the Retablo of a small altar against the eastern column of the nave. This has the Ma.s.s of St.

Gregory carved and painted, with other paintings of much merit. That of the Pieta recalls Francia, and the figure of the Blessed Virgin in an Annunciation is full of tender grace and sweetness. It is strange how completely the Inquisition altered the whole character of Spanish art, and deprived it at once and for ever apparently of all power of regarding religion from its bright and tender side!

An uninteresting country is pa.s.sed between Medina and Avila. This old city is indeed very finely situated; and if it be approached from Madrid, seems to be a real capital of the mountains, with ranges of hills on all sides. It lies, in fact, on the northern side of the Sierra, and just at the margin of the great corn-growing plains which extend thence without interruption to Leon and Palencia. Of the many fortified towns I have seen in Spain it is, I think, the most complete.

The walls are still almost perfect all round the city; they are perfectly plain, but of great height, and are garnished with bold circular towers not far apart; and for the gateways two of these towers are placed near together, carried up higher than the rest, and connected by a bold arch thrown from one to the other. There are in all no less than eighty-six towers in the circuit of the walls, and ten gateways; and so great is their height[168] that nothing whatever is seen of the town behind them, and they follow all the undulations of the hill on which they stand with a stern, repulsive, savage look which seems almost to belong to a city of the dead rather than to a fairly lively little city of the present day.

The s.p.a.ce within the walls was very confined, and no doubt it was found impossible for any new religious foundations to be established within their boundaries. Several of the great churches, and among these some of the most important--as San Vicente, San Pedro, and San Tomas--were therefore built outside the walls; and the Cathedral itself, cramped by its close neighbourhood to them, was built out boldly with its apse projecting beyond the face of the walls, and making an additional circular tower larger and bolder than any of the others.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Puerta de San Vicente.]

The walls of Avila were commenced in A.D. 1090, eight hundred men having been employed on them daily in that year;[169] among them were many directors who came from Leon and Biscay, and all of them wrought under Casandro, a master of geometry and a Roman, and Florin de Pituenga, a French master; so at least we learn from the contemporary history attributed to D. Pelayo, Bishop of Oviedo. The walls were finished in 1099.

In 1091 the Cathedral of San Salvador was commenced by an architect named Alvar Garcia, a native of Estella, in Navarre;[170] the work was completed in sixteen years, as many as nineteen hundred men, according to the authority already quoted, having been employed on the works. D.

P. Risco[171] throws considerable doubt on the veracity of D. Pelayo; and his figures certainly seem to be on too grand a scale to be at all probable.

I doubt very much whether any part of the existing Cathedral is of the age of the church whose erection is recorded by Don Pelayo, except perhaps the external walls of the apse. Its general character is thoroughly that of the end of the twelfth or early part of the thirteenth century, with considerable alterations and additions at later periods; and we may safely a.s.sume that the chevet, commenced in A.D.

1091, was continued westward very slowly and gradually during the following hundred years or more. The ground-plan will show the very singular disposition of the plan; in which the chevet, with its double aisle and semi-circular chapels in the thickness of the walls, is, I think, among the most striking works of the kind in Spain.[172] The external wall of the apse is a semi-circle divided into bays by b.u.t.tresses of slight projection alternating with engaged shafts. The chapels do not therefore show at all in the external view; and indeed all that does appear here is a projecting tower of vast size pierced with a few very small windows--mere slits in the wall--and flanked on either side by the wall and towers of the town. It is finished at the top by a corbel-table and lofty battlemented parapet; and behind this again, leaving a pa.s.sage five feet and a half in width, is a second and higher battlemented wall, from within which one looks down upon the aisle-roof of the chevet, and into the triforium and clerestory windows of the central apse. From below very little of the apse and flying b.u.t.tresses which support it are seen; and one is more struck perhaps by the strange unlikeness to any other east-end one has ever seen, than by any real beauty in the work itself; though at the same time it is pleasant to see that not even so difficult a problem as that of a windowless fortified chevet presented any serious difficulty to these old architects.

[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 21

AVILA CATHEDRAL p. 164.

INTERIOR OF AISLE ROUND THE APSE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: East End, Avila Cathedral.]

a.s.suming as I do that the external wall of the apse is as old as the end of the eleventh century, I think it nevertheless quite impossible that the chapels within it, in their present state, should be of the same early date. In general plan it is true that they are similar to those round the chevet of the abbey at Veruela,[173] the eastern chapels in the transepts being apsidal in both cases, and similarly planned in connection with those of the apse. The church of Veruela was completed by about the middle of the twelfth century, and is beyond all question earlier in style than the interior of Avila. The great beauty of the latter arises from the narrow, recessed aisle round the apse, the groining of which is carried on lofty and slender shafts, whilst the columns round the apse itself consist of a bold single column with three detached shafts on the side next the aisle. The groining throughout is extremely good, and, in the chapels, is carried on cl.u.s.tered shafts.

A careful examination of the groining of the choir shows clearly how much the design of the church was altered during its progress, though it is certainly not an ill.u.s.tration of the advantage of such a course. The lines of the groining on the plan explain that it is planned with hardly any reference to the structure below: some of the groining shafts not being over the piers, and everything having been sacrificed by the architect of the triforium and clerestory in order to make all their bays equal in width both in the apse and in the side walls. East of the Crossing there is a narrow quadripart.i.te bay of vaulting, then a s.e.xpart.i.te bay, and then those of the apse, and each of the three bays of the choir is thus made about equal to those of the apse, though the arches below are quite unequal. Externally all of them are supported by regularly arranged flying-b.u.t.tresses, some of which must, I think, be supported on the cross-arches of the aisle in front of the chapels. The triforium is round-arched, of two horseshoe-headed lights divided by a shafted monial; and the clerestory is of round-headed broadish windows, with jamb-shafts and richly-chevroned arches. The flying-b.u.t.tresses are all double, the lower arch ab.u.t.ting against the triforium, and the upper against the wall above the clerestory windows; and all appear to me to have been added after the original erection of the clerestory. The parapet here, as well as in the aisles, is battlemented, the battlements being finished with pyramidal copings of the common Moorish type. I should have observed that the pa.s.sage round the town walls is connected with that round the aisle walls, and that the two levels of battlements in the latter are connected by occasional flights of stone steps.

The transepts have the same triforium in their eastern walls as the choir; and here, too, the same kind of construction was ventured on, the groining shafts not being over the cl.u.s.tered column which divides the arches of the aisles round the chevet. When this was done the intention was evidently to erect one bay of s.e.xpart.i.te vaulting next the Crossing, and then a quadripart.i.te bay beyond it. At present both bays are similar--quadripart.i.te--and the clerestory is filled with large traceried windows.

The remainder of the church was so much altered in the fourteenth century, that its whole character is now of that period. The north transept facade has in its lower stage two windows of two lights, the traceries of which are precisely similar to those of our own early geometrical style, and there is a very fine rose window above them. This rose is of sixteen divisions, each containing two plain pierced circular openings, but the dividing lines between them being marked, give the whole tracery that effect of radiation from the centre which is so important a feature in the designs of many wheel-windows. All the windows in this facade are richly moulded, and there are well-developed b.u.t.tresses at its angles, but, unhappily, the gable has been entirely destroyed, and the present termination of the wall is a straight line of brickwork below the eaves of the hipped roof. The question of the original pitch of the roof--always so interesting--is therefore left uncertain and undecided. The clerestory throughout is filled with enormous six-light traceried windows, with transomes, and the double flying b.u.t.tresses between them are very large, and are finished at the top with a line of traceries below their copings, and with crocketed pinnacles in front. There are two towers at the ends of the aisles, which do not open into them, but only into the nave. The south-west tower has never been completed, but the north-west steeple is a very fine work of the same age as the clerestory of the nave. It has bold b.u.t.tresses, and a belfry stage lighted by two windows on each side, with tall crocketed pediments above them, and below the battlemented parapet a line of rich sunk tracery. The angles--internal as well as external--are carved with a ball enrichment, which at a distance produces the same effect as our English ball-flower ornament; and, like it, gives an air of richness to the whole work. The b.u.t.tresses finish above the parapet with crocketed pinnacles, and the parapet with a pointed coping, which somewhat recalls the outline of the Moorish battlement. The whole effect of the steeple, transept, and nave is certainly very n.o.ble, and they are marked by an entire absence of any of those foreign peculiarities which usually strike an English eye. The whole might, in fact, be English work of the fourteenth century. The north door of the nave is of grand dimensions, having six statues in niches in each jamb, and others against the b.u.t.tresses on either side.

The tympanum is sculptured with our Lord in an aureole in the centre, the Betrayal and the Last Supper below, angels censing on either side, and the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin above. The orders of the archivolt are filled with figures, some representing the resurrection of the dead, and others figures of kings and saints worshipping the central figure of our Lord. The door-opening has the peculiarity of having an elliptical or three-centred arch. This feature I noticed also in doors evidently of about the same age at Burgos and at Leon, and it is just one of those evidences which go surely to prove that the several works are all designed by the same architect. The resemblance of the mouldings in the jamb of this doorway to those in the western end of Leon Cathedral is very close, and all these doors have an order of very similar foliage between the several sculptured or storied orders of the archivolt. I do not think the work here is quite as good as that at Leon, though the filling in of the tympanum with a well-marked vesica in the centre, and four rows of subjects divided by well-defined horizontal lines, is uncommonly good. A sort of shallow porch has been formed by some later groining, which occupies the s.p.a.ce between the b.u.t.tresses on either side of the doorway, and this is finished in front with a rich open traceried parapet and pinnacles.

It was during the prelacy of Don Sancho III., Bishop of Avila from A.D.

1292 to 1353, that most of the later works of the cathedral were executed, and his arms are sculptured upon the vault of the Crossing.

The character of all the work would agree perfectly with this date, which is given by Gil Gonzalez Davila[174] in his account of the church.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Roofing, Avila.]

A staircase in the south-west tower leads up into the roof of the aisles, which now partly blocks up the too large clerestory; and pa.s.sing through this, and then over the roofs of the sacristies, we reach the exterior of the chevet and the fortified eastern wall. Over the sacristies is some original stone roofing, of an extremely good, and, so far as I know, almost unique kind, with which it, seems very probable that the whole of the roofs were originally covered. But it is now, as well as all the others, protected by an additional timber roof covered with tiles, and is not visible from the exterior. This roofing is all laid to a very flat pitch with stones, which are alternately hollowed on the surface for gutters, and placed about eight and a half inches apart, and other square stones, which rest on the edges of the first, so as to cover their joints. The stones are of course all of the same length--two feet seven inches--and set over each other so as to form a drip. The cornice at the eaves of this roof is very well managed, and looks as if it were of the thirteenth century. Its construction reminded me much of the stone guttering so frequently seen in the early Irish buildings, and which, being so much less perishable than lead, has often preserved them, where the common English construction would long ere this have involved the whole building in ruin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CATHEDRAL OF SAN SALVADOR AVILA--Ground Plan of Church and Cloister &c. Plate 3

Published by John Murray. Albermarle St. 1865.]

The cloister on the south side of the nave is much decayed and mutilated. It was built probably in the early part of the fourteenth century, and has good traceried windows, generally of four lights, but blocked up, and with all their cusping destroyed. On its east side is a fine fifteenth century chapel, with an altar at the south end, and a pa.s.sage through its other end, screened off by an iron Reja, leading to the priests' rooms, and so round to the sacristies. The windows of this chapel are covered with a rude ball ornament, constantly seen in works of the fifteenth century.

I must not forget to notice the furniture of the interior of the cathedral, some of which is very fine. The Retablo of the high altar is very grand, having five sides, which follow the outline of the apse, and it is of three stages in height. The lowest stage has the four evangelists and the four doctors painted on its side panels, and SS.

Peter and Paul in the centre; the next has the Transfiguration in the centre, and the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Presentation in the Temple at the sides; and the upper stage the Crucifixion in the centre, and the Agony, the Scourging, the Resurrection, and the Descent into h.e.l.l at the sides. These paintings were executed in A.D. 1508 by Santos Cruz, Pedro Berruguete, and Juan de Borgona: and some of them are not only valuable in the history of art, but of great merit. The St. Matthew attended by an angel, who holds his ink for him, is designed with great grace; and the Adoration of the Magi, and some of the other subjects, are admirably designed and painted. The drawing is rather sharp and angular, and has more the character of German than of Italian art. The woodwork in which the paintings are framed is richly carved and gilt, but in a jumble of styles; the canopies over the pictures being Gothic, and the columns which support them thoroughly Renaissance in style.[175]

The fittings of the Coro are all Renaissance, and there is a screen of the same age across the nave on its western side. To the east is the usual metal Reja, and low rails enclosing the pa.s.sage from the Coro to the Capilla mayor. A flight of seven steps in front of the altar, the magnificent colour of its Retablo, and the contrast of the extremely light choir and the almost windowless aisles and chapels round it, make the pictorial effects here extremely fine; and they are heightened by a good deal of stained gla.s.s, which, though of late date, has some fine rich colour. It was executed at the end of the fifteenth century.

Fine as this cathedral is, I think, on the whole, I derived almost as much pleasure from the church of San Vicente, built just outside the walls, a little to the north of the cathedral. This is a very remarkable work in many respects.

[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 22

SAN VICENTE, AVILA. p. 170.

NORTH-EAST VIEW]

The church--dedicated to the three martyrs, Vicente, Sabina, and Cristeta, who are said to have suffered on the rock still visible in the crypt below the eastern apse--is cruciform in plan,[176] with three eastern apses, a central lantern, a nave and aisles of six bays in length, two western steeples with a lofty porch between them, and a great open cloister along the whole south side of the nave. The south door is in the bay next but one to the transept, and there are staircase turrets in the angles between the aisles and the transepts. The design and detail of the eastern apses recall to mind the Segovian type of apse. Their detail as well as their general design are, in fact, as nearly as possible identical, and no doubt they are the work of the same school of late Romanesque architects. They are very lofty, the ground being so much below the floor of the church that the windows of a crypt under the choir are pierced in the wall above the plinth. They have, too, the usual engaged shafts between the windows, dividing each apse into three vertical compartments, each pierced with a round-headed window. These shafts are finished with finely carved capitals under the eaves' corbel-tables; and the stringcourses which occur below the windows, on a level with their capitals, and again just over their arches, are generally delicately carved, but sometimes moulded. The central apse is higher than those on either side, and consequently none of the horizontal lines are continuous round the three apses; and as the eastern walls of the transepts have no openings, and no stringcourses or enrichments of any kind between the ground and the eaves, there is a certain air of disjointedness in the whole design which is not pleasing.

The transept facades are very simple: both are pierced with windows of one light high up in the wall, and the northern transept is vigorously treated with a grand system of b.u.t.tressing, used as mediaeval artists alone apparently knew how! The b.u.t.tresses are mere pilasters at the top, and the eaves-cornices are carried round them and up the flat-pitched gable-line in the way so commonly seen in Italian Gothic. But at mid-height these pilasters are weathered out boldly, and run down to the natural rock on which the church is built, and which here crops up above the surface of the ground: a central b.u.t.tress is added between the others, and between the b.u.t.tresses the whole wall is battered out with a long succession of weatherings to the same thickness at the base as the greatest projection of the b.u.t.tresses. Probably the lower part of this front has been added long after its first erection for the sake of strength; and undoubtedly the somewhat similar system of b.u.t.tressing which is carried along the north wall of the nave is long subsequent in date to the early church, to which it has been applied. The south transept, owing to the rapid rise of the ground to the south, is much less lofty than the other, and has between its b.u.t.tresses three high tombs.

The whole south side of the nave is screened, so to speak, by a very singular lofty and open cloister, which extends from the west wall of the transept to a point in advance of the west front. It is very wide, and is entirely open to the south, having occasional piers, with two cl.u.s.tered shafts between each. There is something at first sight about the look of these cl.u.s.tered shafts which might lead one to suppose them to be not later than the thirteenth century; and as the lofty arches are semi-circular, this idea would be strengthened were it not that a careful comparison of the detail with other known early detail proves pretty clearly that they cannot be earlier than about the middle of the fourteenth century. The material--granite--favours this view, for here, just as in our own country, the early architects seem to have avoided the use of granite as much as possible, even where, as at Avila, it lies about everywhere ready for use. There is something so novel and singular about this open loggia or cloister, that I could not help liking it much, though it undoubtedly destroys the proportions, and conceals some of the detail, of the old church in front of which it has been added.

The bays of the aisle are divided by pilaster-b.u.t.tresses, and lighted with round-headed windows which have external jamb-shafts.

The west end is, perhaps, the n.o.blest portion of this very remarkable church. There are two towers placed at the ends of the aisles. These are b.u.t.tressed at the angles, and arcaded with sunk panels of very considerable height on the outer sides; they are groined with quadripart.i.te vaults, and do not open into the church, but only into the bay between them, which, though it is a continuation of the full height of the nave, is treated simply as a grand open porch, with a lofty pointed arch in its outer (or western) wall, and a double doorway in its eastern wall opening into the church. This porch is roofed with a vault of eight cells, level with that of the nave, and extremely lofty and impressive, therefore, from the exterior, and over the doorway a window opens into the nave. The western, as well as the side arches, have bold engaged shafts, and the groining is also carried on angle shafts. The whole effect is fine, and the light and shade admirable and well contrasted: but the charm of the whole work seemed to me to lie very much in the contrast between the n.o.ble simplicity and solid ma.s.siveness of the architecture generally, and the marvellous beauty and delicacy of the enrichments of the western doorway, which is certainly one of the very finest transitional works I have ever seen. It is, as will be seen by the engraving, double, with round arches over each division, and the whole enclosed under a larger round arch. Statues of saints are placed in either jamb, and against the central pier in front of the shafts which carry the archivolt, and the latter and the capitals are carved with the most prodigal luxuriance of design and execution, and with a delicacy of detail and a beauty of which an idea cannot be conveyed by words. Sculptured subjects are introduced in the tympana of the smaller arches, and a richly carved stringcourse is carried across under a parapet which is placed over the doorway. The figures and carving are all wrought in a very fine and delicate stone. The tympana are sculptured on the left with the story of Dives and Lazarus, and on the right with a death-bed scene, where angels carry up the soul to Paradise. The detail of the foliage seemed to me to have a very Italianizing character, being mostly founded on the acanthus-leaf. The capitals are very delicate, but copied closely from Cla.s.sic work, and the figures are dignified in their pose, but their draperies are rather thin and full of lines. Some of the shafts are twisted, and beasts of various kinds are freely introduced with the foliage in the sculpture.