The oldest purely Christian building in Granada is the convent and chapel of San Jeronimo, a foundation transferred here from Santa Fé immediately after the Reconquest. The convent is now a cavalry barracks, and is not to be inspected by the curious. The church, built by Diego de Siloe, is in the form of a Latin cross—stern, plain, dignified. The walls are adorned with frescoes representing scenes from the Passion, portraits of the Fathers of the Church, and angels playing on the harp and singing. They were executed in 1723 by an obscure painter called Juan de Medina. Eight chapels open on the aisles and nave, one containing a fine retablo, with the Entombment as subject. The principal chapel exhibits Siloe’s skill at its best. He is said to have realised in its construction “his lofty ideal of effecting a truly Spanish Renaissance; an ideal which bore little fruit, since some of his followers confined themselves to the strictest classicism, others to the development of the plateresque.” Very much in the spirit of the Renaissance is the decoration of the chapel with the statues of the worthies of the classic world, Cæsar, Pompey, Hannibal, Homer, and others, side by side with Old Testament characters. Strange, this admiration for a pagan civilisation co-existent with violent religious fanaticism against all contemporary non-Catholics!
The whole church was practically dedicated to the memory of Spain’s greatest soldier, the Great Captain, Gonzalo de Cordova, who was buried here, but whose ashes have been transferred to Madrid. The hero and his duchess are shown, sculptured, kneeling in prayer on either side of the high altar, over which rises a magnificent retablo, divided into several compartments filled with reliefs and statues. The horizontal sections are in the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and composite Orders respectively. The lowest central compartment is occupied by the Tabernacle, the subjects of the three compartments immediately above being the Immaculate Conception, St. Jerome, and the Crucifixion. Over all is shown the figure of the Eternal Father. This splendid work, the best of its kind in Spain, seems to have been executed by a variety of artists, among them Juan de Aragon, Pedro de Orea, and Pedro de Raxis. The beautiful shell-like vaulting above is adorned with figures of the Apostles, of Saints Barbara, Katharine, Magdalen, and Lucy, and the warrior-saints, George, Eustace, Martin, Sebastian, and Francis. The sword given by the Pope to the Great Captain, formerly one of the treasures of the chapel, was carried off by Sebastiani during the Peninsular War.
There are a great many beautiful things in this old church which seem to escape the ordinary traveller’s notice. The seats in the choir were designed by Siloe. The frescoes, representing the Triumph of the Church, of the Virgin, and of the Eucharist, the Assumption, &c., are very well done. The restoration of the fabric has often been denounced, but it is difficult to see how it could have been better carried out.
In the neighbourhood of the Great Captain’s chapel is a monument to a hero and a great Spaniard of a very different type. Juan de Robles devoted himself to the sick and the suffering with a zeal which earned for him confinement in a madman’s cage. His virtues were recognised after his death, and procured him canonisation as St. John of God in 1669. A tribute to his memory which he would have no doubt appreciated better is the large hospital founded two years after his death, that is, in 1552. The saint’s ashes, in a silver coffin, repose in the hospital chapel, a gorgeous structure, characterised by costliness and bad taste. The trail of the serpent of Spanish architecture—Churriguera—is over all. All that is interesting in it is the portrait of the saint, a copy of one in Madrid.
The name of the Great Captain is associated with the Cartuja, or suppressed Carthusian monastery, the site of which was his gift. The monastery, begun in 1516, was pulled down in 1842. A small portion of the buildings, however, remains, together with the church. The single nave is disfigured by over-elaborate ornamentation in the plateresque style. The doors of the choir are richly and tastefully inlaid with ebony and mother of pearl, cedar and tortoise-shell, and were the work of a friar, Manuel Vazquez, who died in 1765. The sanctuary, in the baroque style, is enriched with precious marbles, some richly veined with agates. On some of the slabs the hand of Nature has traced the semblances of human and animal forms. In the adjoining sacristy, various marbles have been combined so as to produce an effect dazzling and gorgeous in the extreme. The hall is certainly one of the most remarkable in Spain. Scarcely less marvellous are the exquisitely inlaid doors and presses. The generally bad style of the church is also redeemed by a statue of St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusian Order, ascribed to Alonso Cano, and some pictures by Bocanegra, Giaquinto, and Cotán. The last named, a friar, was responsible for the pictures in the cloister, representing the martyrdom of Carthusian monks in London by the tyrant Henry VIII. and the brigands who acted as his officers.
The Cartuja was formerly much richer in works of art, but, like San Jeronimo, it was ransacked by the French under Sebastiani, who exhibited, as on all occasions, the discrimination of a dilettante coupled with the rapacity of a bandit.
In front of the church of Santos Pedro y Pablo is a very handsome mansion built in 1539 for Hernando de Zafra, secretary of the Catholic sovereigns. The portal is in three stages: the first contains the entrance, a square doorway, between Doric columns; the second bears the escutcheons of the family, above them being sculptured griffins and lions; the third, a balcony between pilasters, carved in delicate relief. In a line with this is another balcony, bearing the curious inscription, Esperandola del Cielo—“Looking for it from Heaven.” These words are explained by a tragic legend. De Zafra is said to have suspected his daughter of a clandestine attachment. To satisfy his doubts, he burst into her room one day, and found her page assisting the lover to escape by the window. Baulked of his prey, the father turned, with death in his face, upon the boy. “Mercy!” shrieked the page. “Look for it in Heaven!” answered the Don, as he hurled his daughter’s accomplice from the balcony into the street below. So runs the legend. De Zafra does not appear, according to the records, to have left any children; but his daughter may not have survived the terrible consequences of her amour. “After all,” remarks Valladar, “nothing was easier in the sixteenth century than to throw a page out of the window without attracting the attention of the police or magistrates.”
Granada is by no means as rich in ancient churches and houses as Seville. The house of the Great Captain now forms part of the convent of Carmelite nuns. On the façade a tablet sets forth that “In this house lived, and on December 2, 1515, died, the Great Captain Don Gonzalo Fernandez de Aguilar y de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa, Terranova, and Santangelo, the Christian hero, and conqueror of the Moors, French, and Turks.”
The early sixteenth-century Casa de los Tiros—the property, like the Generalife, of the Marques de Campotejar—seems to occupy the site, if it did not actually form part, of a Moorish fortified dwelling. Some think it was an advanced work of the fortifications known as the Torres Bermejas. The interior certainly shows Arabic influence. The staircase was probably built by Moors, and there are rich azulejos and a splendid artesanado hall. This is adorned with busts of various Spanish celebrities, with the graven heads of Moors and Christians, and with reliefs of Lucretia, Judith, Semiramis, and Penthesilea.
In this house is preserved an Arabic sword with a magnificent hilt and scabbard, said to have belonged to Boabdil. The scabbard, at all events, is unquestionably of workmanship posterior to the Reconquest; and it is well to be a little on one’s guard in the matter of the numerous relics ascribed to the last Moorish king.