SANTA MARIA LA REDONDA, LOGROÑO
The interior is Roman cruciform with a high and airy central nave, in which stands the choir, and on each hand a rather dark aisle of much smaller dimensions.
The trascoro is the only peculiarity possessed by this church. It is large and circular, closed by an immense vaulting which turns it into a chapel separated from the rest of the church (compare with the Church of the Pillar of Saragosse).
True to the grotesque style to which it belongs, the whole surface of walls and vault is covered with paintings, the former apparently in oil, the latter frescoes. Vixés painted them in the theatrical style of the eighteenth century.
From the outside, the regular features of the church please the eye in spite of the evident signs of artistic decadence. The two towers, high and slender, are among the best produced by the period of decadence in Spain which followed upon Herrero's severe style, if only the uppermost body lacked the circular linterna which makes the spire top-heavy.
Between the two towers, which, when seen from a distance, gain in beauty and lend to the city a noble and picturesque aspect, the[{206}] façade, properly speaking, reaches to their second body. It is a hollow, crowned by half a dome in the shape of a shell which in its turn is surmounted by a plateresque cornice in the shape of a long and narrow scroll.
The hollow is a peculiar and daring medley of architectural elegance and sculptural bizarrerie and vice versa. From Madrazo it drew the exclamation that, since he had seen it, he was convinced that not all monuments belonging to the grotesque style were devoid of beauty.
The date of the erection of the western front is doubtless the same as that of the trascoro; both are contemporaneous—the author is inclined to believe—with the erection of the Pillar in Saragosse; at least, they resemble each other in certain unmistakable details.
Calahorra.—The fourth of the cathedral churches of Upper Rioja is that of Calahorra. After the repopulation of the town by Alfonso VI. of Castile in the eleventh century, the bodies of the two martyr saints Emeterio and Celedonio were pulled up out of a well (to be seen to-day in the cloister) where they had been hidden by the Christians,[{207}] when the Moors conquered the fortress, and a church was built near the same spot. Of this eleventh-century church nothing remains to-day.