SEGOVIA CATHEDRAL
The act of consecrating the finished building constituted a grand holiday. The long aqueduct was illuminated from top to bottom, as was also the cathedral tower, and every house in the city. During a week the holiday-making lasted with open-air amusements for the poor and banquets for the rich.
The date of the construction of the new building was contemporaneous with that of Salamanca, and the architect was, to a certain extent, the same. It is not strange, therefore, that both should resemble each other in their general disposition. What is more, the construction in both churches was begun at the foot (west), and not in the east, as is generally the case. The oldest part of the building is consequently the western front, classic in its outline, but showing among its ogival details both the symmetry and triangular pediment of Renaissance art. The tower, higher than that of Sevilla, and broader than that of Toledo, is simple in its[{318}] structure; it is Byzantine, and does not lack a certain cachet of elegance; the first body is surmounted by a dome, upon which rises the second,—smaller, and also crowned by a cupola. The tower was twice struck by lightning and partly ruined in 1620; it was rebuilt in 1825, and a lightning conductor replaced the cross of the spire.
Though consecrated, as has been said, in 1558, the new temple was by no means finished: the transept and the eastern end were still to be built. The latter was finished prior to 1580, and in 1615 the Renaissance dome which surmounts the croisée was erected by an artist-architect, who evidently was incapable of giving it a true Gothic appearance.
The apse, with its three harmonizing étages corresponding to the chapels, aisles, and nave, and flanked by leaning buttresses ornamented with delicate pinnacles, is Gothic in its details; the ensemble is, nevertheless, Renaissance, thanks to a perfect symmetry painfully pronounced by naked horizontal lines—so contradictory to the spirit of true ogival. Less regularity and a greater profusion of buttresses, and above all of flying buttresses, would have been more agreeable,[{319}] but the times had changed and new tastes had entered the country.
Neither does the broad transept, its façade,—either southern or northern,—and the cupola join, as it were, the eastern and the western half of the building; on the contrary, it distinctly separates them, not to the building's advantage.
The interior is gay rather than solemn: the general disposition of the parts is as customary in a Gothic church of the Transition (Renaissance). The nave and transept are of the same width; the lateral chapels, running along the exterior walls of the aisles, are symmetrical, as in Salamanca; the ambulatory separates the high altar from the apse and its seven chapels.
The pavement of the church is of black and white marble slabs, like that of Toledo, for instance; as for the stained windows, they are numerous, and those in the older part of the building of good (Flemish?) workmanship and of a rich colour, which heightens the happy expression of the whole building.
The cloister is the oldest part of the building, having pertained to the previous cathedral. After the latter's destruction, and the successful erection of the new temple, the[{320}] cloister was transported stone by stone from its old emplacement to where it now stands. It is a handsome and richly decorated Gothic building, containing many tombs, among them those of the architects of the cathedral and of Maria del Salto. This Mary was a certain Jewess, who, condemned to death, and thrown over the Peña Grajera, invoked the aid of the Virgin, and was saved.
Another tomb is that of Prince Don Pedro, son of Enrique II., who fell out of a window of the Alcázar. His nurse, according to the tradition, threw herself out of the window after her charge, and together they were picked up, one locked in the arms of the other.