My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

The benefactors were Don Gonzalo Nuñez and his wife, Doña Mercia, who had recently returned from the Indies with a handsome fortune. He was old and crippled with gout and other ailments, but he was borne into the Cathedral on a carrying-chair to attend the octave of the feast from the 7th to the 14th of December 1654, and thus he was able to witness “the incredible delight of the entire city” at the splendid trappings provided for the popular ceremony by his own and his wife’s munificence.

No less than 150,000 ducats, or £40,000 of our money, did the pious pair set aside to endow the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, “in order to make it as splendid as that of Corpus Christi,” and they gave the money in their lifetime too, instead of bequeathing it by will so as to enjoy it themselves as long as they lived. There were new blue and white vestments for the priests, blue and white draperies for the pulpit, the reading-desk, and the Archbishop’s throne, blue and white banners, even cushions of blue and white for the Archbishop to kneel on in the choir and before the high altar. Now for the first time the little boys were given vestments of blue and white, “colours of the Mystery,” and so comprehensive was the scheme laid down by the generous Don Gonzalo that, as the archive says, “even the Singing Children called Seises” had “all their borders and fringes of equal cost and richness” with those of the Dean himself.

Nor were women entirely left out in this endowment, for it was ordered that “certain poor maidens” should be provided with dowries out of the £40,000, and these maidens were to walk in the processions throughout the Octave clad to match the Seises in white robes and hooded mantles of blue, such as Murillo was depicting then in his representations of the Virgin. Doña Mercia for her part endowed the Capilla de las Doncellas (Chapel of the Maidens) in the cathedral, and here until recent years the dowries provided by her husband and herself were annually distributed, and here portionless girls even now go to pray for good husbands, although unfortunately most of the endowment funds mysteriously disappeared in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

One of the interesting details in this donation is the light it throws on the condition of the silk weaving industry of Seville in the seventeenth century. All the vestments, of whatever class, the altar and other hangings, the costumes of the Seises, and the dresses for the maidens, were to be “of the finest possible materials,” and they were “to be woven for the purpose in the city of Seville, which in such weaving does not give place either to Milan or Naples.” Such is the wording of the deed of gift. Had Don Gonzalo himself been a silk merchant we might have suspected prejudice in favour of his own manufactures; but not so, he had made his fortune as a general trader with the New World.

The silk industry of Seville dated from Arabic times, and appears to have been at its height in the eleventh century under the beneficent rule of the Abbadite kings, who brought civilisation and luxury here to a greater height than ever was attained in Cordova, always more distinguished for literature and science than for arts or industries. The Beni Abbad were Yemenite Arabs, and their family with many others of Yemenite descent (contrary to what is generally supposed) had peacefully established themselves side by side with the Christian natives in the eighth century. They had a full appreciation of the benefits of commerce and industry, for the Yemenites were not nomads like many other Arabs, but had developed, with the aid of their conquerors the Persians, a remarkable civilisation and art in their beloved capital, Sana, the traditional glories of which were still the theme of their poets several centuries after the Arab occupation of Spain. Thus we find in the silks, damasks, and brocades manufactured in Seville right down to the seventeenth century a curious Egypto-Persian influence in design, an influence which, strange to say, even now persists in the beautiful work done by Andalucian women, whether lace, embroidery, or drawn thread, and in the naïve traditional birds and beasts painted on the pottery of Triana. So characteristic are these designs that it is easy to recognise the Seville school of art from the earliest Arabic times down to the present day, while the productions of the seventeenth century can be dated with tolerable accuracy by a new feature which then appeared, as a result of the Sevillian devotion to the “Immaculate.”

New, however, is hardly the correct word, for it had its root in the sacred lotus of Egypt, whose pointed leaves symbolised the flame of life, worshipped from prehistoric ages.

As far back as the thirteenth century this lotus or lily (azucena) had been adopted as their heraldic device by the knightly Order of Our Lady of Old Time, and in 1400 when they began to rebuild the Cathedral of Seville it was assumed as the heraldic arms of the Chapter. Now, in consequence of the general devotion to the “Mystery,” the device became known as the “Heraldic Arms of the Virgin,” and henceforth the jar or vase, with the two-branched lily springing from it, is ubiquitous in Andalucian design. The calix of the lotus flower turned into the vase, while the stamens and pistils grew into the two branches. Some artists indeed went so far as to paint the Virgin sitting on a water-lily with two stems, one of which had its root in the breast of St. Anna, her mother, and the other in that of St. Joachim, her father. We can hardly imagine that an idea so foreign to Western hagiology would have sprung up spontaneously after the Mozarab rite had been suppressed in favour of the Roman on the reconquest of Seville, whereas it would only be natural that the art of the Mozarabic Church should be influenced by Eastern ideas at the time when the members of that Church were in intimate contact with the Arabic civilisation and were practically isolated from the rest of Christendom. As for the Egyptian (or Coptic) tradition, the Yemenite Arabs would have brought it with them in the eighth century, when they came to Spain after their conquest of Egypt, and it would be reinforced by the close intimacy which existed in the eleventh century between the Fatimite Khalifs and the Abbadite court in Seville.

Thanks to Don Gonzalo Nuñez the celebration of the Immaculate Conception has been observed in Seville since 1654 with greater magnificence than anywhere else. The columns of the transepts and nave are draped from top to bottom with crimson velvet curtains, for which the merchants of Seville subscribed £17,000 towards the close of the century, the whole of the reredos and the high altar are covered with plates of chased silver, and the pyx is placed in a shrine of gold surrounded by a coronal of blazing diamonds, each as large as a small pea. This is raised high above the actual altar, and gleams dazzlingly through the dim light of the candles placed round it. When the bell rings for the Elevation, after the dance of the Seises is over, the red velvet curtains screening the Host are slowly drawn back; soft orchestral music fills the air; the Cardinal Archbishop steps forward to give the benediction, and the thousands of worshippers kneel in silent adoration. Then indeed one realises the extraordinary hold that the “Mystery” has taken upon the imagination of the people of Seville.

The little Seises, no matter what imps of mischief they may be at other times, comport themselves with great gravity on this occasion. Filled with honourable pride, convinced that their dance is the event towards which moves all the magnificent ritual of the whole Cathedral year, each small boy feels that everything depends on the perfection of his own performance. Should a single Seis err in the minutest detail, the whole stately dance would break up in confusion. For this “dance” is in truth a series of complicated arabesques traced by small feet upon a velvety carpet, each movement growing out of and depending upon those before and after. There are over two hundred musical settings, but there is only one rule for the dance, and a choir boy, however clever, has to practise it for a whole year before he can be promoted to the dignity of a Seis, the summit of his ambition. Indeed to be a Seis is something like winning a scholarship, for when he outgrows his costume and his voice begins to break, his future is taken care of by the Chapter, who train him for the priesthood if he has a bent that way, or apprentice him to some trade whereby he may eventually earn his living, unless, as frequently is the case, he be the son of parents able to give him a professional career.

Their dresses are still made after the seventeenth-century fashion, though somewhat modified, and, alas! no longer of “the best materials” to be obtained in Seville. The trunks of an earlier day have degenerated into knickerbockers down to the knee, but we still see the white shoes and the white stockings which once were trunk-hose, the round hats turned up at one side with feathers, doublets of white satin with strips of blue edged with gold, and streamers to match hanging from the shoulders, as once did the elegant cloaks of which these are the modest survival. For all the changes and diminished glories of their dress, the little Seises strike a ringing note from the past as they hurry across the broad aisle to the choir before their dance begins, eight of them passing along the railed-off gangway leading from the choir to the high altar, while the two smallest place themselves one on either side of the great carved reading-desk with its immense old missals, ready to take their place of honour behind the Cardinal-Archbishop when he moves from his throne to the altar. The tiny blue and white figures constitute an enchanting touch of childish insouciance among the sombre purples of the canons’ robes and the rich brown of the carved cedar stalls, the top of which they can hardly look over, for they are only seven or eight years old; and they stand first on one foot and then on the other through the long vespers intoned by the choir-men and the beneficed clergy, trying in vain to behave as if they were big boys not at all tired by the drone of phone and antiphone over their small heads.