Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

The old cathedral is called the “Seu,” par excellence, the other being the Cathedral “del Pilar.” The Seu[381] is the usual term for the principal church, and the name of the second is derived from a miracle-working figure of the Blessed Virgin on a pillar, which it seems that the people care only to worship half the year.

The Seu is in some respects a remarkable church, but it is so much modernized outside as to be, with the exception of one portion, quite uninteresting, and the interior, though it is gorgeous and grand in its general effect, is of very late style and date, and does not bear very much examination in detail. It is very broad in proportion to its length, having two aisles on each side of the nave, and chapels beyond them between the buttresses; and there are but five bays west of the Crossing, and of these the Coro occupies two. There is a lantern at the Crossing, and a very short apsidal choir. The nave and aisles are all roofed at the same level, the vaulting springing from the capitals of the main columns, and the whole of the light is admitted by windows in the end walls, and high up in the outer walls of the aisles. In this respect Spanish churches of late date almost always exhibit an attention to the requirements of the climate, which is scarcely ever seen in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and this church owes almost all its good effect to this circumstance, for it is in light and shade only, and neither in general design nor in detail, that it is a success. The detail, indeed, is almost as much Pagan as Gothic. The capitals of the columns, for instance, have carvings of fat nude cherubs, supporting coats of arms, and the groining, which is covered with ogee lierne ribs, has enormous bosses and pendants cut out of wood and gaudily gilded.

There is some interesting matter in the history of the Cimborio over the Crossing. It seems that in the year 1500 there was supposed to be some danger of the old Cimborio falling, and the Archbishop, D. Alonso de Aragon, and his Chapter, thereupon invited several artificers and skilled engineers to examine the works, and advise as to its repair. At this Junta there were present two maestros from Toledo—one of them Henrique de Egas; Maestro Font, from Barcelona; Carlos, from Montearagon (Huesca); and Compte, from Valencia; and they, having deliberated with the artificers attached to the cathedral, reported that it would be necessary to take down the Cimborio and rebuild it, and do other repairs to the rest of the church.

This report having been presented, the archbishop some time afterwards, in January, 1505, makes an appeal to the King on the subject, in order that he may obtain the services of Henrique de Egas as architect for the work. He says that he has had the advice of the most experienced and able architects of the day, and among them of Egas, and that they were all agreed that the Cimborio must be taken down, which had been done. And then he says that, inasmuch as the rest of the church seems to be much in want of repair, and as Egas seemed to be a man of great ability and experience, he was very anxious to procure his aid, but that Egas had excused himself on the plea that he had a certain hospital to build at Santiago in Galicia for the King, who required him to go there. Whereupon the archbishop begs the King, for the love of God our Lord, that he will have pity on him; and since there is no great necessity at Santiago, and a very great one at Zaragoza, that he will command Egas to undertake the work.

It is said that Egas did execute the work after all. But it is impossible not to be amused at the enormous contrast between those times and our own, if then it was necessary for an archbishop to appeal to the King to make an architect undertake such a work![382]

The detail of the Cimborio is, as might be expected from its date, most impure. It is octagonal in plan, the canted sides being carried on semi-circular arches thrown across the angles. It is of two stages in height, the lower having square recesses for statues, and the upper traceried windows. The general scheme is Gothic, but the detail is all very Renaissance in character.[383]

The choir is apsidal, but the apse is concealed by an enormous sculptured Retablo, which, in spite of its very late date, is certainly dignified in its effect.

Externally there are evidences of the existence of an earlier church, the lower part of the apse being evidently Romanesque, a portion of the buttresses and one of the windows retaining their old character. The new work is of brick, the windows generally of four lights, with flamboyant tracery, and the walls crowned with rich cornices. The exterior of the Cimborio, as well as of the church, owes much of the picturesqueness which marks it to the fact that the brickwork is everywhere very roughly and irregularly executed.

One portion of the exterior of the church is, however, most interesting; for on the face of the wall, at the north-east angle, is a very remarkable example of brickwork, inlaid with coloured tiles, the character of which proves that it is, no doubt, part of the cathedral which was approaching completion in the middle of the fourteenth century, and earlier in date therefore than the greater part of the existing fabric. This wall is a lofty unbroken surface, about sixty-four feet in length from north to south, and is erected in front of a building of two stages in height, and pierced with pointed windows in each stage. It is built with bricks of, I think, a reddish colour (though I am a little uncertain, owing to their being now very dirty), which are all arranged in patterns in the wall, by setting those which are to form the outlines forward from one-and-a-half to two inches in advance of the general face of the wall. The spaces so left are then filled in with small tiles set in patterns or diapers, the faces of which are generally about three quarters of an inch behind those of the brick outlines. The tiles are of various shapes, sizes, and colours, red, blue, green, white, and buff on white. The blue is very deep and dark in tone, the green light and bright. The patterns are generally of very Moorish character; and there can be no doubt, I think, that the whole work was done by Moorish workmen. The general character of this very remarkable work is certainly most effective; and though I should not like to see the Moresque character of the design reproduced, it undoubtedly affords some most valuable suggestions for those who at the present day are attempting to develop a ceramic decoration for the exteriors of buildings. Here I was certainly struck by the grave quiet of the whole decoration, and was converted to some extent from a belief which I had previously entertained rather too strongly, that the use of tiles for inlaying would be likely to lead to a very gay and garish style of decoration, foreign to all dignity and repose in its effect. There is an intersecting arcade under the lowest windows, in which, as also in some other parts, the ground of the panels is plastered; and in this plaster panels of tiles and single sunk disks of tile are inserted on the white ground. The windows are pointed, and all of them have rich borders to their jambs, which are continued round the arches. Within their borders there appears to have been an order of moulded brickwork, and then the window opening, which is now blocked, but which may possibly have had stone monials and tracery. The bricks used here are of the usual old shape, about 1 ft. 1½ in. long by 6¾ in. wide. They are generally built alternately long and short, but not by any means with any great attempt to break the bond. The mortar-joints are also not less than half an inch in thickness, and this, it must be remembered, in a work the whole characteristic of which is the extreme delicacy and refinement of the decoration. The tiles are five-eighths of an inch thick; some of them are encaustic, of two colours; and all are, as is usual with Moorish tiles, glazed all over. This tile and brick decoration begins at a height of about eight feet from the ground, and is carried up from that point to the top of the wall. Such work seems to be obviously unfitted to be close to the ground; and the lower part of the wall is therefore judiciously built with perfectly plain brickwork.

The most important church in Zaragoza after the cathedral is that of San Pablo. This is an early thirteenth-century church, of the same class as that of San Lorenzo at Lérida, having a nave of four bays, and an apse of five sides with a groined aisle round it. The side walls of the nave, which are of enormous thickness, are pierced with pointed arches opening into the aisles, which seem to be of the same date, though from the enormous size of the piers they are very much cut off from the nave. The groining ribs are of great size, and moulded with a triple roll in both nave and aisles. Some trace of the original lancet windows is still to be seen in the apse; but most of them are blocked up or destroyed. The aisle is returned across the west end of the nave; and there is a western door and porch, with a descent of some eleven or twelve steps into the church. The Coro is at the west end of the nave, and is fitted with stalls executed circa A.D. 1500-1520, with a Renaissance Reja to the east of them. There is a good reredos, rich in coloured and sculptured subjects, which is said to be a work of the beginning of the sixteenth century, by Damian Forment, of Valencia, who, as will be recollected, carved the reredos in the cathedral at Huesca. The fine octagonal brick steeple is evidently a later addition to the church, and rises from the north-west angle of the nave. It is very much covered with work of the same kind as the wall veil at the cathedral, which I have just been describing, though on a bolder and coarser scale; and it belongs, as far as I can judge by its style, to somewhere about the same period.[384] The brick patterns here, as there, are in parts filled in with glazed tiles; and the general effect of the steeple is very graceful, rising as it does with richly ornamented upper stages, upon a plain base, out of the low and strange jumble of irregular roofs with which the church is now covered.