Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

In our large towns in England there is nothing we now want more than something which shall emulate the magnificent scale of these Catalan churches. They were built in the middle ages for a large manufacturing or seafaring population; and we have everywhere just such masses of souls to be dealt with as they were provided for. But then, of course, it is useless to recommend such models if they are only to be used as we use our churches, for four or five hours on Sundays, instead of, as these Spanish churches were and still are, for worship at all sorts of hours, not only on Sundays, but on every day of the week also. When English Churchmen are accustomed to see churches thoroughly well used; when no church is without its weekly, no great church without its daily Eucharist; and when they see none, great or small, without their doors open daily both for public and private prayer,—then, and not till then, can we expect that they will allow architects any chance of emulating the glories achieved by these old men. Till then we shall hold fast to our insular traditions of little town churches and subdivided parishes, and shall doubt the advantages of enormous naves, of colleges of clergy working together, and of those other old Catholic appliances, which must be tried fully and fairly before we give up in despair the attempt to Christianize the working population of our large cities.

The general idea of these great fifteenth-century churches has no doubt already been grasped by my readers. Worship at the altar appears to me to be the key to the design and arrangement of many of them, for nowhere else in Europe, I suppose, can we find a church on so very moderate a scale as the Cathedral at Barcelona crowded in the way it is with altars, and so planned and fitted up as to make it absolutely useless as a place of gathering for a large number of persons at one service. But if this multiplication of side altars was here carried to excess, one of the most remarkable examples of an attempt to glorify the high altar, and at the same time to provide for one enormous and united congregation, is unquestionably that which is presented by Sta. Maria del Mar in the same city. This church has its prototype at Palma in Mallorca, and I much regret that I have never yet been able to visit that island, for, so far as I can learn, it seems that the mainland owed much to it in the way of architectural development, and that some of the finest examples of the Catalan style in this age are still to be seen there.

The special devotion to the altar service which is exemplified in Barcelona Cathedral led naturally to other architectural developments. Such are the remarkable church of San Tomás at Avila, with its western choir and eastern altar both raised in galleries, and its arrangement for the congregation of worshippers below. Such again is the church of El Parral, Segovia, with its deep western gallery for the choir, its dark, gloomy, and austere nave, and the concentration of light and window round the altar. Indeed, the institution of the western gallery, so common—I might almost say so universal—in small churches at this period in Spain, arose from the same feeling as did the removal of the choir into the nave in the larger churches. The object of all these changes was to give the people access to the altar, and usually they seem to have been made upon the assumption that no one would care to assist at the services in the choir itself. I am very much inclined to think that the rise of this feeling was to a great extent an accident, and the result of the fact that almost all the early Spanish churches were founded on models in which the eastern limb of the Cross was so very short that the choir or Chorus Cantorum must almost always have occupied the eastern part of the nave, or the Crossing under the central lantern. This must have been almost a necessity in such cathedrals as those of Lérida, Tudela, and Sigüenza: whilst in others, as those of Tarragona, Tarazona, and Avila, the space must always have been cramped, though a choir might have been accommodated. Of the larger churches Burgos alone has a really large constructional choir. In Toledo it is very short, and in Leon certainly below what we usually find in a French church of the same age and pretensions.

The cathedrals of Segovia and Salamanca are the two latest great Gothic churches in Spain, and in some respects among the grandest; and here, as might be expected, the Spanish custom as to the position of the Coro had become so thoroughly fixed and invariable, that the choir proper is very short, and built only for the altar. The plan of Segovia Cathedral is very fine and well proportioned; whilst that of Salamanca has been unhappily ruined by the erection of a square east end, in place of the apse which was first of all intended: and this, in place of emulating at all the noble design of any of our English eastern ends, is contrived with but little skill, the aisle returning across behind the altar, whilst beyond it to the east there is a line of chapels similar to those beyond the aisles.

Of the later styles I need say but little. They are not Gothic, and this is a summary of Gothic architecture only; yet it is interesting to look into their history if only to notice how curious the fact is that at the same time that men like Berruguete were designing in the most thoroughly Renaissance style, Juan Gil de Hontañon was still painfully superintending the erection of a great Gothic cathedral. The remarkably Gothic staircase to the Hall at Christ Church, Oxford (A.D. 1640); the Gothic window traceries of Stone Church, Kent, of the same date; the rebuilding of Higham Ferrers steeple by the great Archbishop Laud, and of the spire of Lichfield Cathedral by good Bishop Hacket in 1669, are well-known instances of the remarkable love for Christian art which Englishmen retained long after the fashion for Pagan and Renaissance art had set in. And it is not a little interesting to find the same contest going on in Spain, and the same love for the old and hallowed form of art exhibited.

I cannot see much—I might almost say I can see nothing—to admire in the works of the Renaissance school in Spain. It was in their time that the discovery of America raised the country to the very summit of her prosperity, and right nobly did she acknowledge her duty by the offerings she made of her wealth. Few Spanish churches are without some token of the magnificent liberality of the people at this time, and one is obliged to acknowledge it in spite of the horror with which one regards the works they did, and the damage which their erection did to the older buildings to which they were added.

It would be dreary work to follow the stream of Spanish art down by Berruguete and Herrera to Churriguera and so on to our own time; and the only fact of interest that I know is that the old scheme of cruciform church with a central lantern is still the most popular, and that down to the present time almost every modern church has been so planned, with a lantern dome rising from above the intersection of the nave and transepts.

Fortunately, down to this time the tide of “Restoration” has hardly reached Spain, and one is able therefore to study the genuine old records in their old state. There are no Salisbury Chapter-houses or Worcester Cathedrals to puzzle us as to whether anything about them is old, or whether all may be dismissed or discussed as if it were perfectly new; and so it affords a field for study the value of which cannot be overrated, and which ought not to be neglected. It must not be supposed that this field of study is limited to the general scheme of the churches. On the contrary, their fittings and furniture, their appendages and dependent buildings, are unsurpassed in interest by those of any other land, and in addition to these there are several other heads under which my subject naturally presents itself.

First among them is that of church furniture. No country is perhaps now so rich in this respect as Spain. Few of course—if any—of her churches retain their old furniture in its original place earlier in date than the fifteenth century. It is true that the magnificent baldachin and Retablo at Gerona, the screens round the Coro at Toledo, and the beautiful painted Retablo in the old cathedral at Salamanca, are earlier than this; but these are exceptions to the rule. The great glory of the country in this respect are such Retablos—rich in sculpture, covered with gold and colour, and in paintings of no mean merit, and lofty and imposing beyond anything of the kind ever seen elsewhere—as those of Toledo Cathedral or the Carthusian Church of Miraflores. In these one hardly knows whether to admire most the noble munificence of the founders, or the marvellous skill and dexterity of the men who executed them. It is not only that they are rich and costly, but much more, that all the work in them is usually good of its kind, and far finer than the work of the same age and style which we see in the Netherlands and Germany. The choir stalls, again, are often magnificent. Nothing can be more interesting than the contemporary chronicle of the capture of Granada which we see in the lower range of stalls at Toledo; they are full of character and spirit, and represent what was no doubt felt to be a truly religious enterprize, with at least as much fidelity as any view of our own military operations at the present day ever attains to. Other churches have choir fittings, like those of Zamora, full of curious interest to the student of Christian iconography; like those at Palencia, remarkable for the exceedingly elaborate character of their traceries and panelling; and like those of Gerona, valuable for the fine character of the rare fourteenth-century woodwork which has been re-arranged in the modern Coro. Turn again from the choir stalls to the other fittings of the choir. Seldom elsewhere shall we see the old columns for the curtains at the side of the altar still standing as they do at Manresa. Nowhere shall we see such magnificent choir lecterns, in brass as that of Toledo, or in wood as that of Zamora; nowhere else such pretty and sweet-sounding wheels of bells for use at the elevation of the Host; nowhere, perhaps, so many old organs, many of which, if not Mediæval, are at any rate not far from being so; nowhere else so many or such magnificent Rejas or metal screens and parcloses, as in this country. In every one of these works Spanish workmen excelled, because they devoted themselves to them. We have lists of men who made screens, of others who carved the choir stalls, of others who made Retablos, and of others, again, who painted and gilded them. Each class of men is named after the furniture to the execution of which they devoted themselves, and occasionally individuals rose to rare eminence from this kind of work. The time was late, indeed, when it happened, but see how Borgoña and Berruguete strove for mastery over their work on the upper stalls at Toledo, or how the poor Matias Bonifé, at Barcelona, was bound to carve no beasts or subjects on his stalls, to which we may suppose he was addicted; and how his successor died of distress because the Chapter did not like the pinnacles he added to the canopies; and consider how people interested themselves in the matter, how they were excited in the contest between Borgoña and Berruguete, and no doubt in the others also, and we see at once how different was the position which these men occupied from that which, so far as we know, their contemporaries in England held.

The monuments in the Spanish churches are not the least of their glories. From one of the earliest and finest, that of Bishop Maurice at Burgos, there is a sequence illustrating almost every variety of Gothic down to that exquisite Renaissance monument of the son of Ferdinand and Isabella at Avila, in which—in spite of the date and style—the old spirit still breathes an air of grace, refinement, and purity over the whole work. Such chapels as those which enshrine these monuments,—that of the Constable at Burgos, of Santiago at Toledo, of Miraflores near Burgos,—are well fitted to hold the most magnificent of memorials; for were it not that such a work as the tomb of Juan II. and Elizabeth is almost unmatched anywhere for the skill and delicacy of its workmanship, and that some of the others are almost equally sumptuous, the chapels within which they are erected would appear to be in themselves the noblest remembrances of the dead.