Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

The feature which most struck me in this cathedral was the wonderful lightness which characterizes its construction in every part. The columns of the nave are of moderate size, and the arches which they carry very thin, whilst the large and lofty clerestory, and the triforium below it, were both pierced to such an extent as to leave a pier to receive the groining smaller than I think I ever saw elsewhere in so large a church. There are double flying buttresses, one above the other, and the architect trusted, no doubt, that the weight of the groining would be carried down through them to such an extent as to make it safe to venture on as much as he did. Moreover, he was careful to economize the weight where possible; and with this view he filled in the whole of his vaults with a very light tufa, obtained from the mountains to the north of Leon.[118] In short, when this cathedral was planned, its architect must either have resolved that it should exceed all others in the slender airiness of its construction, or he must have been extremely incautious if not reckless. It is not a little curious that in France, at the same time, the same attempt was being made, and with the like result. The architect of Beauvais, unable to surpass the majestic combination of stable loftiness with beauty of form, which characterized the rather earlier work at Amiens, tried instead to excel him alike in height, and in lightness of construction. No one can pretend that he was an incompetent man, yet his work was so imprudently daring, that it was impossible to avoid a catastrophe; and we now have it rebuilt, to some extent in the same design after its fall, but with so many additional points of support as very much to spoil its symmetry and beauty. Here, then, we have an exactly parallel case: for at Leon, no sooner was the church completed than it became necessary to build up the outer lights, both of the clerestory and triforium, to save the work from the same misfortune. Nor was the precaution altogether successful, for, owing almost entirely to the over-hazardous nature of the whole construction, the south transept had recently, it is said, become so dangerously rent with cracks and settlements as to render it absolutely necessary to rebuild it; and the groining throughout the church shows signs of failure everywhere, and this of serious, if not of so fatal a character.

At the risk of repetition, I cannot help saying how strongly this parallel between Beauvais and Leon tells in favour of the assumption that its origin was rather French than Spanish. For in Spain there were no other churches at the time it was built from which a Spanish architect could have made such a sudden development as this design would have been. The steps by which it would have been attained are altogether wanting, and yet in France we have every step, and, finally, results of precisely the same kind. Both at an earlier and at a later date, when Spaniards made use of their own school of architects, they developed for themselves certain classes of churches, unlike, in some respects, to those of any other country. Here, however, we have an exotic, which, like the cathedral at Burgos, is evidently the work of some artist who had at least been educated among the architects of the north of France, if he was not himself a Frenchman. The proof of this is to be found more perhaps at S. Denis than anywhere, for there the section of the mouldings of the clerestory windows, as well as their general design, tallies so closely with the same parts of Leon Cathedral that it is almost impossible to doubt their common origin.

One other feature not yet insisted upon, affords strong evidence in the same direction. This cathedral is a mere lantern, it has scarcely a yard of plain unpierced wall anywhere, and the main thought of its architect was evidently how he might increase to the utmost extent the size of the windows, and the spaces for the glorious glass with which he contrived to fill the church. No greater fault could be committed in such a climate. This lavish indulgence in windows would have been excessive even in England, and must have always been all but insupportable in Spain. It was the design of French and not Spanish artists, for in their own undoubted works these last always wisely reduced their windows to the smallest possible dimensions. The cathedral at Milan is a case of the same kind, for there a German architect, called to build a church in a foreign land, built it with as many windows as he would have put had it been in his own country, and with a similar contempt for the customs of the national architects to that which marks the work of the architect of Leon Cathedral.

Regarding this cathedral, then, as a French, rather than as a Spanish church, and giving up all attempt to make it illustrate a chapter of the real national artistic history, we shall best be able to do justice to it as a work of art. It is, indeed, in almost every respect worthy to be ranked among the noblest churches of Europe. Its detail is rich and beautiful throughout, its plan very excellent, the sculpture with which it is adorned quite equal in quantity and character to that of any church of the age, and the stained glass with which its windows are everywhere filled, perhaps some of the most brilliant in Europe.

There are many features in its construction and design which must be referred to somewhat in detail, and to this part of my subject I must now turn.

I have already mentioned that the triforium throughout the church was originally glazed. In order to obtain this the aisles were covered with gabled roofs, whose ridges were parallel with the nave; and in order to allow of this being done a stone gutter was formed below the sills of the clerestory windows, and below this again corbels were built into the wall to carry the aisle roofs; cross gutters also of stone were carried through the roof in each bay from the clerestory gutter to the outer wall of the aisles. I cannot say that the effect of this arrangement is good. The eye seems to require some grave space of wall between the main arches and the glazing of the clerestory; and it is difficult to say on what ground the triforium is to be treated as a separate architectural division of the fabric, when it is in truth, as it is here, nothing more than a prolongation of the clerestory.

The flying buttresses are rather steep in pitch, and each consists of two arches abutting against very broad buttresses rising from between the side chapels; the lower arch supports the clerestory just at the level of the springing of the groining; the higher a few feet only below the parapet. Two pinnacles rise out of each of the buttresses, and others form a finish to them all round the clerestory, and at the angles of the chapels of the apse.

The windows throughout have good traceries. They are all of pure geometrical character; those in the chapels of the choir being of two lights, with large cusped circles in the head, and those in the clerestory of four lights, subdivided into two divisions, similar to the chapel windows, with another cusped circle above. The heads of the lights throughout the windows are uncusped, the cusping being confined to the traceries. The clerestory windows originally had six lights, but the outer lights were rather clumsy additions to the original scheme for four-light windows, and have since been walled up, to give the necessary strength to the groining piers. The general arrangement of the traceries in this part of the church will be best understood by reference to the engraving which I give of one bay of the choir.

The stone-work of all the window traceries was very carefully cramped together with strong toothed iron plugs let into the centre of the stones, and the masons seem, in many cases, to have marked the beds and not the face of the stones. Indeed, the early masons’ marks are but few in number, and most of those that I saw occurred at the base of the eastern walls, and again in the upper portion of the work. On the late, and thoroughly Spanish chapel of Santiago also, a good many occur on the outer face of the stones. Owing to the works which were in progress in the south transept, I had an unusually good opportunity of looking for these marks, not only on the face of the stones, but also on their beds, and their almost entire absence from the early work was very remarkable. On the other hand, there were markings on some of the other stones which were of much more interest. I found, for instance, one of the large stones forming the capital of the pier at the crossing of the nave and transepts, carefully marked, first with an outline of the whole of the jamb mould, then with the lines of the capital, and finally with the whole of the archivolt. It had all the air of being the practical working drawing used for the execution of the work, some little alterations having been made in the archivolt. It is easy to conceive that the architect may thus have designed his details, and his mode bears considerable analogy to that which M. Verdier describes as having been adopted at Limoges, where the lines of the groining and all the working outlines were scratched on the floor of the triforia; here the lines are scratched boldly on the surface of the stones.