Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

The journeys which I have undertaken in Spain have all been made with the one object of inspecting the remains of Gothic building which I either hoped to, or knew I should, find there. My knowledge of Spanish scenery has therefore been very much limited, and it is only incidentally that I am able to speak at all of it. Yet I have seen enough to be able to recommend a great extent of country as thoroughly worthy of exploration by those who care for nought but picturesque scenery. The greater part of Catalonia, much of Aragon, Navarre, the north of Leon, Galicia, and the Asturias, are all full of lovely scenery, and even in other districts, where the country is not interesting, there seem always to be ranges of mountains in sight, which, with the singular purity of the atmosphere through which they are seen, never fail of leaving pleasant recollections in one’s mind. Such, for example, is the view of the Guadarrama Mountains from Madrid—a view which redeems that otherwise forlorn situation for a great city, and gives it the only charm it has. Such again are the mountain backgrounds of Leon, Avila, and Segovia.

In my first Spanish tour I entered the country from Bayonne, travelled thence by Vitoria to Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, Madrid, Alcalá, Toledo, Valencia, Barcelona, Lérida, and by Gerona to Perpiñan. In the second I went again to Gerona, thence to Barcelona, Tarragona, Manresa, Lérida, Huesca, Zaragoza, Tudela, Pamplona, and so to Bayonne; and in the third and last I went by Bayonne to Pamplona, Tudela, Tarazona, Sigüenza, Guadalajara, Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Avila, Salamanca, Zamora, Benavente, Leon, Astorga, Lugo, Santiago, la Coruña, and thence back by Valladolid and Burgos to San Sebastian and Bayonne.

Tours such as these have, I think, given me a fair chance of forming a right judgment as to most of the features of Spanish architecture; but it were worse than foolish to suppose that they have been in the slightest degree exhaustive, for there are large tracts of country which I have not visited at all, others in which I have seen one or two only out of many towns which are undoubtedly full of interesting subjects to the architect, and others again in which I have been too much pressed for time. Yet I hardly know that I need apologize for my neglect to see more when I consider that, up to the present time, so far as I know, no architect has ever described the buildings which I have visited, and indeed no accurate or reliable information is to be obtained as to their exact character, or age, or history. The real subject for apology is one over which I have had, in truth, no control. The speed with which I have been compelled to travel, and the rapidity with which I have been obliged to sketch and take dimensions of everything I have seen, have often, no doubt, led to my making errors, for which, wherever they exist, I am sincerely sorry. In truth, the work I undertook was hardly the mere relaxation from my ordinary artistic labour for which it was first of all intended, and has been increased not a little by the labour which I have undertaken in the attempt to fix by documentary evidence, where possible, the ages of the various parts of the buildings I have described.

It will be observed that I have not visited the extreme south of Spain; and this was from the first a settled purpose with me. We have already been treated almost to surfeit with accounts of the Moorish remains at Granada, Seville, Cordoba, and other places in the south; but beside this my anxiety was to see how the Christians and not how the Moors built in Spain in the middle ages, and I purposely, therefore, avoided those parts of the country which during the best period of mediæval art were not free from Moorish influence. The pages of this book are the best evidence I can give of the wisdom of such a decision, and I need only say here that I was more than satisfied with the purity and beauty of the Christian architecture of Spain, and that I have no hesitation in the advice which I give to others to follow in my track and to make good the deficiencies in my investigations, of which I am so thoroughly conscious.

By this time travelling on the great high road through Spain viâ Madrid is much easier than it was when I first made the journey. The railway to Madrid is now either completed or all but completed, and it is possible to travel from Calais to Alicante on an almost unbroken line. It is a matter to be grateful for in most respects, yet I rejoice that I made my first journey when it was still necessary to make use of the road, and to see something on the way both of the country and of the people.

It was after a hurried journey by night to Paris, and thence the next night on to Bordeaux, that I arrived, after a few hours spent in that interesting old city, at the end of the second day in Bayonne. Here my first work was to furnish myself with money and places in the Spanish diligence; and in both these matters I received my first lesson in one peculiarity of Spaniards—that of using foreign words in another and different sense from that to which we are accustomed. Napoleons are said to be the best coin for use in Spain, and I furnished myself with them only to discover, when it was too late, that in Spain a Napoleon means a silver five-franc piece, and that my gold Napoleons were all but useless out of Madrid. And again, when I asked for places in the coupé of the diligence, I found that I was really trying to secure seats in the banquette—the coupé being called the berlina, and the banquette the coupé.

At Bayonne there is not very much to be seen beyond the cathedral, the river crossed by the Duke for his attack on Soult, and a charming view from the top of the cathedral tower of the lower ranges of the Pyrenees. The Trois Couronnes is the most conspicuous peak, and its outline is fine; but here, as generally in the distant views of the chain which I obtained, there is a lack of those snow peaks which lend so much beauty to all Alpine views. The exterior of the cathedral has been almost entirely renewed of late, and a small army of masons was busy in the cloister on the south side of the choir. It is to be hoped that the stoppage of the funds so lavishly spent upon the French cathedrals may happen before the Bayonne architects and masons have come round to the west end. At present there is a savage picturesqueness about this which is beyond measure delightful, whilst the original arrangement of the doorways and porches on the west and south, with enormous penthouse roofs over them, is just so far open to conjecture and doubt as to be best left without very much alteration. The general character of the interior of the cathedral is only moderately good, the traceries of the lofty traceried triforium and the great six-light windows of the clerestory in the nave being unusually complicated for French work. The choir is of late thirteenth century work, very short, with five chapels in the chevet.

In the afternoon we followed the stream and drove to Biarritz. A succession of vehicles of every kind, crowded with passengers, gave strong evidence of the attractions either of the place or else of the Emperor and Empress, who had been there for a week or two; and the mob of extravagantly dressed ladies, French and English, who thronged the bathing-places and the sandy plain in front of the Villa Eugénie, accounted for the enormous black boxes under which all the vehicles seemed to groan. The view from the cliffs on the western side of Biarritz is strikingly beautiful, embracing as it does the long range of the Pyrenees descending to the sea in a grand mass above Fuenterrabia, and prolonged as far as the eye could reach along the coast of Biscay. The next morning we left Bayonne at four o’clock for Burgos. We had seats in the coupé, the occupants of the berlina on this journey being a son of Queen Christina, with his bride. In Spain every one seems to travel by the diligence; you seldom meet a private carriage; there are no posting arrangements; and owing to the way in which the diligences on the great roads are crowded, it is very difficult indeed to stop on the road without running great risk of indefinite delays in getting places again.

The drive was very charming. The sun rose before we reached St. Jean de Luz,[6] and we enjoyed to the full the lovely scenery. Crossing the Bidassoa at Irun, the famous Ile de Faisans was seen—a mere stony bank in the middle of the stream, recently walled round and adorned with a sort of monument—and then ensued a delay of an hour whilst our luggage was examined and plombé in order that it might pass out of Guipuzcoa into Castile without a second examination.

There is a rather characteristic church of late date here. It stands on ground sloping steeply down towards the river, and has a bald look outside, owing to the almost complete absence of window openings, what there are being small, and very high above the floor. The plan is peculiar: it has a nave and chancel, and aisles of two bays to the eastern half of the nave, so that the western part of the nave corresponds in outline very nearly with the chancel. There is a tower at the west end of the south aisle. The groining is many-ribbed, and illustrates the love of the later Spanish architects for ogee surface-ribs, which look better on a plan of vaulting than they do in execution. The east end is square, but the vaulting is apsidal, the angles of the square end being cut across by domical pendentives below the vaulting. The most remarkable feature is the great width of the nave, which is about fifty-four feet from centre to centre of the columns, the total length not being more, I think, than a hundred and fifty feet. The church floor was strewed with rushes, and in the evening when I visited it the people stole in and out like ghosts upon this quiet carpeting. This church was rebuilt in A.D. 1508, and is of course not a very good example of Spanish Gothic.