There is a good painting of the Deposition in the sacristy of S. Antholin; and a still more interesting work is the Retablo of a small altar against the eastern column of the nave. This has the Mass of St. Gregory carved and painted, with other paintings of much merit. That of the Pietà recalls Francia, and the figure of the Blessed Virgin in an Annunciation is full of tender grace and sweetness. It is strange how completely the Inquisition altered the whole character of Spanish art, and deprived it at once and for ever apparently of all power of regarding religion from its bright and tender side!
An uninteresting country is passed between Medina and Avila. This old city is indeed very finely situated; and if it be approached from Madrid, seems to be a real capital of the mountains, with ranges of hills on all sides. It lies, in fact, on the northern side of the Sierra, and just at the margin of the great corn-growing plains which extend thence without interruption to Leon and Palencia. Of the many fortified towns I have seen in Spain it is, I think, the most complete. The walls are still almost perfect all round the city; they are perfectly plain, but of great height, and are garnished with bold circular towers not far apart; and for the gateways two of these towers are placed near together, carried up higher than the rest, and connected by a bold arch thrown from one to the other. There are in all no less than eighty-six towers in the circuit of the walls, and ten gateways; and so great is their height[168] that nothing whatever is seen of the town behind them, and they follow all the undulations of the hill on which they stand with a stern, repulsive, savage look which seems almost to belong to a city of the dead rather than to a fairly lively little city of the present day.
The space within the walls was very confined, and no doubt it was found impossible for any new religious foundations to be established within their boundaries. Several of the great churches, and among these some of the most important—as San Vicente, San Pedro, and San Tomás—were therefore built outside the walls; and the Cathedral itself, cramped by its close neighbourhood to them, was built out boldly with its apse projecting beyond the face of the walls, and making an additional circular tower larger and bolder than any of the others.
The walls of Avila were commenced in A.D. 1090, eight hundred men having been employed on them daily in that year;[169] among them were many directors who came from Leon and Biscay, and all of them wrought under Casandro, a master of geometry and a Roman, and Florin de Pituenga, a French master; so at least we learn from the contemporary history attributed to D. Pelayo, Bishop of Oviedo. The walls were finished in 1099.
In 1091 the Cathedral of San Salvador was commenced by an architect named Alvar Garcia, a native of Estella, in Navarre;[170] the work was completed in sixteen years, as many as nineteen hundred men, according to the authority already quoted, having been employed on the works. D. P. Risco[171] throws considerable doubt on the veracity of D. Pelayo; and his figures certainly seem to be on too grand a scale to be at all probable.
I doubt very much whether any part of the existing Cathedral is of the age of the church whose erection is recorded by Don Pelayo, except perhaps the external walls of the apse. Its general character is thoroughly that of the end of the twelfth or early part of the thirteenth century, with considerable alterations and additions at later periods; and we may safely assume that the chevet, commenced in A.D. 1091, was continued westward very slowly and gradually during the following hundred years or more. The ground-plan will show the very singular disposition of the plan; in which the chevet, with its double aisle and semi-circular chapels in the thickness of the walls, is, I think, among the most striking works of the kind in Spain.[172] The external wall of the apse is a semi-circle divided into bays by buttresses of slight projection alternating with engaged shafts. The chapels do not therefore show at all in the external view; and indeed all that does appear here is a projecting tower of vast size pierced with a few very small windows—mere slits in the wall—and flanked on either side by the wall and towers of the town. It is finished at the top by a corbel-table and lofty battlemented parapet; and behind this again, leaving a passage five feet and a half in width, is a second and higher battlemented wall, from within which one looks down upon the aisle-roof of the chevet, and into the triforium and clerestory windows of the central apse. From below very little of the apse and flying buttresses which support it are seen; and one is more struck perhaps by the strange unlikeness to any other east-end one has ever seen, than by any real beauty in the work itself; though at the same time it is pleasant to see that not even so difficult a problem as that of a windowless fortified chevet presented any serious difficulty to these old architects.
