Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

The entrance to Madrid is not very striking. For the last three or four miles the road passes by a fair amount of planted woods, but the river by its side is dry and dreary, and every one in the hot season at which I arrived seemed to be gasping for breath. A very small suburb only is passed before the Queen’s palace is reached: this is built on the edge of a steep hill overhanging the river, and commands a grand view of the Sierra de Guadarrama. This is indeed the one and only glory of such a site as that of Madrid, for were it not for this distant view, I know nothing more dreary and unhappy than the country with which it is surrounded. At the same time, partly owing to the great height above the sea, and partly, probably, to the neighbourhood of this mountain range, the climate here is most treacherous, changing rapidly from the most violent heat in the daytime, to what seems by contrast to be icy chilliness at night.

A garden with statues is laid out in front of the palace, and beyond this, passing some narrow streets, one soon reaches the Puerta del Sol, a fine irregular space in the centre of the city, with a fountain in the centre which is always playing pleasantly, and on great occasions sends up a jet to an unusual height. The Puerta del Sol is very irregular, and on sloping ground, and hence it has a certain pleasing picturesqueness, which probably accounts for the reputation it has achieved.

There is one great attraction to me in Madrid, and only one—the Picture Gallery. And it is as well for travellers to take up their quarters in one of the hotels near the Puerta del Sol, where they are within a walk of it, rather than in the respectable Fonda de Ynglaterra, where I found myself quite too far from everything that I wanted to see.

I discovered no old churches here. Madrid is, in fact, a thoroughly modern city, and is remarkable as not being the see of a bishop, the Archbishops of Toledo having succeeded in retaining it in their diocese.

I found, therefore, nothing whatever to do in the way of ecclesiologizing; and yet, on the whole, having formed a very low estimate of the place beforehand, I was rather agreeably disappointed. The situation is unquestionably fine, the views of the mountains beautiful, the streets busy and smart, and the fountains, which seem to be innumerable, are on a scale which would astonish our London authorities. The evenings are always deliciously cool, and then all Madrid is on the move; the very well laid out and planted Prado is thronged with smart people on foot, and smarter people in carriages; and until one has suffered as one does from the extreme heat of the day, it is hardly possible to imagine the luxurious freshness of the cool night. It is said, however, to be a dangerous pleasure, pulmonary complaints being very common.

The two great sights are the Museo and the Armeria; the latter is said to be the best collection of arms in Europe, but somehow I always managed to want to go there too early or too late, and, after divers mistakes, in the end did not see it at all. Of the Museo it is difficult to speak with too much enthusiasm: the number of pictures is enormous, and it seemed to me that there was a larger proportion than is usual of very first-rate works. Its deficiency is mainly in early pictures—Italian, German, and Spanish. The early Italian schools are represented by one Angelico da Fiesole only: this is a beautiful example; an Annunciation, with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden on the left of the picture, and five subjects from the life of the Blessed Virgin in the predella. Among these, the Marriage of the Blessed Virgin has a close resemblance to Perugino’s and Raffaelle’s celebrated pictures. I could see no examples of Francia or Perugino, not to speak of earlier men; whilst the few early German works were none of them of any great interest.

On the other hand, the pictures by Titian, Velasquez, Raffaelle, Veronese, Tintoret, Murillo, and others of the great masters of their age, are numerous and magnificent beyond description.

Velasquez and Titian are both so grand that I hardly knew which to admire the most; of the former, perhaps on the whole the most charming work is the portrait of Prince Balthazar, a noble boy, galloping forward gallantly on his pony; whilst of the Titians, I think the most striking was a weird-looking portrait of Charles V. in armour on horseback. Murillo of course is in great force; he has frequent representations of the Assumption, always treated in the same way: his work has a religious spirit wanting in the manlier work of Titian and Veronese, but yet not the true religious spirit so much as a sentimental affectation of it. Of Ribera—better known in England as Spagnoletto—there are a great many examples, generally disagreeable portraits of emaciated saints in distorted attitudes, and a horrible elaboration of ghastliness. Juan Juanes, an earlier Spanish painter, is much more agreeable, and he seems to have been largely inspired by Perugino and his school; a series of five subjects from the life of St. Stephen are perhaps the most interesting of his works here.

The room in which the greatest treasures of the Gallery are collected is called the Salon de la Reyna Isabel. Unfortunately a large opening in the floor, to give light to a gallery of sculpture below, makes it a little difficult to see some of the pictures at all well. At its upper end is the famous Spasimo de Sicilia, a noble work, but spoilt by the awkward and distorted drawing of the soldiers on the left. Near it is a very fine Giovanni Bellini, the Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter; and by its side a Giorgione, with a man in armour, as fine as anything I know,—the subject, the Virgin and Saints. By Bronzino there is a violin-player, a lad with a face beyond measure loveable. But it were endless to go on through a list even of the chefs-d’œuvre in such a collection; and it is the less necessary to say much more than generally to praise the whole Gallery as one of the first, if not the first, in Europe, because, now that railways make the journey thither so much more easy, some, no doubt, of our thousands of annual travellers will make their way to Madrid, to make lists for themselves of the best of its pictures.

There is as little interest in modern as in earlier architecture here; the only development that struck me being a fashion the people have of diapering houses all over with a kind of thirteenth-century painting on plaster; but I was not struck with the beauty of the development. The best street is the Calle de Alcalá, leading from the Puerta del Sol to the Prado. It is of great width, rising from the Puerta del Sol and falling to the Prado, and not straight, all which points are much in its favour: but the houses on either side are not generally so fine as they should be, and there is consequently a slightly faded look about it, which is not otherwise characteristic of Madrid. To see the Calle de Alcalá to advantage, the day of a bull-fight should be selected. Then from half-past three to four all the world streams along it to the arena, excited, running, pushing, buying red and yellow paper fans for the seats in the sun, and as noisy, boisterous, and enthusiastic as all the world at any of our own national gatherings. The picadors in their quaint dresses come galloping along on their sorry steeds, each attended by a man in a blouse riding on the same horse, and whose office it is afterwards to make the poor wretch face the bull by beating him with a long stick. Omnibuses and vehicles of all kinds bring their share of the mob; and when I took my seat, I believe there were not less than twelve thousand people assembled, every seat in the rather shabby but vast arena being full. Women formed a very small proportion only of the whole number, and I noticed that a lady who sat near me seemed as much shocked as I was at the brutal parts of the exhibition; for all parts of it are by no means brutal, and, indeed, I should be inclined to limit the term to those parts in which horses are introduced. It would be quite as pleasant to indulge oneself by an occasional visit to a knacker’s yard, as to sit quietly looking on whilst a furious bull rips up a miserable beast, usually blindfolded, in order that it may not move from the spot at which the picador chooses to receive the attack; but this part of the performance over, there is little that is disgusting, and a great deal that is singularly exciting and skilful. The men seldom seem to be in any real danger of being caught by the bull, and nothing can be cleverer than the way in which one of the chulos will dance before him half across the arena, always avoiding his charge by a hair’s-breadth only, or in which one of the banderilleros, seated in a chair, will plant his two arrows exactly on each side of the bull just as he stoops to toss him, and the next instant jump out of his seat, whilst the chair is dashed to atoms by the furious beast.