Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

The earliest of the distinctly Moorish buildings is a little mosque—now called the church of “Cristo de la Luz”—which was standing at the time of the entrance of Don Alonso VI. into the city, on Sunday, May 25, 1085. He entered by the old Puerta de Visagra, and, turning into this the first mosque on his road, ordered mass to be said, and hung up his shield there before he went further. No doubt the nave of the building is still very much in the state in which he found it; it is very small, only 21 ft. 7¼ in. by 20 ft. 2 in., and this space is subdivided into nine compartments by four very low circular columns, which are about a foot in diameter. Their capitals are some of those of which I have just spoken; they are all different, and, it seemed to me, more like Moorish work than the other capitals of the same class at San Roman and Sta. Cruz. The arches, of which four spring from each capital, are all of the round horseshoe form; above them is a string-course, and all the intermediate walls are carried up to the same height as the main walls. They are all pierced above the arches with arcades of varied design, generally cusped in very Moorish fashion, and supported on shafts; and above these each of the nine divisions is crowned with a little vault, formed by intersecting cusped ribs, thrown in the most fantastic way across each other, and varied in each compartment. The scale of the whole work is so diminutive that it is difficult, no doubt, to understand how so much is done in so small a space; but, looking to the early date of the work, it is impossible not to feel very great respect for the workmen who built it, and for the ingenious intricacy which has made their work look so much larger and more important than it really is.[210] It is, indeed, an admirable instance of the skill and dexterity in design which seem to have marked the Moors so honourably from the first, and which must have made them, as far as one can judge, in every respect but their faith so much the superiors of their Christian contemporaries. An apse has been added for the altar, but this is evidently a much later addition to the old mosque. The exterior face of the walls is built of brick and rough stone. The lower part of the side wall being arcaded with three round arches, within the centre of which is a round horseshoe arch for a doorway; above is a continuous sunk arcade of cusped arches, within which are window openings with round horseshoe heads. The lower part of the walls is built with single courses of brick, alternating with rough stonework; the piers and arches of brick, with projecting labels and strings also of unmoulded brick. The arches of the upper windows are built with red and green bricks alternated. The horseshoe arches here are built in the usual Moorish fashion, the lower part of the arch being constructed with bricks laid horizontally, and cut at the edge to the required curve; and about halfway round the arch they are cut back to receive the arch, which is there commenced. In the same way the cinquefoiled arches of the upper arcade have their lowest cusps formed by the stone abacus, the intermediate cusps by bricks laid horizontally and cut at the edge, and the upper central cusp alone has any of its masonry constructed as an arch.

The upper stage of the mosque called De las Tornerias is Moorish work of the same plan as the Cristo de la Luz; but I am much inclined to doubt whether it is equally ancient. The rosettes cut in the vaults, and the cusped openings, give this impression, and the vaults are quadripartite and domical in section, the centres of the nine small bays of vaulting being raised higher than the others, and having two parallel ribs crossing each other both ways, in the way I have already noticed in the Chapter-house at Salamanca, and the Templars’ Church at Segovia.

There is, so far as I know, no other mosque in the city so little altered as these; but among the churches some are said to have been first of all built for mosques. San Roman is one of these. It was converted into a parish church at the end of the eleventh century,[211] and the column and arches between the nave and aisles are probably of this date. The arches are of the horseshoe form, and the capitals are, I think, commonly quoted as some of the earlier works re-used by the Moors. But I very much doubt whether their style justifies my attributing to them any date earlier than the eleventh century. The church was not consecrated until June 20th, 1221, but there can be no doubt that it was built before this date. The noble steeple is one of the works built by Moorish architects for Christian use, and it will be better, perhaps, to reserve it for description with other works of the same class.

Of the two synagogues the older is that which was founded in the twelfth century, but seized in A.D. 1405 by the Toledans—instigated by the preaching of San Vicente Ferrer—and dedicated as a church under the name of Sta. Maria la Blanca.[212] The modernized exterior is of no interest, but the interior is fairly preserved by the zeal, I believe, of some Spanish antiquaries, having long been disused as a church. In plan it consists of a nave, with two aisles on either side. A quasi-chancel was formed at the east end (in the sixteenth century apparently) by the prolongation of the central compartment or nave beyond the aisles, and the intermediate aisles were also lengthened to a less extent at the same time. There are eight horseshoe arches rising from octagonal columns in each of the arcades, and the whole of them, as well as their capitals, are executed in brick, covered with plaster. The capitals are exceedingly elaborate, but very slightly varied in pattern: they have but little connexion with any of the usual types of Byzantine or Romanesque capitals, though they have rather more, perhaps, of the delicate intricacy of the former than of any of the features of the latter, and they are, I imagine, very much later than the original capitals which they overlay. All the Moorish decorative work seems to have been executed in the same way in plaster. This was of very fine quality, and was evidently cut and carved as if it had been stone, and seldom, if ever, I think, stamped or moulded, according to the mistaken practice of the present day. The consequence is that there is endless variety of design everywhere, and—wherever it was desired—any amount of undercutting. The spandrels above the arches are filled in with arabesque patterns, and there is a cusped wall arcade below the roof; but almost all of this is evidently of much later date than the original foundation, as the patterns are all of that large class of Moorish devices which, though they retain many of their old peculiarities, borrow largely at the same time from the traceries and cusping of late Gothic work. Unfortunately in such work the material affords so small an assistance in the detection of alterations, that it requires the exercise of considerable caution to ascertain their exact limits; and in Toledo, as in most places, people seem always disposed to claim the highest possible antiquity in all cases, seldom allowing anything to have been done by the Moors after the restoration of the Christian rule, though, in fact, the exact converse of this would be nearer the truth. The roof has coupled tie beams—placed a very slight distance apart—an arrangement of which the Moorish carpenters seem to have been always very fond. The pavement is very good, but must, I imagine, be of about the date of the conversion of the synagogue into a church. It is divided into compartments by border tiles, laid down the length of the church on either side of the columns. The spaces between these are filled in with a rich diaper of encaustic and plain red tiles, whilst the general area between these richer bands is paved with large red, relieved by an occasional encaustic tile. The latter have patterns in white, dark blue, and yellow, and in all cases they are remarkable for the beautiful inequality both of the colours and of the surface of the tiles. Both colour and material are in themselves better than the work of our tile-manufacturers at the present day, and illustrate very well the difference between hand-work and machine-work, which I have already noticed in comparing the old and new modes of dealing with plaster. The Moorish tiles are very commonly seen in Toledo, and were used both for flooring and inlaying walls, and in some cases for the covering of roofs. This synagogue of Sta. Maria la Blanca is on the whole disappointing. I went to it expecting to see a building of the ninth or tenth century, and found instead a fabric possibly of this age, but in which—thanks to the plasterers of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries—nothing of the original building but the octagonal columns and the simple form of the round horseshoe arches is still visible. Nevertheless it well deserves examination, and a more accurate knowledge of the detail of Moorish work would, I dare say, have enabled me to separate more clearly the work of the original church from the additions with which it has been overlaid.

The other synagogue is now converted into the church called “del Transito,”[213] and about the date of this there is no doubt. It was erected by Samuel Levi,[214] a rich Jew, who held the office of treasurer to Pedro the Cruel, and was completed in A.D. 1366; but it did not long retain its first purpose, the Jews having been expelled the kingdom in 1492,[215] and this synagogue having then been given by Ferdinand and Isabella to the order of Calatrava.

The building is a simple parallelogram, 31 feet 5 inches wide, by 76 feet in length. The lower portion of the side walls is quite unornamented for 20 or 25 feet in height; but above this is very richly adorned with plaster-work. There is, first, a broad band of foliage, with Hebrew inscriptions above and below it, and above this on each side an arcade of nineteen arches, springing from coupled shafts, eight of its divisions being pierced and filled with very elaborate lattice-work. The end wall (now the altar end) has a very slight recess in the centre, and the whole of it to within some seven feet of the floor is covered with rich patterns, inscriptions, and coats of arms, whilst above the arcade is continued on from the side walls in eight divisions. The arcades are all cusped in the usual Moorish fashion, the outline of the cusps being horseshoe, but without an enclosing arch. The end opposite to the altar has two windows pierced in the upper arcade, and three windows below breaking up into the band of foliage and inscriptions. The whole is now whitewashed, and though the detail is all fantastic and overdone, the effect is nevertheless fine, owing to the great height of the walls and to the contrast between the excessive enrichment of their upper and the plainness of their lower part.

The Retablo over the principal altar is a work of the end of the fifteenth century, but not of remarkable merit, having paintings of Scripture subjects under carved canopies; there is another of the same class against the north wall. The roof is a grand example of the Moorish “artesinado”[216] work. It has coupled tie-beams, and a deep cornice, which is carried boldly across the angles, so as to give polygonal ends to the roof, which is hipped at the ends, the rafters sloping equally on all four sides. These rafters are only introduced to improve the appearance of, and—it may be—the possibility of hearing what was read in, the synagogue. The pitch of the real roof is very flat, and where a flat roof is absolutely necessary, this kind of ceiling is undoubtedly very effective. At some height above the plate the sloping rafters are stopped by a flat ceiling below the collar rafters, panelled all over in the ingeniously intricate geometrical figures of which the Moorish architects were so fond, and in the device of which they were always only too ingenious. The rafters as well as the tie-beams are used in pairs placed close to each other, and the space between them is divided into panels by horizontal pieces at short intervals, with patterns sunk in the panels. There is a western gallery, and some seats made of glazed encaustic tiles on each side of the sanctuary.

The exterior has arcades answering to those of the interior: it is built mainly of brick, with occasional bands of rough stonework. The bricks are 11 in. by 7¾ in. by 1¼ in. in size, and are used with a mortar joint 1¼ in. in thickness.