Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

The planning of the whole church was uniform throughout. The columns are all circular, surrounded by engaged shafts, which, in the great piers in the transept, are trefoiled in section. There do not appear to have been chapels anywhere in the side walls of the nave, save on the south side of the south aisle, where the chapel of Sta. Lucia appears to be of the same age as the church, and is recorded to have been founded by Archbishop Rodrigo, with an endowment for two chaplains to say masses for the soul of Alonso VI.[238] This chapel has triple groining-shafts in the angles, a good triplet, with dog-tooth and engaged jamb-shafts, in the south wall, and a window of two lancets, with a circle in the head, in the east wall. On the west side of this chapel is an extremely rich recessed arch in stucco, of late Moorish work—a curious contrast to the fine pointed work of the chapel.

The original scheme of the church is only to be seen now in the choir and its aisles. These are arranged in three gradations of height,—the choir being upwards of a hundred feet, the aisle round it about sixty feet, and the outer aisle about thirty-five feet[239] in height. The outer wall of the aisle is pierced with arches for the small chapels between the buttresses, the design and planning of which are shown clearly in the illustration which I give. The intermediate aisle has in its outer wall a triforium, formed by an arcade of cusped arches; and above this, quite close to the point of the vault, a rose window in each bay. It is in this triforium that the first evidence of any knowledge on the part of the architect of Moorish architecture strikes the eye. The cusping of the arcade is not enclosed within an arch, and takes a distinctly horseshoe outline, the lowest cusp near to the cap spreading inwards at the base. Now, it would be impossible to imagine any circumstance which could afford better evidence of the foreign origin of the first design than this slight concession to the customs of the place in a slightly later portion of the works. An architect who came from France, bent on designing nothing but a French church, would be very likely, after a few years’ residence in Toledo, somewhat to change in his views, and to attempt something in which the Moorish work, which he was in the habit of seeing, would have its influence. The detail of this triforium is notwithstanding all pure and good; the foliage of the capitals is partly conventional, and, in part, a stiff imitation of natural foliage, somewhat after the fashion of the work in the Chapter-house at Southwell; the abaci are all square; there is a profusion of nail-head used in the labels; and well-carved heads are placed in each of the spandrels of the arcade. The circular windows above the triforium are filled in with cusping of various patterns. The main arches of the innermost arcade (between the choir and its aisle) are, of course, much higher than the others. The space above them is occupied by an arcaded triforium, reaching to the springing of the main vault. This arcade consists of a series of trefoil-headed arches on detached shafts, with sculptured figures, more than life-size, standing in each division; in the spandrels above the arches are heads looking out from moulded circular openings, and above these again, small pointed arches are pierced, which have labels enriched with the nail-head ornament. The effect of the whole of this upper part of the design is unlike that of northern work, though the detail is all pure and good. The clerestory occupies the height of the vault, and consists of a row of lancets (there are five in the widest bay, and three in each of the five bays of the apse) rising gradually to the centre, with a small circular opening above them. The vaulting-ribs in the central division of the apse are chevroned, and, as will be seen on the plan, increased in number, this being the only portion of the early work in which any, beyond transverse and diagonal ribs, are introduced. There is a weakness and want of purpose about the treatment of this highest portion of the wall that seems to make it probable that the work, when it reached this height, had passed out of the hands of the original architect. It is strange that, so far as I have been able to learn, no record exists of the date of the consecration of the church; so that it is quite impossible to give, with certainty, the date at which any part of it had been finished and covered in. In the nave the original design (if it was ever completed) has been altered. There is now no trace of the original clerestory and triforium which are still seen in the choir; and in their place the outer aisle has fourteenth-century windows of six lights, with geometrical tracery, and the clerestory of the nave and transepts great windows, also of six lights, with very elaborate traceries. They have transomes (which in some degree preserve the recollection of the old structural divisions) at the level of the springing of the groining. The groining throughout the greater part of the church seems to be of the original thirteenth-century work, with ribs finely moulded, and vaulting cells slightly domical in section. The capitals of the columns are all set in the direction of the arches and ribs they carry, and their abaci and bases are all square in plan.

The great rose-window of the north transept, though later, is not much more so than the work I have been describing. It has an outer ring of twelve cusped circles, six within these, and one in the centre. The whole is filled with old glass. The centre circle has the Crucifixion; the six circles round it St. Mary, St. John, and four Angels; and the outer circles figures of the twelve greater prophets, pointing towards our Lord. The ground of the centre circles within the cusps is a light pure blue, and the cusps are filled with conventional foliage. The whole is fastened to rings of iron, in the usual way, and is the best example of stained glass now remaining in the cathedral.

The works undertaken here in the fourteenth century were very considerable. The north doorway, the doorway of St. Catherine, leading from the cloisters; the clerestory in the nave and nave-aisles and transepts, and probably the whole of the four western bays of the nave; the screens round the Coro, the chapel of San Ildefonso, and some other portions, were all of this period; and the dates of many of them being certain, they give admirable opportunities for the study of the detail of the Spanish middle-pointed style. The north door has three statues in each jamb, and a central figure of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord. The arch has in its three orders different orders of angels, and the tympanum is divided into four spaces by horizontal divisions, containing the following subjects: (1) The Annunciation, the Salutation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents; (2) the Marriage at Cana, the Presentation, the Dispute with the Doctors, the Flight into Egypt; (3) the Marriage at Cana continued all across; and (4) the Death of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The whole is good work of the end of the fourteenth century. The doorway of St. Catherine, which opens into the cloister, is mainly remarkable for its elaborate mouldings, but has a central figure of the saint and two others standing on capitals, and under canopies, on either side of the doorway. The arch is crocketed and covered with a profusion of small carving, and with coats-of-arms of Castile and Leon. The label is crocketed, and between the doorway and the vault of the cloister a rose window and two windows of two lights each are picturesquely grouped. The other great doorways are almost all modernized and uninteresting.

The screen round the Coro is a feature of as great interest as any in the church. It encloses the whole of the two eastern bays of the nave; and, as far as I could judge by the way in which it finishes against the transept column, where the old work ends abruptly, and is completed with a later carving of lions and castles, it seems possible that it crossed the transepts and completely shut them out from the choir. There is, however, no certain evidence of this; and the main fact proved, is that from the very first the choir-stalls were locally in the nave. In a plan such as this, with an extremely short choir, founded evidently, like so many of the Spanish churches, on the plan of the great Abbey of Citeaux, it must, from the first, have been intended that this should be the arrangement; but, as I have observed before, the present use of the choir and the old use are unlike in the only point in which the Spanish plan is distinctly national. For, in the western face of this old screen, the doorway into the choir remains; and this has since been blocked up, in order to put the archbishop’s throne in the centre of the west end of the Coro, the only access to which is now from the transept crossing through the eastern Reja or screen. The screen-work is continued on round the apse, but much mutilated by Berruguetesque and other alterations, the work of which at the east, behind the altar, is the worst in the world—el trasparente—where angels, clouds, and rays of light, all painfully executed in marble, are lighted by a big hole, wickedly pierced right through the old thirteenth-century vault!

The nave-screen consists of an arcade filled with rich tracery, and carried upon marble and jasper shafts (said, but on what authority I know not,[240] to have come from the seventh-century Basilica of Sta. Leocadia). The wall above the capitals is divided by pinnacles; between each of which is a niche containing a subject sculptured in high relief under a canopy. The detail of the whole is of the richest kind of middle-pointed, and altogether very similar in the amount of work and delicacy of design to the arcades round some of the richest of our own buildings, as, for instance, round the Chapter-house at Ely. The sculptures are many of them admirable, full of the natural incidents so loved by, and the naïveté so characteristic of, the best mediæval sculptors of their age. I give a complete list of these subjects in the Appendix, and strongly recommend careful study of them to those who visit Toledo. I feel the more bound to do this, because in all the Spanish Guide-books they will find them spoken of with the utmost contempt, whilst all the praise is reserved for a vile gilt creation by Berruguete, which has taken the place of the three central western subjects over the choir-door, and for two statues of Innocence and Sin, which seem to me to be innocent of art, and to sin against nature!

In addition to the western doorway there were four others in these screens, two on the north and two on the south; these opened into small chapels contrived in the space left between the screen just described, outside the columns, and the wooden screen inside the columns and behind the choir-stalls.

The screen on the south side of the apse—the remains of what no doubt once went all round it—is even more elaborate than that round the Coro: it is pierced below, so that the altar may be seen, and has large statues of saints above, and an open-gabled parapet, finished with angels everywhere, and truly a most gorgeous work! This is in the south-west arch of the choir only, a late flamboyant screen having been added afterwards beyond it to the east, whilst on the north side a Berruguetesque monument has taken the place of the old screen.