Bishop Maurice was buried in the church, and his monument was afterwards moved to the front of the Trascoro (or screen at the west end of the choir) by Bishop Ampudia, before his death, in A.D. 1512. It has never been moved from the spot in which it was then placed, and yet, owing to the rearrangement of the stalls, it is now in the very midst of the Coro,[13] and affords an invaluable piece of evidence of the fact already stated, that of old the stalls did not occupy their present place in the nave.[14]
There is nothing else worthy of note in the Coro. Its floor is boarded, and a long passage about six feet wide, between rails, leads from its door through the choir to a screen in front of the high altar. The people occupy the choir, hemmed in between these rails and the parclose screens under the side arches. The altar has a late and uninteresting Retablo, in Pagan style, carved with large subjects and covered with gold.[15] The steps to the altar are of white, black, and red marble, counterchanged; and at the entrance to the choir under the lantern are two brass pulpits or ambons, for the Epistoler and Gospeller, an admirable and primitive arrangement almost always preserved in Spanish churches.
The columns of the choir arches have been modernized, and there is consequently but little of the old structure visible on the inside, the Retablo rising to the groining, and concealing the arches of the apse. Between these arches sculptures in stone are introduced, which are said to have been executed by Juan de Borgoña, in 1540. They are bold and spirited compositions in high relief, and give great richness of effect to the aisle towards which they face. The subjects are—(1) the Agony in the Garden; (2) our Lord bearing His Cross; (3) the Crucifixion; (4) the Descent from the Cross and the Resurrection; (5) the Ascension. Numbers 1 and 5 are not original, or at any rate are inferior to and different in style from the others.
When we leave the choir for its aisles, we shall find that everything here, too, has been more or less altered. Chapels of all sizes and shapes have been contrived, either by addition to or alteration of the original ground-plan; and, picturesque as the tout ensemble is, with dark shadows crossed here and there by bright rays of light from the side windows, with here a domed Renaissance chapel, there one of the fourteenth century, and here, again, one of the fifteenth, it has lost all that simplicity, unity, and harmony which in a perfect building ought to mark this, the most important part of a church. In truth hardly any part of the aisles or chapels of the chevet of Bishop Maurice now remains; for of the two early chapels on the north side (marked a and b on the plan), the former is evidently of later date, being possibly the work of Bishop Juan de Villahoz, who founded a chapel here, dedicated to S. Martin, in A.D. 1268-69.[16] The style of this chapel is very good middle-pointed; the abaci of the capitals are square, the tracery is geometrical, the vaulting very domical, and its north-western angle is arched across, and groined with a small tripartite vault, in order to bring the main vault into the required polygonal form. This arrangement occurs at an earlier date, as I shall have presently to show, at Las Huelgas (close to Burgos), but ought to be noticed here, as the same feature is seen reproduced, more or less, in many Spanish works of the fifteenth century, and here we have an intermediate example to illustrate its gradual growth. It is, in fact, the Gothic substitute for a pendentive.
The other chapel (b) I believe to be the one remaining evidence of the original plan of the chevet; and, looking at it in connexion with the other portions of the work, and especially with the blank wall between which and the cloister the new sacristy is built, it seems pretty clear that originally there were only three chapels in the chevet, and all of them pentagonal in plan. Between these chapels and the transepts there would then have been two bays of aisle without side chapels, and on the eastern side of each of the transepts a small square chapel, one of which still remains. This plan tallies to some extent with that of the cathedral at Leon (with which the detail of Burgos may well be compared), and is in some respects similar to that of the French cathedrals of Amiens, Clermont, and some other places. In fact, the planning of this chevet is one of the proofs that the work was of French, and not of Spanish origin.
At the east end of the cathedral is a grand chapel, erected about A.D. 1487, by the Constable D. Pedro Fernandez de Velasco and his wife. This remarkable building was designed by an architect whose work we shall see again, and of whom it may be as well at once to say a few words. Juan de Colonia—a German by birth or origin, as his name shows—is said to have been brought to Burgos by Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena (A.D. 1435 to A.D. 1456) when he returned from the Council of Basle. There is evidence that he built the chapel of the great Carthusian monastery of Miraflores, on the hill just outside the town; and there is, I believe, but little doubt that he wrought here too. His work is very peculiar. It is essentially German in its endless intricacy and delicacy of detail, but has features which I do not remember to have seen in Germany, and which may fairly be attributed either to the Spaniards who worked under him, or to an attempt on his own part to accommodate his work to Spanish tastes.
The chapel is octagonal at the east, but square at the west end; and pendentives of exactly the same kind of design as those of the early German and French churches are introduced across the western angles of the chapel, to bring the plan of the central vault to a complete octagon. They are true pendentives, and quite unlike those three-sided vaulting bays across the angles of the apse chapels, to which I just now referred, and which answer precisely the same purpose. They are hardly at all Gothic, having semi-circular arches, and the masonry below them being filled in with stones radiating as in a fan, from the centre of the base of the pendentive. The groining ribs (the mouldings of which interpenetrate at the springing) form by their intersection a large star of eight points in the centre, and the cells between the ribs of this star are pierced with very elaborate traceries. This is a feature often reproduced in late Spanish works, and it is one which aids largely in giving the intricate and elaborately lacelike effect aimed at by the Spanish architects at this date, to a greater extent even than by any of their contemporaries in other lands; for though this, which is wellnigh the richest example of the Spanish art of the fifteenth century, was designed by a German, we must remember that he was following, to a great extent, Spanish traditions, and was largely aided in all the better portion of the detail by national artists, among whom the greatest was, perhaps, Gil de Siloe, whose work in the monuments at Miraflores I shall presently have to describe. And it is not a little curious, and perhaps not very gratifying to the amour propre of Spanish artists, that in this great church the two periods in which the most artistic vigour was shown, and the grandest architectural works undertaken, were marked, the first by the rule of a well-travelled bishop—commonly said to be an Englishman—under an English princess, and who seems to have employed an Angevine architect; and the second by the rule of another travelled bishop, who, coming home from Germany, brought with him a German architect, into whose hands all the great works in the city seem at once to have been put. I must return, however, to the description of the detail of the Constable’s chapel. Each bay of the octagonal part of the chapel below the vaulting is divided in this way: below is a recessed arch, under which is an enormous coat-of-arms set aslant on the wall, with coarse foliage round it. These arches have a very ugly fringe of shields and supporters, and finish with ogee canopies. Above are the windows, which are of flamboyant tracery of three lights; the windows being placed one over the other, the outer mouldings of the upper window going down to the sill of the lower. There are altars in recesses on the east, north, and south sides of the octagon; and the two latter stand upon their old foot-paces, formed by flights of three steps, the ends of which towards the chapel are filled with rich tracery. The monument of the Constable Velasco is in the centre of the chapel; and a velvet pall belonging to it is still preserved, adorned with one of those grand stamped patterns so constantly seen in mediæval German paintings. The stalls for the clergy are arranged strangely in an angle of the chapel, fenced round with a low screen, and looking like one of those enclosures in some of our own churches sacred to archdeacons and their officials.
A quaint little vestry is contrived outside the south-east angle of the octagon, and in it are preserved some pieces of plate of the same age as the chapel. Among these are—
A chalice of silver gilt, enamelled in white and red, with its bowl richly set with pearls strung on a wire: the knop is richly enamelled, and its edge set with alternate emeralds and sapphires; whilst the sexfoiled foot is in the alternate compartments engraved with coats-of-arms, and set with sapphires. It is a very gorgeous work, and, though all but Renaissance in style, still very finely executed.
A pax; the Blessed Virgin Mary holding our Lord, and seated on a throne covered with pearls and other jewels. The figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary is enamelled with blue, and our Lord is in ivory. The old case for this is preserved, and has a drawer below it which contains papers referring to the gift of it.