Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

The lantern over the Crossing still remains to be described. It is octagonal in plan, segmental arches being thrown across the angles of the square base to support its diagonal sides. The groining springs from immediately above the apex of the main arches, and the light is admitted by windows alternately of three and four lights. Its interior is very fine. The ribs of its eight-celled vault are very bold, and the dog-tooth enrichment is freely used round all the arches and along the string-courses. The diagonal or canted sides of the lantern are carried on pointed arches, the space below which is filled in with pendentives, with the stones arranged in courses radiating from the centre. Such a form of pendentive is rarely seen in works of this age. The details of this lantern are all rather rude, and its height is not great, as it rises only some twenty-five feet above the roofs. The outside has at each angle a buttress, with an engaged shaft in front of it, and the windows are all set within simple enclosing arches. Their tracery is that of ordinary first-pointed windows, the three-light windows having lancet lights, with the centre light longer than the others, and the four-light windows having the two centre lights longest. The old outside roof is destroyed; but the finish of the lanterns of Lérida and of the old cathedral of Salamanca seems to make it pretty certain that it was intended to have a pyramidal or domical stone roof. Access is now gained to the top of the lantern by means of a passage boldly carried on an arch which is thrown from the belfry window of the south-east steeple to the side of the lantern. I ought to have mentioned that the upper stage of this steeple is groined, and that the bells are hung in the window openings; but this is not their original place, the jambs having been cut away to make room for them. Its upper stage seems to have been finished with a pinnacle at each angle, and a gable over each window rising through the parapet—a somewhat similar design to that of the great tower at Lérida, and to that of the Micalete at Valencia, both of which ought, therefore, to be compared with this, and with which it is probably contemporary.

The roofs are covered throughout with pantiles; but these are evidently not the old covering, being put on very carelessly and interfering with the design of the stonework. The position of the windows in the central lantern proves that in the beginning of the thirteenth century the roofs must have been very flat, and the probability is, therefore, that they were all covered with flat-pitched stone roofs, similar to those of Toledo and Avila.

Few of the original windows remain save those already noticed in the eastern apses. At the west end of the aisles there are circular windows, without tracery and with very bold mouldings enriched with two or three orders of dog-tooth ornament. The windows in the aisles of the nave have all been destroyed by the addition of chapels against the side-walls, whilst the clerestory has been filled for the most part with early geometrical tracery windows in place of the lancets, with which it was, no doubt, originally lighted.

The doorways are numerous and somewhat remarkable for their position. There are three at the west end, whereof those to the aisles are of the date of the earliest part of the fabric, whilst the great central western doorway, being an addition of the fourteenth century, will be described further on. The tympanum of the western door of the north aisle is sculptured with the Adoration of the Magi, the figures all in niches and carved in small and very delicate style. The door of the south aisle is similar in style, but simpler and without sculpture. The other doors are, as will be seen on reference to the plan, placed in a most unusual position in the north and south choir aisles. It is rare in churches of this plan to find any doorway east of the transept, and where the aisles or chapels are so short this seems to be a very good rule. Here the access to the church is so near the altars of these aisles as to produce a bad effect. The north door was evidently so placed because it was necessary to put the cloisters in a most unusual position, to the north-east of the church, and I suppose we must assume that the south door was put in a corresponding position for no better reason than that it might match the other.

The door from the cloister into the church is the finest in the church. It is a round-arched doorway, with four engaged shafts in each jamb, and a central shaft, which is remarkable for the grand depth and size of its sculptured capital and base. All the capitals are very delicately wrought, and with an evident knowledge of Byzantine art; and that of the centre shaft has a subject sculptured on each face, of which the three which are visible are: (1) The Procession of the Kings; (2) their Worship of our Lord; and (3) the Nativity. The fourth side is concealed by the modern door-frame, the doorway not having had a door at all originally. A deep plain lintel forms the head of the door, and above this the tympanum is filled with that often-repeated scheme, our Lord in a vesica-shaped aureole, surrounded by the emblems of the Evangelists, each of which has a book, as also has our Lord, who holds His in the left hand, whilst He gives His blessing with the right hand. The small spandrel between the round arch of this door and the pointed arch of the vault above, is filled with a circle containing the monogram,

supported by two angels. On the same (south) side of the cloister is the entrance to the Chapter-house, which follows the invariable type of Chapter doorways, having a central doorway with a window on either side of it. One of the groining-ribs is brought boldly down between the doorway and one of the window openings, a peculiarity which should be compared with the similar arrangement of the Chapter-house at Vernela.[270] The detail is precisely the same as that of the rest of the cloister, the arches all being semi-circular, and the side openings being of two lights, with coupled shafts in place of monials. In the east wall of the cloister, and close to the Chapter-house, is another fine doorway of the same early style. Its door was painted very richly with angels holding coats-of-arms; but this delicate work is now almost all defaced. This spacious cloister is one of the most conspicuous of the earlier portions of the cathedral. A public thoroughfare does now, and probably did always, bound the cathedral close to its southern wall, so that there was no room for the cloister in the usual position to the south of the church. But it is very rare, I think, to find the Chapter-house built as it is here, opening out of the southern alley of the cloister, in place of the eastern. Its character is unusually good, even in this country of fine cloisters. Each bay has three round-arched openings divided by coupled shafts, and above these two large circles pierced in the wall. The arches and circular windows are richly moulded, and adorned largely with delicate dog-tooth enrichments. Some of the circular windows above the arcades still retain—what all, I suppose, once had—their filling in, which was of very delicate interlacing work, pierced in a thin slab of stone, and evidently Moorish in its origin, though, at the same time, the work probably of Christian hands, as in some of them, the figure of the Cross is very beautifully introduced.[271]