Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain

by George Edmund Street

On the south side are the cloisters. They are locked up and in ruins; and though I tried two or three times, I was never able to gain admission to them; but I saw them from the hill above, and they looked at this distance as if they were designed very much after the pattern of those attached to the cathedral. The arches are round, and carried on coupled detached shafts, with piers in the centre of each side of the cloister. The roof seems to have been a barrel-vault, but great part of it has now fallen in. All this havoc and ruin is owing, like so much that one sees in Spain, to the action of the French troops during the Peninsular war.[338]

The whole character of this church is very interesting. The west front reminded me much of the best Italian Romanesque; and the rude simplicity of the interior—so similar in its mode of construction to the great church at Santiago in the opposite corner of the Peninsula—suggests the probability of its being one of the earliest examples of which Spain can boast.

Close to San Pedro, to the north-west, stands another church, which, though it is very small, is fully as curious. This is now desecrated and converted into workshops and dwelling-houses. It is transverse triapsal in plan (i.e., the transepts and the chancel are all finished with apses). The Crossing is surmounted by a low tower or lantern, square below, but octagonal above, and with some remains of an apparently old tiled roof. The transepts are ceiled with semi-domes, and the chancel was similarly covered, but its vault has now been removed in order to facilitate access to the steeple, in which a peasant and his family live. The nave is roofed with a waggon-vault, at the springing of which from the wall is a small moulding; and its walls are supported by buttresses, which do not seem to be earlier than the thirteenth century, though the rest of the church must date no doubt from the early part of the twelfth. The exterior is very plain; but the chancel apse is divided by pilasters which run up to and finish in a corbel-table at the eaves; and the tower has also an eaves’ corbel-table. All the dimensions of this church are very small, but it is interesting, as being almost the only example I have seen in Spain of a transverse triapsal plan; and the central lantern is one of the earliest examples of what became in later days one of the most common features of Spanish buildings.[339]

We came down the hill north of the cathedral to see this church and San Pedro; and if we retrace our steps, and go out by the western door on to the platform at the top of the vast flight of steps which leads up to the cathedral, we shall be at once struck by the beautiful, though truncated, spire of San Feliu, which stands below, and to the west of the cathedral. Indeed, in nearly all views of the old city, this steeple claims the first place in our regard; and perhaps it is seen best of all in crossing the river at the other end of the town, where it stands at the end of the vista up the stream, which is edged on either side by the backs of the tall, picturesque, and crowded houses.

San Feliu[340] is one of the oldest collegiate foundations in the diocese of Gerona; and when, in the eighth century, the Moors converted the cathedral into a mosque, here it was that the Christian rites were celebrated. No doubt, therefore, a church stood here long before the first recorded notices of the fabric, for these do not occur before the early part of the fourteenth century, save such indications of work in progress as the bequest of ten solidos to the work by Bishop William in A.D. 1245, and such evidence of its damage or destruction as is the fact that the French, attacking the city in A.D. 1285, obtained possession of the church and did it much damage. In A.D. 1313, when the Chapter of the cathedral were obtaining royal concessions towards the work of their own church, they granted an exemption to San Feliu, giving to its clergy the first-fruits of their benefices to spend on the work of their own church.[341] In A.D. 1318 there is evidence that the choir was completed, but other works were going on during the rest of the century. In A.D. 1340 the Chapter determined to erect cloisters, under the direction of an architect named Sancii, and bought a site for them to the north of the church; and the operarius or canon in charge of the work seems to have raised alms for them even so far off as at Valencia and in the Balearic Isles. The work was begun in A.D. 1357 and finished in 1368, in which year the Chapter entered into a contract[342] with an architect, one Pedro Zacoma, for the erection of the campanile. In A.D. 1363, however, it was deemed necessary, on account of the position of the church just outside the old walls, and on the north of the town, that it should be fortified; and to accomplish this work, and others of the same kind ordered in A.D. 1374 and 1385, the cloisters so recently built were destroyed. The steeple is said to have been finished in 1392,[343] Pedro Zacoma having acted as architect as late as A.D. 1376.

The church bears evident marks of many alterations and additions. It consists of nave and aisles, transepts, central apse, and two apsidal chapels on the east side of the south, and one on the east of the north transept. The piers are plain square masses of masonry, and the main arches are semi-circular, unmoulded, and springing from a very plain abacus. There is a kind of triforium, an arcade of three divisions in each bay, and a fair pointed vault of ten bays—two to each bay of the nave arcade—carried on groining-shafts corbelled out from the wall. The north transept retains a waggon-vault, the axis of which is north and south, whilst the south transept has two bays of cross vaulting. The eastern apse is circular in plan, but divided into seven groining bays, and lighted by three windows of three lights. The apses of the south transept are also circular, lighted by lancets, and groined with semi-domes, though the arches into the transept are pointed. The general character of the later part of this church is, I should say, that of late first-pointed work; yet it is pretty clear that it is almost all a work of the fourteenth century. There is a fine fourteenth-century south porch, with some good arcading in its side walls, in which the tracery is all executed with soffeit-cusping.

Of the western steeple I need not say very much, as my sketch shows the nature of its design, and the evidence as to its date is evidently very accurate. The character of the architectural detail is quite that of flamboyant-work, and the outline is bold, original, and good. It is seldom indeed that the junction of the tower and spire is more happily managed than it is here; and before the destruction of the upper part of the spire, the whole effect must have been singularly graceful. This is the more remarkable in a country where a genuine spire is so rare a feature; but the architect was fortunate in following the customs of the country when he made his steeple octagonal in plan, for it is extremely difficult—one may almost say impossible—to put a spire upon an octagonal tower the outline of which shall not be graceful. In an arch against the wall of this tower is a tomb resting on lions jutting out from the wall, and with the date 1387 in the inscription. It is a good example of the late date to which this early-looking type of monument continued to be used in Spain.