There are many minor chapels and offices one must overlook in a general description. The wood-work of the Sala capitular and the Anté sala was wrought by Copin of Holland and Antonio Gutierrez. The ceiling of the Anté sala is most charming, a brilliant moresque style, admirably painted and of quite regal magnificence, one of the best specimens of artesonada. The long carved
cupboards on either side are Copin’s and Durango’s work. Copin’s especially is delightful, simple, dignified, not over elaborated. Both are divided in panels which are covered with reliefs, exquisitely designed. Vases, heads, figures, masks, and every kind of mediaeval fancy abound. A Moorish doorway executed by Bonéfacio in 1510, leads into the Sala capitular, one of the loveliest of Spain. The doors are of a rich renaissance, full of busts, leafage, and gilt reliefs. The painted arms of Cisneros and of Lopez de Ayala are worked into the garlands above, and the archiepiscopal choir below is another good specimen of Copin of Holland, who did so much for this cathedral. Round the walls are the portraits of the archbishops, beginning with St Eugenius. The old series ends with Cisneros, and the second begins with William of Croy. Most of the recent portraits are wretched daubs. There are paintings here by John of Burgundy on a level with those of the Mozarabe chapel, while the effect of the Giordano ceiling is striking. The light seems to fall in perpendicular rays. In the matter of paintings the Cathedral would be poor enough but for a Titian and the splendid picture of El Greco in the sacristy. When you have gazed at that virile, majestic figure of Christ, felt the charm of its lofty expression, of its wonderful suggestion of aloofness and fatality, marvelled at the colouring, the splendid boldness of design and grouping, the vigour and naturalness of the figure of the first plan bent forward to bore a hole in the cross at his feet previous to inserting the nails, you may ask yourself in dismay what gave rise to the legend of El Greco’s madness. Stay a moment. This is unfortunately not the last word of El Greco. This grave and lovely Expolio de Jesus, hardly second to that other astounding masterpiece, “The burial of Count Orgaz” in Santo Tomé, has its lamentable sequel in the St John the Baptist of the Hospital de Afuera, which lets you into the secret. Whether or no El Greco ever went mad we have no means now of knowing, though he undoubtedly gives the impression in the St John of genius labouring under some wild and extraordinary influence. But the Expolio is as perfect and sane a masterpiece as artist ever produced. All the tones are cold and subdued, as if a brilliant imagination purposely steadied and held itself in check to realise the highest and simplest expression of repose. The agony is past, transient revolt is over, and here stands the Son of Man in the hands of his ruthless enemies, insusceptible to personal indignity, greater than death, the supreme ideal of resignation, of its majesty rather than its sweetness. No wonder the lovers of El Greco regard him as the precursor of Velasquez, and will have it that Velasquez studied him as master, and from him learned the secret of his own immortal dignity and cold majestic grace. When you look long at this great picture, you wonder how an artist like Théophile Gautier came to write the flippant nonsense he did about El Greco. Even if the legend of the painter’s madness were true, it is certainly not apparent in this canvas. What is apparent is a complete want, felt everywhere in El Greco’s work, of sensibility of the more subtle and penetrative kind, an inaptitude that made the limitation of his art to conceive or paint emotion on a woman’s face. The three Maries are present, so close as to touch the robe of Jesus. Well, the three faces express nothing stronger in feeling than curiosity, in the case of the middle figure more slightly depressed by a vague instinct of passive grief; in the case of the younger women such a curiosity as a passing incident might excite, with neither a touch of terror nor abhorrence much less that of martyred love. The dark and lovely head behind of the third woman, said to be the painter’s daughter, with the superb hand and arm, is that of a young Toledan girl placidly watching some street procession and looking for the appearance of her lover. The smile is not far from the shadowed eyes and sweet, grave mouth, and the whole suggests soft, young romance. A rash youth, passing at that moment, if his eyes fell first upon her in the tragic scene, would greet her with an eloquent smile, and probably fling her a kiss through the air, but he would never suppose she was looking on at barbarous men as they bored holes in a cross and tore the garments from the form of her Lord and Saviour about to be crucified.
The same curious indifference to appropriate form and expression is shown in his St John the Evangelist. The last of the row of apostles on the right of the sacristy, a pallid, lean young man enveloped in the peculiar tints of dull green and faded pink, one soon learns to recognise as El Greco’s hues of predilection, which are more than once reproduced elsewhere in the figures of St Joseph, the infant Jesus and Mary. This is not the dreamy and loving youth of the New Testament, full of tenderness and mystical reverie. The face is delicately hard, long, pointed and intellectual, its cold ardour clouded with a suggestion of impatience and contempt.
Opposite the Trasparente is the chapel of San Ildephonso. Painted on a vault outside is an armed cavalier bearing a standard in one hand and an emblazoned shield in the other. This is the famous Estevan Illan, descended as we have seen from Don Pedro Paleologus, of imperial Greek origin, and founder of the powerful family of the Toledos, since the Dukes of Alba. The general effect of this chapel is costly rather than beautiful. It is impossible not to be oppressed by the sensation of display, not that it is in the least gaudy; it is too solidly wealthy and artistic in its elaboration for that. The mouldings are rich, the decorations are rich, and rich beyond calculation are the tombs. Grander and less elaborate is the really great chapel of Santiago, better known perhaps as the Constable’s Chapel. This was built by Alvaro de Luna as a vast mausoleum for himself and his wife. It is astonishingly bright when you remember its dimensions and its imposing height; of sober taste notwithstanding its flowered ogival style, subdued, while what the Spaniards delight to call everything here, “sumptuous.” The word indeed may not be grudged in this instance, where it is sonorous and appropriate. To do honour to this edifice, Don Alvaro de Luna commanded truly miraculous tombs for himself and his wife, on which lay their full-length figures in gilt-bronze, so fashioned that whenever mass was recited, these life-sized figures rose from their recumbent attitudes, and knelt during the service. On its conclusion, they quietly lay down again. Such tombstones, had they remained, would speedily have turned into a form of local entertainment for the townsfolk. But the great Constable fell into his sovereign’s disgrace, he poor, sorry, feeble king, hounded into the basest ingratitude by the clamouring populace and the Constable’s jealous foes. So in the hour of his fall, the infante, Don Enrique of Aragon, had the wonderful tombs with the gilt moving statues, broken up, on which the Constable sarcastically addressed him in verse: