“Si flota vos combatió
En verdad, señor infante
Mi bulto non vos prendió
Cuando fuistes mareante;
Porque ficiesedes nada
A una semblante figura,
Que estaba en mi sepultura
Para mi fui ordenada.”
The tombs that have replaced these were ordered by the Constable’s daughter, and erected, with Queen Isabel’s permission, in 1489, to the memory of a king’s great servant and friend scandalously abandoned by his master. For this Isabel had nearly all the virtues, barring, alas! religious tolerance. She could be trusted to prove true to her own friends, and not meanly condone betrayal of a subject in a fellow-sovereign. But the Constable has fared all the better because of the Infante’s petty spite. I doubt if we should have been much impressed—except as children are by dolls that squeak and walk, or as the child in most of us is delighted with every kind of mechanical spring, from the wheels of watches to cuckoo clocks and German town-clocks, that send dear, quaint little men and women in and out with the day’s revolution—by these gilt tombs, and they serve a wiser and nobler purpose as the exquisitely-wrought pulpits of Villalpando, outside the reja of the Capilla Major. Now Don Alvaro and Doña Juana repose in sculptured marble between life-size kneeling figures of singular impressiveness. Nothing could be grander and more massive than the simple effect of both tombs. There are more beautiful ones, even in Spain—the splendid Italian tomb of Cisneros at Alcala de Henares, tombs in the Cathedral and Cartuja of Burgos, the grand and lovely tomb of Tavera, Berruguete’s last work, in the Hospital de Afuera—but, nevertheless, these great sculptures of an obscure artist, Pablo Ortiz, are worthy of the crowned and castellated mausoleum built for them. The reliefs are gracious, the treatment fluent, large and sober. The noble statues are unfortunately much mutilated, but the flow of folds, the finish and delicacy of detail, are quite Italian. In the retablo are the painted portraits of Don Alvaro and Doña Juana, painted by Juan of Segovia, and on either side of the altar, under canopied tombs, lie other figures.
The artesonado ceiling of the Chapel of the New Kings is similar to that of St John the Baptist. The Gothic retablo is one of the best of the Cathedral. A passage leads to it, and the interior is extremely gilt and ornate. The sovereigns are buried on either side of the chapter, the first being Henry of Trastamare, the founder of the chapel. Rich as it is in gilding, wrought-iron, marble and paintings, it looks small and unimposing after the great chapel of St Jago. Mass is celebrated here every morning at nine. An official in ragged and embroidered finery, at the end of the chapter, stands, holding the crowned and jewelled mace with the arms of Spain.