“Este monasterio è églesia mandaron hacer los muy esclarecidos Principes è señores D. Hernando è Doña Isabel, Rey y Reina de Castilla, de Leon, de Aragon, de Sicilia, los cuales señores por bienaventurado matrimonio y untaron los dichos Reinos, seyendo el dicho rey y señor natural de los reinos de Aragon y Sicilia, y seyendo la dicha señora Reina y señora natural de los Reinos de Castilla y Leon; el cual fundaron à gloria de nuestro señor Dios, y de la bienaventurado Madre suya Nuestra señora la Virgin Maria, y por especial devocion que le ovieron.”
The few pictures are quite worthless, but pictures are not needed in such a wealth of stone-work. What are needed to make San Juan de los Reyes less crude in its frank over-decoration are, shadow, the dim luminosity of stained glass, the softened glow of bejewelled light, the tender mystery and charm of pillared aisle, the grace of length to give majesty to solidity. It totally lacks the essential quality of reverence, that elusive and unanalysable suggestion of the beyond, the supreme, the intangible, of that inexplicable aspiration that ever stirs the soul of primitive and civilised man, and has taught him to seek its expression in the building of church and temple; in the white splendour of the Parthenon, the very soul of Greek genius in stone, in the grey dimness of Gothic cathedral, in which Christian fervour finds almost an immaterial beauty of definition, the quality of lofty distinction which belongs to the highest poetry and eloquence. Here you are not assailed by a sense of the melancholy loveliness of death, as when you stand beside some canopied tomb of greatness in the softened gloom of an old cathedral. There is none of the lingering charm of legend and peopled shade, none of the obscurity of deep recess, the chill shiver of vaulted solitude, the vibrant ache of other days, that serene and bewitching
misery we feel whenever we travel backward by the road of strange and wonderful experience that has moulded and developed humanity. For San Juan de los Reyes reveals to us nothing of that past whose enigma forever tortures the curious mind, nothing but the admirable skill of some unknown sculptors, provokes neither musing nor aspiration, nor instils the poisonous enchantment of artistic sadness.
For this reason the lovely cloisters, despite the defacing stamp of restoration and the preposterous glare of white plaster, win you to fervour and lure you to reverie. Ruined, monstrously ill-treated, they yet preserve a delicate freshness, an incomparable grace that give us some notion of the mediaeval paradise they must have been when flower and verdure bloomed between their fretted arches, and the statues in their canopied niches stood fresh from each master’s hands. Not melancholy cloisters these, but gay and charming, with their supreme elegance, their matchless distinction, an airiness and lightness, a gaiety not in the least ecclesiastical or claustral. They were built to harbour the measured mirth of breeding, the sweet and elegant piety of romance, the charity, the contentment that knows naught of suffering or revolt, all the placid and decorous joys of religion. Beautiful flowers and delicate foliage grew thickly in the broad sunny space between the double row of exquisite galleries, and branches spread and swayed against the arched columns of the upper cloisters. Truly it must have been delightful to have worn the habit of the Franciscan monk in the days of Isabella the Catholic, and the great Cisneros, the first novice of this convent, can have found no more vivid satisfaction in the hours he was busy making Spanish history than in the radiant peace of these most beautiful cloisters.