of minor artists. He built it for the empress, who, like himself, died before it was finished. Philip II. sent to Brussels, to London and Italy, in search of other artists to help to complete the colossal edifice, and it stood for long the most splendid palace of Spain. Came Staremberg and his troops in 1710, who turned it into a barrack, burnt the superb woodwork as fuel, broke the windows, tore down the artesonado ceilings, the carved doors, and set fire to the palace on leaving it. Spain has never been fortunate in her allies—English, French, or Austrian; they invariably found their entertainment in spreading ruin among her grandeurs. Carlos III. attempted to restore the Alcázar, but the French then came in 1810 and set fire to it again. The fire lasted three days, and now only the walls remain. The regal staircase, surely the widest of the world, ends in the void. You are shown the window at which the unfortunate Blanche sat in her solitary misery, but there are no walls to indicate the size of the chamber. You can see the lovely view from the window by picking your way across the scaffolding, but there is nothing else to see. For years the restorers have been busy with the roof of the galleries that run round the immense patio, only the artesonado will be reproduced in iron instead of wood, and the imitation is good. It may be completed, at the rate of modern work in Spain, in a couple of hundred years. The façade is plateresca, sober, and cold. Indeed, I cannot say that there is anything about this palace except its immensity calculated to provoke admiration. It towers imperiously above the town, crowded beneath it—a gigantic illusion; substantial without, void within; dreary and featureless in all its futile ostentation of measureless space.
CHAPTER X
Minor Churches, Hospitals, and Convents
TO write of all the churches and convents of Toledo would be to burthen the reader with a needless and confusing fatigue. It is enough to know that the city was pre-eminently a hieratic centre to understand that both were once innumerable. To-day they are still too many to remember and certainly more than are worth visiting. Some, like San José, are of no architectural value whatever, only known as a poor little hall which contains some of El Greco’s finest pictures. The fame of others, like San Roman, rests upon their mudejar towers, which give so quaint and individual an air to the general aspect of Toledo from the hills or the river. Others again, like San Tomé, combine both attractions in a pure mudejar tower and El Greco’s most wonderful masterpiece, the Burial of Count Ruiz de Orgaz, as well as Alonzo Cano’s Prophet Elia in sculptured wood, a marvellous specimen of Spanish wood-sculpture. Of Santo Domingo el Antiguo nothing here need be said since I have already written about it in my chapter on El Greco. Perhaps one of the finest of the minor churches is San Andrès. It was transformed after the conquest by order of Alonso VI. from a mosque into a Christian church as the remains of Moorish inscriptions as late as the sixteenth century would indicate. In the lateral nave above the transept there
are still traces of Arabian architecture in the vaults and stucco ornamentation of the same period. But the general appearance of the edifice is more modern, of a sober Gothic style, less highly decorated, but to my thinking more graceful in form than San Juan de los Reyes. The three long naves appear to be of a more recent date than the transept and capilla major. The pillars that sustain the dome are extremely graceful, and there is a bold freshness about the arches between that give the whole an air of distinction which none of the other minor churches of Toledo possess. The general effect is delightfully harmonious. In each of the chapels of the aisles there is something to examine. The founder of the restored temple, as the long inscription in Gothic letters along the friezes of the transept tells us, was Francisco de Rojas, commendador and ambassador at the court of Maximilian I., buried here in 1523. The high altar is of wrought wood of the sixteenth century, with paintings of that period of some merit. The shafts of the transept are in excellent taste, and on one of the lateral altars, under the retablo of painted wood, is a little sculptured Mater Dolorosa by an unknown artist, exquisitely touching and life-like. It has the beauty of a profound and tremulous sensibility and a vivid sweetness that reminded me of a lovely St Scholastica of painted wood by Pereira I saw at Santiago de Compostello, but the Spanish painter who accompanied me to San Andrès assures me that it is not a Pereira. The hand that wrought this symbol of gracious grief remains unknown to fame like that which sculptured the symbol of divine sweetness in the head of St Francis of Assisi above the cloister door of Burgos Cathedral. There are two Grecos here badly placed. With the aid of a chair and a candle even in the early afternoon you can barely distinguish them, so high do they hang in the dim light. One is St Peter of Alcántara and the other St Francis. Visibly Grecos, but of their merits it would be impossible to write, because of the squinting view you get of them. There is a Calvary of the Genoese painter, Semini, and an Adoration of the Kings by Antonio Vanderpere, with the unedifying legend of Lot and his daughters, a copy of Guido.