The interior is built of a clear gray stone on which sparing employment of color in certain places is most effective. Thus in the bosses of the vaulting ribs throughout, in the capitals of the piers of nave and transept, in the very elaborate fan-vaulting of the Capilla Mayor, and in the soffits of nave-clerestory, the blue and gold contrasts finely with the cold gray surfaces. Renaissance medallions decorate the spandrels of the nave, but those of the side aisles bear the coats-of-arms of the Cathedral and the City of Salamanca. A differently designed fan-vaulting spreads over every chapel. Great rejas enclose choir and Capilla Mayor from the transept. The rear of the choir is badly mutilated by a Baroque screen, while the sides and back of the high altar still consist of the rough blocks which have been waiting for centuries to be carved. The choir-stalls are very late eighteenth century, a mass of over-elaborate detail, as fine as Grinling Gibbon's carving, and if possible even more remarkable in the detail.
The west and north façades are, for a Spanish cathedral, singularly free and unencumbered. The west faces the old walls of the university. The entire composition is overshadowed by the tremendous tower that looms up for miles around in the country. It is indeed "Salamanca qui érige ses clochers rutilants sur la nudité inexorable du désert." Though it has nothing to do with the rest of the composition, it is a happy mixture of the two styles; the massive base is as high as the roofing of the nave, blessedly bare and severe beside the restlessness of the adjoining screen. A clock and a few panels are all that break it. Classical balconies run round it above and below the{28} first bell-story, the sides of which are decorated with a Corinthian order and broken by round arched openings. A similar order decorates the drum of the cupola, while Gothic crocketed pyramids break the transition at angles. At the peak of the lantern, three hundred and sixty feet in the air, soars the triumphant emblem of the Church of Christ. That man of architectural infamy, Churriguera, erected it, showing in this instance an extraordinary restraint.
Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid
SALAMANCA
From the Vega
The façade belongs to the first period of the Cathedral, and portions of it are Juan Gil de Hontañon's work, though the later points to Poniente. It is interesting to compare it with the last Gothic work in France, with, for instance, Saint-Ouen at Rouen. The end of the style in the two countries is totally different—one expiring in a mass of glass and tracery, the other, in a meaningless jumble of ornamentation, of cusped and broken and elliptical arches and carving incredible in its delicacy. One can scarcely believe it to be stone. The Spanish, though not wild in its extravagance, yet lacks all sense of restraint. The front is composed of a screenwork of three huge arches, within which three portals leading to the aisles form the main composition, the whole crowned by a series of crocketed pinnacles. A plain fortress-like pier, resembling the remnant of an old bastion, terminates it to the north. Great buttresses separate the portals. Around them are deep reveals and archivolt; somewhat recalling French examples in their forms; above them is an inexhaustible effort in stone. There are myriads of brackets and canopies, some few having statues. There are enough coats-of-arms to supply whole nations with heraldic emblems, and{29} recessed moldings of remarkable and exquisite workmanship and crispness of foliage. Some of the bas-reliefs, as those of the Nativity and Adoration, are very fine. The Virgin in the pillar separating the doors of the central entrance gathers the folds of her robe about her with a queenly grace and dignity.
The whole doorway on its great scale is a remarkable work of the transition from Gothic to Renaissance. While the treatment of the figures has a naturalism already entirely Renaissance, the main bulk of the ornamental detail is still in its feeling quite Gothic.
From the steps of the Palazzo del Goberno Civil, the northern front stretches out before you above the bushy tops of the acacia trees in the Plaza del Colegio Viejo. The demarcations are strong in the horizontal courses of the balconies which crown the walls of the nave and side-aisle chapels,—the two lower quite Gothic. The thrust of the naves is met by great buttresses flying out over the roofs of the side aisles, and there, as well as above the buttresses of the chapel walls, pinnacles rise like the masts in a great shipyard. The whole organism of the late Spanish Gothic church lies open before you. The long stretch of the three tiers of walls is broken by the face of the transept, the door of which is blocked, while the surrounding buttresses and walls are covered with canopies and brackets, all vacant of statues. In place of the condemned door, there is one leading into the second bay, the Puerta de los Ramos or de las Palmas, in feeling very similar to the main doors of the west. Its semicircular arches support a relief representing Christ entering Jerusalem. A circular light flanked{30} by Peter and Paul comes above, and the whole is encased in a series of broken arches filled with the most intricate carving.
The grand and the grandiloquent Cathedral seem to gaze out over the town and the vast plain of the old kingdom of Leon and to listen. It is a golden town, of a dignity one gladly links with the name of Castile. It is a city—or what is left of it after the firebrands of Thiebaut, of Ney, and of Marmont—of the sixteenth century, of convents and churches and huge ecclesiastical establishments. They rise like amber mountains above the squalid buildings crumbling between them, and stand in grilled and latticed silence. Las Dueñas lies mute on one side and on the other San Esteban, where the great discoverer pleaded his cause to deaf ears. In the evening glow their brown walls gain a depth and warmth of color like the flush in the dark cheeks of Spanish girls.{31}