The Plateresque style was rapidly developing towards the effulgence so in harmony with Spanish taste. Interwoven and fused with the work Juan was familiar with from his native country, he and his sons, Simon and Diego, encouraged and royally assisted by Alfonso and his successor, D. Luis of Acuna, set about to erect some of the most striking and wonderful portions of Burgos Cathedral,—the towers of the façade, the first lantern and the Chapel of the Constable.
The Chapel of Don Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, Count of Haro and Constable of Castile, was not erected with pious intent, but to the immortal fame of the {50}Constable and his wife. In the centre of the chapel-church on a low base lie the Count and Countess. The white Carrara of the figures is strangely vivid against the dark marble on which they rest, and all is colored by the sunlight striking down through the stained glass. It is very regal. The Constable is clad in full Florentine armor, his hands clasping his sword and his mantle about his shoulders. The carving of the flesh and the veining, and especially the strong knuckles of the hands, are astonishing. The fat cushions of the forefinger and thumb seem to swell and the muscles to contract in their grip on the cross of the hilt. The robe of his spouse, Doña Mencia de Mendoza, is richly studded with pearls, her hand clasps a rosary, while, on the folds of her skirt, her little dog lies peacefully curled up.
Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid
CATHEDRAL OF BURGOS
The Golden Staircase
The plan of the chapel is an irregular hexagon. It should have been octagonal, but the western sides have not been carried through and end in a broad-armed vestibule, which by rights should be the radial chapel upon the extreme eastern axis of the whole church. Above the vaulting early German pendentives are inserted in the three faulty and five true angles in order to bring the plan into the octagonal vaulting form. The builder seems almost to have made himself difficulties that he might solve them by a tour-de-force. A huge star-fish closes the vault. The recumbent statues face an altar. The remaining sides are subdivided by typically Plateresque band-courses and immense coats-of-arms of the Haro and Mendoza families. The upper surfacing is broken by a clerestory with exquisite, old stained glass. It is melancholy to see tombs of such splendid execution crushed by meaningless, empty display, out of all {51}scale, vulgar, gesticulating, and theatrical, especially so when one notices with what extraordinary mechanical skill much of the detail has been carved. It thrusts itself on your notice even up to the vaulting ribs, which the architect, not satisfied to have meet, actually crossed before they descend upon the capitals below.
The reja closing the chapel off from the apse is among the finest of the Renaissance, the masterpiece of Cristobal Andino, wrought in the year 1523. Curiously enough, the supporters of the shield above might have been modeled by Burne-Jones instead of the mediæval smith.
The interior could not always have been as light and cheerful as at present, for probably all the windows were more or less filled with stained glass from the workshops of the many "vidrieros" for which Burgos was so renowned that even other cathedral cities awarded her the contracts for their glazing. The foreign masters of Burgos were accustomed to see their arches and sculpture mellowed and illumined by rainbow lights from above, and surely here too it was of primary importance.
After the horrible powder explosion of 1813, when the French soldiers blew up the old fortress, making the whole city tremble and totter, the agonized servants of the church found the marble pavements strewn with the glorious sixteenth-century crystals that had been shattered above. They were religiously collected and, where possible, reinserted in new fields.
Chapels stud the ground around the old edifice. The Cloisters, a couple of chapels north of the chevet{52} and small portions here and there, rose with the transepts and the original thirteenth-century structure, but all the others were erected by the piety or pride of later ages or have been transformed by succeeding generations. Their vaulting illustrates every period of French and German Gothic as well as Plateresque art, while their names are taken from a favorite saint or biblical episode or the illustrious founders. The fifteenth century was especially sedulous, building chapels as a rich covering for the splendid Renaissance tombs of its spiritual and temporal lords. They are carved with the admirable skill and genius emanating once more from Italy. The Castilian Constable and his spouse, Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena (in the Capilla de la Visitacion), Bishop Antonia de Velasco, the eminent historian-archbishop (in the Sacristia Nueva), are splendid marbles of the classic revival. They must all have been portraits: for instance Bishop Gonzalvo de Lerma, who sleeps peacefully in the Chapel of the Presentacion; his fat, pursed lips and baggy eyelids are firmly closed, and his soft, double chin reposes in two neat folds upon the jeweled surplice. So, too, Fernando de Villegas, who lies in the north transept and whose scholarly face still seems to shine with the inner light which prompted him to give his people the great Florentine's Divine Comedy.