"But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth, and some to honor, and some to dishonor."
The semicircular door is crowned by a profusely subdivided, Gothic archivolt and guarded by two scaly giants or wild men that look, with their raised clubs, as if they would beat the life out of any one who should try to enter the holy cavern. Saints Peter{86} and Paul float on clouds in the spandrels. Above rises a sixteenth-century composition of masks and canopied niches. The Saviour naturally occupies the centre, flanked by the various saints that in times of peril protected the church of Avila: Saints Vincente, Sabina and Cristela, Saint Segundo and Santa Teresa. In the attic in front of a tremendous traceried cusp, with openings blocked by masonry, the ornamentation runs completely riot. Saint Michael, standing on top of a dejected and doubled-up dragon, looks down on figures that are crosses between respectable caryatides and disreputable mermaids. It is certainly as immaterial as unknown, when and by whom was perpetrated this degenerate sculpture now shamelessly disfiguring a noble casing. The strong, early towers seem in their turn doubly powerful and eloquent in their simplicity and one wishes the old Romanesque portal were restored and the great traceries above it glazed to flood the nave with western sunlight.
Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid
CATHEDRAL OF AVILA
Main entrance
The northeastern angle is blocked by poor Renaissance masonry, the exterior of the chapels here being faced by a Corinthian order and broken by circular lights.
The northern portal is as fine as that of the main entrance is paltry. The head of the door, as well as the great arch which spans the recess into which the entire composition is set, is, curiously enough, three-centred, similar to some of the elliptical ones at Burgos and Leon. A lion, securely chained to the church wall for the protection of worshipers, guards each side of the entrance. Under the five arches stand the twelve Apostles, time-worn, weather-beaten and mutilated, but splendid bits of late thirteenth-century {87}carving. For they must be as early as that. The archivolts are simply crowded with small figures of angels, of saints, and of the unmistakably lost. In the tympanum the Saviour occupies the centre, and around Him is the same early, naïve representation of figures from the Apocalypse, angels, and the crowned Virgin.
Two years before Luther, a true exponent of Teutonic genius, had nailed his theses to the door of a cathedral in central Germany, there was born in the heart of Spain as dauntless and genuine a representative of her country's genius. Each passed through great storm and stress of the spirit, and finally entered into that closer communion with God, from which the soul emerges miraculously strengthened. Do not these bleak hills, this stern but lovely Cathedral, rising per aspera ad astra, typify the strong soul of Santa Teresa? A great psychologist of our day finds the woman in her admirable literary style. Prof. James further accepts Saint Teresa's own defense of her visions: "By their fruits ye shall know them." These were practical, brave, cheerful, aspiring, like this Castilian sanctuary, intolerant of dissenters, sheltering and caring for many, and leading them upward to the City which is unseen, eternal in the heavens.{88} {89}