Cathedrals of Spain

by John A. Gade

The Cathedral of Granada is not at all remarkable. Its interest is derived from the city of which it is the chief Christian edifice and the great bodies which it contains; to students of architecture it is in a manner a connecting link between the Gothic building of the middle ages and the modern revival of classical building methods.

It is the death of the old and the birth of the new; it marks the advent of stagnant, uninspired formalism in constructive forms. Its sarcophagi and much of its decoration are both in design and execution most exquisite and appropriate examples of Renaissance art in Spain. Its easy victory in decorative forms was owing to the fact that there had practically been evolved little or no Spanish ornamental design outside of that produced by the ingenuity and peculiar skill of the Moors. The influence of Moorish design is long traceable in Christian decoration. The Spanish nature craves rich adornment in all material. The art of the great sculptors who, like Berruguete, returned at the beginning of the new century with{251} inspiration gained in the workshops of the Florentine Michael Angelo, soon found a host of pupils and followers. Not only in stone, but in wood, metal, plaster, and on canvas, the new forms were carried to a gorgeous profusion never dreamt of before. Charles V stands out amid its glories in as clear relief as in the tumult of the battlefield. The decline and frigid formality did not set in until the reign of his unimpassioned and repulsive son. The grandest epoch in Spain's history thus corresponds to the most inspired period of its sculpture. The first architects of this period worked on Granada Cathedral; the work of the greatest sculptor, the Burgundian Vigarny, is found in inferior form on the retablo of the Royal Chapel. In Spain, where the climate made small window openings desirable, the churches offered great wall spaces to the sculptor. The splendid portals, window frames, turrets and parapets, the capitals and string courses and niches all became rich fields for Spanish interpretation of the exquisite art of Lombardy.

The new art first found tentative expression in decorative forms, then in more radical and structural changes. The world-empire of which Ferdinand had dreamed, and which his grandson almost possessed, placed untold wealth and the art of every kingdom at the disposal of Spain.

Granada Cathedral has a strange exterior, meaningless except in certain portions, which are essentially Spanish. To the Granadines it is as marvelous as Saint Peter's to the Romans. Its view is obstructed on all sides by a maze of crumbling walls, yellow hovels, and shop fronts shockingly modern and out of keeping. It is all very, very provincial. The stream of the{252} world has left it behind and its pageants and glories had departed centuries ago. Donkeys heavily laden with baskets of market produce stand—personifications of wronged and unremonstrating patience—hitched to the iron rails before its main portals. Goats browse on the grass in its courtyards, and are milked between the buttresses. Immediately to the south of it lies the old episcopal palace, where the archbishop preached the sermons criticized by the ingenuous Gil Blas.

The main entrance is to the west. This front is the latest portion of the building with the exception of certain portions of the interior. Though not as corrupt as some of the surgical decorations in the trascoro, it is the heaviest and least interesting part of the church. It bears no relation to the sides of the building, but seems to have been clapped on like a mask. The central portion is subdivided into three huge bays, the spring of the arch, which rises from the intermediate piers, being considerably higher in the centre than those of the two to the north and south. Diego de Siloé probably designed the composition, intending that it should be flanked and terminated by great towers. Three stages, rising to a height of some 185 feet, stand to the north. Corinthian and Ionic orders superimpose a Doric entablature over a plain and restrained base. Arches frame more or less meaningless and unpierced designs between the pilasters and engaged columns of the orders. The whole is as painfully dry as the transfer of a student's compass from a page of Vignola. Old cuts and descriptions represent this northern tower crowned by an octagonal termination with a height of 265 feet. Despite the{253} apparent massiveness of the substructure, this soon made the whole so alarmingly insecure that it was pulled down. The present tower scarcely reaches above the broken lines and flat surfaces of the roof tiles and, particularly at a distance, has the effect of a huge buttress. The southern tower was never erected, but in place of it the front was supported by a makeshift portion of base. The northern tower is the work of Maeda, the façade principally by Cano, although much of the sculpture, such as the Incarnation over the central doorway, and the Annunciation and Assumption over the side portals, are by other inferior eighteenth-century sculptors.

Statues, cartouches and ornamental medallions relieve the paneled surfaces of the stonework, the masonry of which has been laid and jointed with the utmost conceivable mechanical skill. The whole central composition fizzles out in a meaningless mass of parapets and variously carved stone terminations. One feels as if the original designer had started on such a gigantic scale that he either had to give up finishing his work proportionately or keep on till it reached the sky,—he wisely chose the former alternative.

In Granada, as in most of the Spanish cathedrals, the decoration of the doorways and portals forms one of the principal features of exterior interest. Their ornamentation, with that of the parapets crowning the outer walls of chapels and aisles, is practically all that relieves the huge surfaces of ochre masonry. The walls themselves indicate in no manner the interior construction; the windows which pierce them are very low and narrow and Gothic in outline. The north and south façades,—if despite their many{254} obstructions they may be spoken of as such,—differ radically. The northern is to a great extent executed in the same ponderous magnificence as the western. Two doorways pierce it, the Puerta de San Jeronimo with mediocre sculpture by Diego de Siloé and his pupil and successor, Juan de Maeda, and the Puerta del Perdon, leading into the transept. The decoration of this doorway is as good pure Renaissance work as was executed in Spain during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. It consists of a double Corinthian order crowned by a broken pediment. The shafts of both orders are wreathed. The pilasters, the moldings of the arch, the archivolt and jambs are all, in the lower order, most profusely covered with exquisite designs, admirably fitted to their respective fields, full of imagination and virility. They are as good as the best corresponding work in Italy. Above the arch key of the main door, splendidly treated bas-reliefs of Faith and Justice support from the spandrels an inscription recounting the defeat of the Moors. The frieze band of both lower and upper orders is profusely filled with ornament, while small cherubs in excellent scale replace the conventional volutes of the Corinthian capitals. In the upper order the niches have unfortunately been left uncompleted. A bas-relief of God the Father fills the semicircle of the main arch; Moses and David occupy the lunettes.

The huge pilasters or buttresses of the church which run up east and west of the entire composition are decorated with the enormous imperial shields of Charles V, overshadowing in their vulgar predominance all the exquisitely proportioned and delicate detail adjacent to them.{255}

Some of the bays on the southern side of the Cathedral can be better seen, as a small courtyard separates them from the adjacent building, the episcopal palace. The others are choked by the Capilla del Pulgar, the Royal Chapel and the sagrario.

This side of the church exhibits in its balustrades, its ornamentation and the crocketed terminations and finials to the exterior buttresses, what is far more interesting in the Plateresque style of Spain than the purely borrowed and imitative features of the west and northern fronts. Here appear in jeweled play of light and shade, in all their imaginative and exquisite intricacy, those forms of carved string courses which were developed by the Spanish Renaissance and were essentially Spanish and national. You feel somewhere back of it the Moorish influence. It presents all the richness, the magnificence and exuberant fancy which characterizes the spirit in which its masters worked. The labor it involved must have been enormous. The splendor of the solid lacework ten to twelve feet high is thrown out by contrast with the naked walls which it crowns.