ALTAR-FRONT IN ENAMELLED BRONZE
(11th Century. Museum of Burgos)

Other old objects—boxes, triptyches, statuettes, incensories, book-covers, crucifixes, and processional crosses—partly or wholly covered with enamel, belong or recently belonged to the Marquises of Castrillo and Casa-Torres, the Count of Valencia de Don Juan, and Señor Escanciano. All, or nearly all, of these are thought to have proceeded from Limoges (Pl. [v].). Champlevé enamel is also on the tiny “Crucifix of the Cid” (Pl. [vi].) at Salamanca, as well as on the Virgin's throne in the gilt bronze statuette of the Virgin de la Vega at San Esteban in the same city.[21] Of this image, although it properly belongs to another heading of my book, I think it well to give a reproduction here (Plate [vii].). I will also mention, in spite of its presumably foreign origin, the enamelled altar-front of San Miguel de Excelsis in Navarre—a small sanctuary constructed by a mediæval cavalier who, by an accident occasioned by the dark, murdered his father and mother in lieu of his wife.[22] This altar-front, conspicuously Byzantine in its style, measures four feet three inches high by seven feet five inches long, and is now employed as the retablo of the little church which stands in solitary picturesqueness on the lofty mountain-top of Aralar. The figures, coloured in relief upon a yellowish enamel ground, are those of saints, and of a monarch and his queen—possibly King Sancho the Great, who is believed to have been the donor of the ornament. If this surmise be accurate, the front would date from the eleventh century.

I have said that the history of Spanish enamel-work is both confused and scanty. The subject in its general aspects has been studied by M. Roulin, whose judgments will be found in the Revue de l'Art Ancien et Moderne, and in his article, “Mobilier liturgique d'Espagne,” published in the Revue de l'Art Chrétien for 1903. M. Roulin believes the altar-front of San Miguel in Excelsis to be a Limoges product, not earlier than the first half of the thirteenth century.

Ramírez de Arellano declares that no enamelling at all was done in Spain before the invasion of the Almohades. López Ferreiro, who as a priest had access to the jealously secreted archives of Santiago cathedral, gives us the names of Arias Perez, Pedro Martinez, Fernan Perez, and Pedro Pelaez, Galician enamellers who worked at Santiago in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Martin Minguez says that enamelling was done at Gerona in the fourteenth century, and Moorish enamels were certainly produced at Cordova and Cuenca from comparatively early in the Middle Ages. A few obscure workers in enamel are mentioned by Gestoso, in his Diccionario de Artistas Sevillanos, as living at Seville in the fifteenth century, though, in the entries which refer to them, little is told us of their lives and nothing of their labours. In the sixteenth century we obtain a glimpse of two enamellers of Toledo—Lorenzo Marqués and Andrés Ordoñez, and dating from the same period the Chapter of the Military Orders of Ciudad Real possesses a silver-gilt porta-paz with enamelling done at Cuenca. However, our notices of this branch of Spanish art have yet to be completed.

“THE CRUCIFIX OF THE CID”
(Salamanca Cathedral)

A long array of royal gifts caused, in the olden time, the treasure of Santiago cathedral to be the richest and most varied in the whole Peninsula, although at first this see was merely suffragan to Merida. But early in the twelfth century a scheming bishop, by name Diego Gelmirez, intrigued at Rome to raise his diocese to the dignity of an archbishopric. The means by which he proved successful in the end were far from irreproachable. “Gelmirez,” says Ford (vol. ii. p. 666) “was a cunning prelate, and well knew how to carry his point; he put Santiago's images and plate into the crucible, and sent the ingots to the Pope.”