Morel, like Brunelleschi, was an architect as well as a craftsman in bronze.[98] He completed this tenebrarium in 1562, and the chapter of the cathedral were so contented with it that instead of paying him the stipulated price, namely, eight hundred ducats, they added of their own accord a further two hundred and fifty. They also commissioned him to make a handsome case to keep it in; but the case has disappeared, and the naked tenebrarium now stands in the Sacristy of Chalices of the cathedral.[99] It is still used at the Matin service during the last three days of Holy Week, and still, in the Oficio de Tinieblas, the custom is observed of extinguishing the fifteen tapers, one by one, at the conclusion of each psalm.

The title of the object which surmounts the famed Giralda tower of Seville is properly “the Statue of Faith, the triumph of the Church” (Pl. [xxxviii].); but it is known in common language as the Giraldillo (weathercock), which name has passed into the word Giralda, now applied to all the tower. The populace of Seville also call it, in the argot of their cheerful town, the muñeco or “doll,” the “Victory,” and the “Santa Juana.”

THE WEATHERCOCK OF THE GIRALDA TOWER
(16th Century. Seville Cathedral)

This statue, made of hollow bronze, rotates upon an iron rod piercing the great bronze globe which lies immediately beneath the figure's feet. The globe is nearly six feet in diameter. The figure itself represents a Roman matron wearing a flowing tunic partly covering her legs and arms. Sandals are secured to her feet by straps. Upon her head she wears a Roman helmet crested by a triple plume. In her right hand she holds the semicircular Roman standard of the time of Constantine, which points the direction of the wind and causes the figure to revolve, excepting when the air is very faint, in which case it is caught by two diminutive banners springing from the large one.[100] So huge are the proportions of this metal lady that the medal on her breast contains a life-size head which represents an angel.

The Spanish Moors were also well acquainted with the use of weathercocks. During the reign, in the eleventh century, of the Zirite kingling of Granada, Badis ben Habbus, a weathercock of strange design surmounted his alcázar. The historian Marmol wrote in the sixteenth century that it was still existing on a little tower, and consisted of a horseman in Moorish dress, with a long lance and his shield upon his arm, the whole of bronze, with an inscription on the shield which says: “Badis ben Habbus declares that in this attitude should the Andalusian be discovered (at his post).”

Not many other objects in this substance can be instanced as the work of Spanish craftsmen of the sixteenth and succeeding centuries, or of the later-Gothic age immediately preceding. Among them are the pulpits of Santiago cathedral, made by Celma, an Aragonese, in 1563; the choir-screen (1574–1579) in the cathedral of Zaragoza, made by Juan Tomás Cela, also a native of Aragon; the gilt lecterns of Toledo cathedral, which are the work of Nicolás Vergara and his son; the Gothic lectern of the mosque of Cordova; the choir-lectern (1557) of Cuenca, made by Hernando de Arenas, who will also be remembered as having made the reja of the same cathedral; and the octagonal gilt-bronze pulpits of Toledo, wrought by Francisco de Villalpando, as are the bas-reliefs (1564) upon the door of Lions, executed by the same craftsman from designs by Berruguete.

These last-named pulpits are associated with a legend. Within this temple, once upon a time, rested the metal sepulchre of the great Don Alvaro de Luna, so constructed by his orders that upon the touching of a secret spring the statue of the Constable himself would rise into a kneeling posture throughout the celebration of the mass. His lifelong and relentless foe, the Infante Enrique of Aragon, tore up the tomb in 1449; and from its fragments, superstition says, were made these pulpits.

Spanish Renaissance door-knockers in bronze are often curious. Fifteen large bronze rings adorned with garlands, heads of lions and of eagles, or with the pair of columns and the motto PLUS OULTRE of Charles the Fifth, were formerly upon the pilasters of the roofless, semi-ruined palace of that emperor at Granada. Removed elsewhere for greater safety,[101] they will now be found among the couple of dozen curiosities preserved in a chamber of the Moorish royal residence of the Alhambra.