The mighty doors of the “Hall of Ambassadors,” in the mediæval royal residence of Seville (Plates [xi]. and [xii].), are quite the finest to be seen in Spain. Although a widespread superstition assigns their manufacture to a period close upon the Moorish conquest, it has been proved conclusively that they were made by Mudejar craftsmen of Toledo at the time when the whole Alcázar was erected more or less upon the ruins of the old, by Pedro the First of Castile, denominated, according to the prejudice with which we view his character, “the Cruel,” or “the Just.”[44]

These doors, which under a pretence of restoration have been mutilated more than once, are made of larch, and measure sixteen feet in height by thirteen feet (including both the leaves) in width. The upper part of either leaf consists of geometrical and floral ornament in exquisitely tasteful combination, executed in the scheme known technically, from the angles at the central polygon, as lazo de á doce—“lazo-work of twelve.” The decoration of the lower part is more minute, and in the scheme of lazo de á diez—“lazo-work of ten.” Inscriptions in Arabic and Latin, many of which are quoted from the Psalms, are distributed on both sides of the woodwork, and confirm our other evidence that the doors were made during the reign and in obedience to the orders, of Don Pedro.

The Plateresco sixteenth-century doors of the Capilla de los Vargas at Madrid (Plate [xiv].) are attributed by Cean Bermudez and by Ponz to an artist named Giralte, who carved them in walnut with various military and other scenes from Scripture, alternating with shields and floral ornament; the whole surrounded by an exquisitely delicate and tasteful border. Lampérez remarks that the errors of perspective recall the similar productions of Ghiberti.

XXVI
CHOIR-STALLS
(Burgos Cathedral)

The celosía or decorative wooden window-grating, imported by the Mussulman conqueror from Egypt and the East, extended to all parts of Christian Spain, and was particularly used in convents. These gratings, identical in form and workmanship with those of Cairo,[45] were attached to projecting windows, so that the women of a household could look into the street without themselves being seen, a custom which the Spanish woman still recalls to us by peering, for hours at a time, between the lowered persiana of her balcony.[46] By the seventeenth century, which may truthfully be called the age of Spanish jealousy, and when the “Othello-like revenge of the Moor” had eaten into the very entrails of society, the celosía had become as indispensable to houses as the door or window. “La,” wrote Bertaut de Rouen of a residence on the outskirts of Madrid, and obviously alluding to these gratings, “il y avoit bien des Dames dans l'appartement d'enhaut qui y demeurerent cachées, se contentant de nous voir promener dans le jardin par les fenêtres.”

We know from the stone coat of arms which is carved above the doorway of the “House of Castril at Granada” that in the olden time the balconies of the Hall of Comares in the Alhambra were fitted with projecting wooden celosías; and Contreras says that in the Torre de los Puñales of the same palace there used to be “a kind of wooden mirador or menacir, covered with celosías like those of Cairo, and many of which were still to be seen in Granada early in the nineteenth century.”

I am not aware of any Moorish celosía remaining to this day outside a Spanish building. In such exposed positions weather and the natural delicacy of the woodwork seem to have destroyed them all. As an interior ornament, a single one (Pl. [xvi].) exists in the Alhambra. Nevertheless, I hesitate to call this celosía purely Moorish. Perhaps it is the work of a Morisco, or even of a Christian-Spaniard, for we know that decorative wooden fittings for the Alhambra were made in the sixteenth century by Antonio Navarro and other craftsmen. The grating, which is well preserved, covers a window over the archway leading from the Hall of the Two Sisters into the Sala de los Ajimeces and the Mirador de Daraxa, and consists of minute prisms and turned pieces in the typical Egyptian style.