Burgos Cathedral
An excerpt from GE Street's work on the cathedrals of Spain
There are some views of Burgos Cathedral which are constantly met with, and upon which I confess all my ideas of its style and merits had been founded, to their no little detriment. The western steeples, the central lantern, and the lantern-like roof and pinnacles of the chapel of the Constable at the east end, are all very late in date – the first of the latest fifteenth century, and the others of early Renaissance work;and their mass is so important, their character so picturesque, and their detail so exuberantly ornate, that they have often been drawn and described to the entire exclusion of all notice of the noble early church, out of which they rise.
The fabric consists of a thirteenth-century church, added to somewhat in the fourteenth century, altered again in the fifteenth, and even more in the sixteenth century. The substratum, so to speak, is throughout of the thirteenth century, but the two western steeples, with their crocketed and perforated spires, the gorgeous and fantastic lantern over the crossing, and the lofty and sumptuous monumental chapel at the east end, are all later additions, and so important in their effect, as at first sight to give an entirely wrong impression both of the age and character of the whole church.
The early church seems to have consisted of a nave and aisles of six bays, deep transepts, and a choir and aisles, with apses and chapels round it. The transepts probably had chapels on the east, of which one still remains in the north transept; but this is the only original chapel, none of those round the chevet having been spared. Externally, the two transept fronts are the only conspicuous portions of the old church, but, on mounting to the roof, the flying buttresses, clerestory windows, and some other parts, are found still little damaged or altered.
Never was a church more altered for the worse after its first erection than was this. It is now a vast congeries of chapels and excrescences of every shape and every style, which have grown round it at various dates, and, to a great extent, concealed the whole of the original plan and structure; and of these, the only valuable medieval portions are the cloisters and sacristies, which are, indeed, but little later in date than the church, and two of the chapels on the north side of the chevet, one of which is original, and the other at any rate not much altered. The rest of the additions are all either of the latest Gothic, or Renaissance.
On entering the nave at the west end, the effect of the arcades, triforia and clerestory is very fine, though much damaged by the arrangement of the choir... Otherwise, the architectural features of the nave are thoroughly good. The original scheme evidently included two western steeples, the piers which support them – large clusters of engaged shafts – being larger than any of the others, yet of the same date. The nave columns are circular, with eight engaged shafts around them. The bases are circular, finished on squares, with knops of foliage filling in the spandrels. The abaci are all square in plan, and both bases and caps are set at right angles to the direction of the arches they support. One of the smaller columns carries the pier arch, the other three carry the transverse and diagonal groining ribs, whilst the wall ribs are carried on shafts on each side of the clerestory window. The pier arches are of ordinary early-pointed character, and well moulded. There is not much variety in the general design of the nave and transepts, though some changes of detail occur. The triforium in both is very peculiar... The openings vary considerably in number, and the piercings of the tympanum and in the enclosing arch are also singularly arranged. I know nothing like this singular triforium elsewhere. It is certainly more curious than really beautiful, but at the same time it is valuable, as seeming to prove this part of the work to be from the hand of a native artist. The enclosing label is in all cases a segment of a circle, and filled with sculptured heads at short intervals apart...
The original clerestory still, in great part, remains; it is simple, but good and vigorous in style, and with but one special peculiarity in its detail. The windows are for the most part of two lights, with a quatrefoiled circle in the head; and the peculiarity referred to here is the omission to carry the chamfer round the extrados of the arched heads to the lights or the circle; the effect produced is peculiar, the tracery not looking as if it were properly constructed, but as if the wheel had been loosely placed in the arch without having any proper connection with it. I have noticed the same arrangement in a church in Valladolid, and it must, I think, be regarded either as a freak of the workmen, or more probably as the exhibition of some degree of ignorance of the ordinary mode of executing the mouldings in window traceries.
But here, with this one exception, as in almost all the details throughout the original work of this cathedral, there is little, if anything, to show that we are not in France, and looking at some of its best and purest thirteenth-century Gothic. There is no trace of Moorish or other foreign influence, the whole work being pure, simple, and good. In the aisles two only of the original windows remain, and these show that they were lighted originally by a series of well-shaped lancets, with engaged jamb-shafts inside. The vaults are all slightly domical in section...
The transepts, which, as has been said, are similar in their design to the nave, are of considerable size, and the view across them is in fact best internal view in the church. One early chapel alone remains – on the east side of the north transept – and its groined roof is remarkable. It is a square in plan, with its vault divided into eight groining cells, forming two bays on each side, each under a division of the vault. No one who has studied the groining of the churches in Poitou and Anjou – so decided in their local peculiarities – can doubt, on comparison of them with this chapel, that it wast work of men who had studied in the same school, and it is remarkable that we find it reproduced in the lantern of the great church of the Convent of Las Huelgas, near Burgos... In both cases the vaulting is very domical, and the joints of the stone filling-in of the cells are vertical. This chapel suggests, too, the question whether the first idea was not here, as well as at Las Huelgas, to have a series of chapels on the east side of the transepts...
At Burgos the Coro occupies the three eastern bays of the nave, and the only entrance to it is through a doorway in its eastern screen. The stalls, screens and fittings are all of early renaissance work, and were the gift of bishop Pascual de Fuensanta, between AD 1497 and AD 1512. there are about eighty stalls, in two rows, returned at the ends, and very richly carved, over the lower stalls with subjects from the Old Testament. In the centre of the choir, concealed by the great desk for the books (which, by the way, are old, though not very fine) lies a magnificent effigy of bishop Maurice, the founder of the church. It is of wood, covered with metal plates, and very sumptuously adorned with jewels, enamels, and gilding. He was bishop from AD1213 to AD 1238, and his effigy appeared to me to be very little later than the date of his death.
A special architectural interest attaches to the life of this prelate, for the tradition in Burgos has always been that he was an Englishman, who came over in the train of the English Princess Alienor, Queen of Alfonso VIII, and having been Archdeacon of Toledo, became in AD 1213 bishop of Burgos... Two years before the cathedral was commenced he went on an embassy through France to Germany, to bring Beatrice, daughter of the Duke of Suabia, to marry King Ferdinand; so that, even if he were not of English birth, he was at any rate well travelled, and had seen some of the noble works in progress and completed in France and Germany at this date. In AD 1221 he laid the first stone of his new cathedral... and the work went on so rapidly that in November 1230, when he drew up directions as to the precedence of the various members of the chapter, their order of serving at the altars, and of walking in processions, the bishop was able to write 'Tempore nostrae translationis ad novam fabricam' [in our time transferred to the new building].
The altar has a late and uninteresting retablo, in Pagan style, carved with large subjects and covered with gold. Ponz says that the sculptures of this retablo were executed by Rodrigo de la Aya and his brother Martin between AD 1577 and 1593 at a cost of 40,000 ducats; and that Juan de Urbina (a native of Madrid) and Gregorio Martinez of Valladolid, painted and gilded it for 11,000 ducats in three years, finsihing in AD 1593.
The columns of the choir arches have been modernised, and there is consequently but little of the old structure visible on the inside, the Retablo rising to the groining and concealing the arches of the apse. Between these arches sculptures in stone are introduced, which are said to have been executed by Juan de Borgoña, in 1540. They are bold and spirited compositions in high relief, and give great richness of effect to the aisle towards which they face. The subjects are (1) the Agony in the Garden, (2) Our Lord bearing His Cross, (3) the Crucifixion, (4) the Descent from the Cross and the Resurrection, and (54) the Ascension. Numbers 1 and 5 are not original, or at any rate are inferior to and different in style from the others.
At the east end of the cathedral is a grand chapel, erected about AD 1487 by the Constable Don Pedro Fernandez de Velasco and his wife. This remarkable building was designed by an architect whose work we shall see again, and of whom it may be as well at once to say a few words. Juan de Colonia – a German by birth or origin, as his name [John of Cologne] shows – is said to have been brought to Burgos by bishop Alfonso de Cartagena (1435-1456) when he returned from the Council of Basle. There is evidence that he built the chapel of the great Carthusian monastery of Miraflores, on the hill just outside the town; and there is, I believe, but little doubt that he wrought here too. His work is very peculiar. It is essentially German in its endless intricacy and delicacy of detail, but has features which I do not remember to have seen in Germany, and which may fairly be attributed to the Spaniards who worked under him, or to an attempt on his own part to accommodate his work to Spanish tastes.
The chapel is octagonal at the east, but square at the west end; and pendentives of exactly the same kind of design as those of the early German and French churches are introduced across the western angles of the chapel, to bring the plan of the central vault to a complete octagon. They are true pendentives... They are hardly at all Gothic, having semi-circular arches,and the masonry below them being filled in with stones radiating as in a fan, from the centre of the base of the pendentive. The groining ribs ... form by their intersection a large star of eight points at the centre, and the cells between the ribs of this star are pierced with very elaborate traceries. This is a feature often reproduced in late Spanish works, and it is one which aids largely in giving the intricate and elaborately lacelike effect aimed at by Spanish architects at this date, to a greater extent even than by any of their contemporaries in other lands...
The central lantern was the last great work executed in Burgos cathedral, and its history must be given somewhat at length, as it is of much interest. In the Royal Library at Madrid there is preserved a manuscript, from which we learn that the 'crossing' of the cathedral fell on the 4th of March, 1539; and that Felipe de Borgoña, “one of the three masters who in the time of our Emperor came to our Spain, from whom we have learned perfect advantage over the others”, was entrusted with the execution of the new work erected in its place. This Cimborio or lantern was completed, according to this manuscript, in December 1567... The whole composition of this lantern is Gothic and picturesque; yet there is scarce a portion of it which does not show a most strange mixture of Pagan and Gothic detail. The piers which support it are huge, ungainly cylinders, covered with carving in low relief, and everywhere there is that combination of heaviness of parts and intricacy of detail, which in all ages marks the inferior artist. 
The upper part of the towers and the spires was added in the fifteenth century, by bishop Alfonso de Cartagena who employed Juan de Colonia to design them. German peculiarities do not gain in attractiveness by being exported to Spain, and this part of Juan de Colonia's work is certainly not a success. Nothing can be less elegant than the termination of the spires, which, instead of finishing simply and in the usual way, are surrounded near the top by an open gallery, and then terminated with the clumsiest of finials. This work was commenced in 1442, and when the bishop died in 1456, one spire was finished, and the other, being well advanced, was soon completed under bishop Luis Acuña y Osorio, the founder also of the central lantern. On the upper part of the towers, 'Ecce Agnus Dei', and 'Pax vobis' [Behold the Lamb of God, and Peace to you]; and on the spires, 'Sancta Maria' and 'Jesus'. These words are in large stone letters, with the spaces around them pierced.
The sculptures of the south door are, in the tympanum, our Lord seated with the evangelistic beasts around him, and the four evangelists, one on either side and two above, seated and writing at desks, whilst below His feet are the twelve apostles, seated and holding open books. Below, there is a bishop in front of the central pier, and statues on either side, of which I made out two on the right to be St Peter and St Paul, and the two answering to them on the left Moses and Aaron. The three orders of the archivolt have angels with censers and angels with candles, kings seated and playing musical instruments. Here, as throughout the early sculpture, the character of the work is very French, and the detail of the arcading below the statues in the jambs is very nearly the same as that of the earliest portion of the work in the west front of the cathedral at Bourges.
The north doorway is reached from the transept floor by an internal staircase of no less than thirty-eight steps (the sixteenth-century work of Diego de Siloe)... The doorway has in the tympanum Our Lord, seated, with St Mary and St John on either side, and angels with the instruments of the Passion above and on either side. Below is St Michael weighing souls, with the good on his left, and the wicked on his right. The orders of the archivolt have (1) seraphim, (2) angels, and (3) figures rising from their graves; and 6t jambs have figures of the twelve apostles.
Photo credits - www.viajar24h.com on Flickr