Toledo cathedral
An excerpt from GE Street
Here we have a church which is the equal in some respects of any of the great French churches; and I hardly know how to express my astonishment that such a building should be so little known, and that it should have been so insufficiently if not wrongly described whenever any attempt at a description has been made by English travellers who have visited it.
The cathedral is said to have occupied the present site before the capture of the city by the Moors. They converted it into a mosque, and in course of time enlarged and adorned it greatly. At the capitulation to Alfonso VI, in 1085, it was agreed that the Moors should still retain it; but this agreement was respected for a few months only, when the Christians, without the consent of their king, took it forcibly from them and had it consecrated as their cathedral. The first stone of the new cathedral was laid with great ceremony by the king Don Fernando III, assisted by the Archbishop, on the 14th of August, 1227; and from that time to the end of the seventeenth century additions to and alterations of the original fabric seem to have been constantly in hand.
It was the same king who laid the first stone of Burgos Cathedral in 1221, and it will be remembered that Maurice, the then bishop of Burgos, is said to have been an Englishman, and had been Archdeacon of Toledo. Ferdinand's first wife was a daughter of the Duke of Suabia, his second a Frenchwoman. The name of the architect was preserved on his epitaph, as Petrus Petri – the Spanish writers all talk of him as 'Pedro Perez', but as the Latin inscription is the only authority for his name, he may as fairly be called Pierre le Pierre, and so become a Frenchman; and I cannot help thinking that this is on the whole very much more likely than that he should have been a Spaniard. This, at any rate, is certain; the first architect of Toledo, whether he were French or Spanish, was thoroughly well acquainted with the best French churches, and could not otherwise have done what he did.
In Spain itself there was nothing to lead gradually to the full development of the pointed style. We find, on the contrary, buildings, planned evidently by foreign hands, rising suddenly, without any connexion with other buildings in their own district, and yet with the most obvious features of similarity to works in other countries erected just before them. Such, I have shown, is the case with the cathedrals at Burgos, at Leon, and at Santiago, and such even more decidedly is the case here. Moreover, in Toledo, if anywhere, was such a circumstance as this to be expected. In this part of Spain there was in the thirteenth century no trained school of native artists. Even after the conquest the Moors continued to act as architects for Christian buildings.
Toledo Cathedral is thoroughly French in its ground-plan and equally French in all its details for some height from the ground. It is not until we reach the triforium of the choir that any other influence is visible; but even here the work is French work, only slightly modified by some acquaintance with Moorish art. The whole work is, indeed, a grand protest against Mahomedan architecture, and I doubt whether any city in the Middle Ages can show anything so distinctly intended and so positive in its opposition to what was being done at the same time by other architects as this.
The plan of the cathedral is set out on an enormous scale. In width it is scarcely exceeded by any other church of its age, Milan and Seville cathedrals being, I think, the only larger churches in Christendom. And the area covered by the cloisters, chapels, and dependencies of Toledo, being on the same large scale, is of course in excess altogether of Milan, which has none.
The original plan consisted of a nave with double aisles on either side, seven bays in length; transepts of the same projection as the aisles; a choir of one bay; and the chevet formed by an apse to the choir of five bays, with the double aisles continued round it, and small chapels – alternately square and circular in plan – between the buttresses in its outer wall. Scarcely a fragment of the lower and visible part of the exterior of the cathedral has been left untouched by the destructive hands of the architects of the last three centuries; and the consequence is that it is after all only the interior of this noble church that is so magnificent, there being very little indeed that is either attractive or interesting on the exterior.
The first view of the interior is very impressive. [Entering the cathedral at the north transept.] The view across this, as is usually the case in Spain, is the great view of the church; for here only is there any really grand expanse of unoccupied floor, and without such a space real magnificence of effect can never be secured. The view hence into the double aisles round the choir, across the gorgeously decorated Capilla mayor, and down the side aisles of the nave, is truly noble, and open, I think, to but one criticism, which is that it is somewhat wanting in height. Judged by English examples, its height is unusually great; but all the other dimensions are so enormous that one requires more than o
rdinary height, and the vast size of the columns throughout the church, as well as the fact that most of the perspectives are those of the side aisles, which are of necessity low, gives perhaps an impression of lowness to the whole which is certainly not justified by the measurement in feet and inches of the central vault.
Visitors will be struck by the extreme simplicity and uniformity of the original outline of Toledo cathedral, and the entire absence of all excrescences, whether of transepts or chapels. In this respect it is not a little like some of the finest French examples, such as Notre Dame, Paris, and Bourges, and extremely unlike the ordinary early Spanish plan, in which the transepts, the lantern, and the three eastern apses, are always distinctly and emphatically marked. Here the excrescences are all later additions. The chapels of the chevet were very small, and almost contained within the semi-circle which forms its outline. There is no lantern, and the transepts are hardly recognised on the ground-plan. The aim of the great French architects of the period was to reduce their work to an almost classic simplicity and uniformity; and their ambition was evidently shared by the architect who presided over the erection of this cathedral at Toledo.
The chevet is extremely beautifully arranged. There are twice as many columns between the aisles are there are round the central apse, and the points of support in the outer wall are again double the number of the columns between the aisles. The alternate bays throughout are thus roofed with triangular compartments, and the remaining bays are, as nearly as possible, perfectly rectangular, whilst the vista from west to east is perfectly preserved, and the distance from centre to centre of the outer row of co
lumns is as nearly as possible the same as that of the inner order. The outer wall of the aisle was occupied alternately by small square chapels opposite the triangular vaulting compartments, and circular chapels opposite the others.
I hold it to be in the highest degree improbable that any one could have devised this improvement who had not been actively engaged in the study of the French cathedral.
The planning of the whole church was uniform throughout. The columns are all circular, surrounded by engaged shafts, which, in the great piers of the transept, are trefoiled in section. There doe not appear to have been chapels anywhere in the side walls of the nave, save on the south side of the south aisle, where the chapel of Santa Lucia appears to be of the same age as the church. On the west side of this chapel is an extremely rich recessed arch in stucco, of late Moorish work -0 a curious contrast to the fine pointed work of the chapel.
The original scheme of the church is now only to be seen in the choir and its aisles. These are arranged in three gradations of height – the choir being upwards of a hundred feet, the aisle round it about sixty feet, and the outer aisle about thirty-five feet in height. The outer wall of the aisle is pierced with arches for the small chapel between the buttresses. The intermediate aisle has in its outer wall a triforium, formed by an arcade of cusped arches; and above this, quite close to the point of the vault, a rose window in each bay. It is in this triforium that the first evidence of any knowledge on the part of the architect of Moorish architecture strikes the eye. The cusping of the arcade is not enclosed within an arch, and takes a distinctly horseshoe outline.
The great rose-window of the north transept, though later, is not much more so than the work of the choir. It has an outer ring of twelve cusped circles, six within these, and one in the centre. The whole is filled with old glass. The centre circle has the Crucifixion; the six circles round it Saint Mary, Saint John, and four angels; and the outer circles figures of the twelve greater prophets, pointing towards Our Lord. The ground of the centre circles within the cusps is a light pure blue, and the cusps are filled with conventional foliage. It is the best example of stained glass still remaining in the cathedral.
The Coro
The screen-work is continued on around the apse, but much mutilated by Berruguetesque and other alterations, the work of which at the east, behind the altar, is the worst in the world – el trasparente – where angels, clouds, and rays of light, all painfully executed in marble, are lighted by a big hole, wickedly pierced right through the old thirteenth-century vault!
[Opinions on the Trasparente are now much more favourable. Narciso Tome's great baroque work blends painting, sculpture and architecture in a vision of heaven as a shaft of light; and in its own terms it's thoroughly successful. But Street was not either by disposition or by education likely to understand the baroque; and for him it remained nothing more than a desecration of the Gothic cathedral.]
The last great middle-pointed feature is the chapel of San Ildefonso, at the extreme east end of the church. It is a most elaborate work, groined with an eight-sided vault; its windows and arches full of rich mouldings, and enriched by ball flowers and some of the other devices commonly seen in our own work of the same age. Each side of this chapel had an elaborate tomb with an arched recess in the wall over it, surmounted by a gabled canopy between pinnacles, and under which sculptured subjects are introduced. These tombs were evidently all erected at the same time, and help to make the tout ensemble of the chapel very rich and striking. The vaulting-ribs are treated in an unusual and rather effective way, being fringed with a series of cusps on their under side, which give great richness to the general effect.
The chapel of Santiago, to the north-east of the chevet, was a great work of the fifteenth century. It is similar in plan to that of San Ildefonso, by the side of which it is built, and has in its centre a grand high tomb, carrying recumbent effigies of the Constable Don Alvaro de Luna and his wife Doña Juana. Each of the tombs has life-size kneeling figures, one at each angle, looking towards the tomb, and angels holding coats of arms – that most unangelic of operations, as it always seems to me – in panels on the sides. Don Alvaro de Luna died in 1453 and his wife in 1448, and the chapel bears evidence in the 'perpendicular' character of its panelling, arcading and crocketing, of the poverty of the age in the matter of design.
The internal fittings of the Coro are full of interest and of much magnificence. The lower range of stalls all round (fifty in number) are the work of Maestro Rodrigo, circa 1495; and the upper range were executed, half by Berruguete, and half by Felipe de Borgoña, in 1543. the old stall ends are picturesque in outline, very large, and covered with tracery, panels, and carvings, with monkeys and other animals sitting on them. The upper range of stalls is raised by four steps, so that between the elbows of the lower stalls and the desk above there are spaces which are filled in with a magnificent series of bas-reliefs illustrating the various incidents of the conquest of Granada. They were executed whilst all the subjects depicted in them must have been fresh in the minds of the people, and they are full of picturesque vigour and character. Their effect is in marked contrast to the heavy dull Paganism of the sculptures by Berruguete.
[Again, Street has no appreciation of Renaissance or later art; the Berruguete sculptures are not at all bad.]
In the centre of the Coro stands the great Eagle, a magnificent work in brass. The enormous bird, with outstretched wings, is fighting a dragon which struggles between its feet; its eyes are large red stones, and it stands upon a canopied, buttressed and pinnacled pedestal, crowded with statues, among which are those of the twelve apostles. Six lions couchant carry the whole on their backs, and serve to complete the family likeness to other brass eagles, of which, however, this is, I think, by far the most grandiose I have ever seen.