Zamora cathedral, Spain
An excerpt from GE Street on the Spanish cathedrals
Of the history of Zamora cathedral I know but little. Here, as elsewhere at the same time, a Frenchman, Bernardo, a Benedictine, was bishop from 1125 to 1149, having been appointed through the influence of, and consecrated by, his namesake, the French archbishop of Toledo. Davila says that the cathedral was built by a subsequent bishop, Don Estevan, 'by order and at the cost of the Emperor Don Alonso VII, as is proved by some lines which were in this church'. These lines give the date of 1174 as that of the completion of the work, and it tallies fairly with the general character of much of the building; for though it is true that everywhere the main arches are pointed, much of the detail is undoubtedly such as to suggest as early a date as that here given.
The cathedral is on a small scale, and the most important portion of the ground-plan – the choir – having been rebuilt, it has lost much of its interest. It consists now of a nave and aisles of four bays, shallow transepts, with a dome over the crossing, a short choir with an apse of seven sides, and two choir aisles with square east ends. At the west end are chapels added beyond the church... At the west end of the north aisle is an unusually large and fine Romanesque steeple – the finest example of the kind I have seen in Spain – and erected, no doubt, during the time of the one of the French bishops already referred to.
The nave piers are very bold and vigorous in design; they are planned with triple shafts on each face of a square core, and have square caps and bases. The arches are very simple, but pointed. The massiveness of the piers is very remarkable, for through the clear width of the nave is only about 23 feet, the columns are not less than seven feet across. The nave is groined in square, the aisles in oblong compartments. There are no groining ribs in the aisles, though the vaults are quadripartite, and in the transepts there are pointed waggon roofs. The central dome is carried on pendentives, similar to those in the old cathedral at Salamanca. It has an arcaded and pierced stage above the pendentives, and then a dome or vault, divided into sixteen compartments by ribs of bold section, the filling in between which is a succession of small cylindrical vaults, so that the construction inside looks rather complicated. .. It will be seen that in many respects it is singularly like that at Salamanca. The circular angle turrets, the dormers on the cardinal sides, are similar in idea, though ruder and heavier here than there; here, too, the outline of the dome is more thoroughly domical. All the courses of stone in the dome seem to have been scalloped at the edges.