Part 16 (1/2)
The buildings to be studied here are of singular interest, inasmuch as they reflect in a great degree the striking history of the city itself, as well as of the kingdom of which it was so long the capital. There is no doubt that there was a cathedral, as well as some churches,[205] here before the conquest of this part of Spain, in A.D. 711, by the Moors; and in the course of the long period of nearly four centuries during which the Mahomedan rule lasted, many buildings were erected, and a Moorish population was firmly planted, which, when Alonso VI. regained the city in 1085, was still protected, and continued to live in it as before. The Moors had, indeed, set an example of toleration[206] worthy of imitation by their Christian conquerors; for though it is true that they converted the old cathedral into their princ.i.p.al mosque, they still allowed the Christians to celebrate their services in some other churches[207] which existed at the time of the Conquest; and during the greater part of the Christian rule, their tolerant example was so far followed, that the Moors seem to have enjoyed the same freedom, and to have lived there unmolested, whilst they built everywhere, and acted, in fact, as architects, in the old city, not only for themselves, but also for the Christians and the Jews, down to the establishment of the Inquisition. It is a very remarkable fact, indeed, that with one grand exception nearly all the buildings of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, which are to be seen here, are more or less Moorish in their character;[208] and though the cathedral, which is the one exception, is an example of thoroughly pure Gothic work almost from first to last, there never seems to have been any other attempt to imitate the Christian architectural idea of which it was so grand an exponent. I have purposely avoided going to those parts of Spain in which the Moors were undisputed masters during the middle ages; but here it is impossible to dismiss what they did without proper notice, seeing that, after Granada and Cordoba, perhaps nowhere is there so much to be seen of their work as in Toledo.
The buildings to be examined will be best described under certain heads, reserving the cathedral for the last, because some of the Moorish buildings are the oldest in the city, and these lead naturally on to the later works of the same cla.s.s. The order in which I shall attempt to take them will be therefore as follows:--
I. The Moorish mosque; II. The Jewish synagogues; III. The Moorish houses; IV. The Moorish work in churches; V. The gateways, walls, and bridges; VI. The cathedral and other examples of Christian art.
There are, indeed, some works anterior to the rule of the Moors, for below the walls, in the _vega_, are said to be some slight remains of a Roman amphitheatre;[209] in addition to which there are still some fragments of work _possibly_ Visigothic, and anterior therefore to the Moorish Conquest of 711. These are confined to a few capitals which have some appearance of having been re-used by the Moors in their own constructions, such _e.g._ as the capitals of the Mosque now called the ”Cristo de la Luz,” and those of the arcades on either side of the church of San Roman, together with some fragments preserved in the court of the hospital of Sta. Cruz. They are very rudely sculptured, and bear so slight a resemblance to the early Romanesque work of the same period, that it is difficult, I think, to decide positively as to their age. It is certain, however, that the earliest distinctly Moorish capitals are entirely unlike them in their character, and quite original in their conception; and it is, of course, very possible that the Moors, pressed by the necessity of the case, would, after their conquest, not only have retained some of the existing buildings, but also have re-used the best of their materials in their new works.
[Ill.u.s.tration: S. Cristo de la Luz, Toledo.]
The earliest of the distinctly Moorish buildings is a little mosque--now called the church of ”Cristo de la Luz”--which was standing at the time of the entrance of Don Alonso VI. into the city, on Sunday, May 25, 1085. He entered by the old Puerta de Visagra, and, turning into this the first mosque on his road, ordered ma.s.s to be said, and hung up his s.h.i.+eld there before he went further. No doubt the nave of the building is still very much in the state in which he found it; it is very small, only 21 ft. 7 in. by 20 ft. 2 in., and this s.p.a.ce is subdivided into nine compartments by four very low circular columns, which are about a foot in diameter. Their capitals are some of those of which I have just spoken; they are all different, and, it seemed to me, more like Moorish work than the other capitals of the same cla.s.s at San Roman and Sta. Cruz. The arches, of which four spring from each capital, are all of the round horseshoe form; above them is a string-course, and all the intermediate walls are carried up to the same height as the main walls. They are all pierced above the arches with arcades of varied design, generally cusped in very Moorish fas.h.i.+on, and supported on shafts; and above these each of the nine divisions is crowned with a little vault, formed by intersecting cusped ribs, thrown in the most fantastic way across each other, and varied in each compartment. The scale of the whole work is so diminutive that it is difficult, no doubt, to understand how so much is done in so small a s.p.a.ce; but, looking to the early date of the work, it is impossible not to feel very great respect for the workmen who built it, and for the ingenious intricacy which has made their work look so much larger and more important than it really is.[210] It is, indeed, an admirable instance of the skill and dexterity in design which seem to have marked the Moors so honourably from the first, and which must have made them, as far as one can judge, in every respect but their faith so much the superiors of their Christian contemporaries. An apse has been added for the altar, but this is evidently a much later addition to the old mosque. The exterior face of the walls is built of brick and rough stone. The lower part of the side wall being arcaded with three round arches, within the centre of which is a round horseshoe arch for a doorway; above is a continuous sunk arcade of cusped arches, within which are window openings with round horseshoe heads. The lower part of the walls is built with single courses of brick, alternating with rough stonework; the piers and arches of brick, with projecting labels and strings also of unmoulded brick.
The arches of the upper windows are built with red and green bricks alternated. The horseshoe arches here are built in the usual Moorish fas.h.i.+on, the lower part of the arch being constructed with bricks laid horizontally, and cut at the edge to the required curve; and about halfway round the arch they are cut back to receive the arch, which is there commenced. In the same way the cinquefoiled arches of the upper arcade have their lowest cusps formed by the stone abacus, the intermediate cusps by bricks laid horizontally and cut at the edge, and the upper central cusp alone has any of its masonry constructed as an arch.
The upper stage of the mosque called De las Tornerias is Moorish work of the same plan as the Cristo de la Luz; but I am much inclined to doubt whether it is equally ancient. The rosettes cut in the vaults, and the cusped openings, give this impression, and the vaults are quadripart.i.te and domical in section, the centres of the nine small bays of vaulting being raised higher than the others, and having two parallel ribs crossing each other both ways, in the way I have already noticed in the Chapter-house at Salamanca, and the Templars' Church at Segovia.
There is, so far as I know, no other mosque in the city so little altered as these; but among the churches some are said to have been first of all built for mosques. San Roman is one of these. It was converted into a parish church at the end of the eleventh century,[211]
and the column and arches between the nave and aisles are probably of this date. The arches are of the horseshoe form, and the capitals are, I think, commonly quoted as some of the earlier works re-used by the Moors. But I very much doubt whether their style justifies my attributing to them any date earlier than the eleventh century. The church was not consecrated until June 20th, 1221, but there can be no doubt that it was built before this date. The n.o.ble steeple is one of the works built by Moorish architects for Christian use, and it will be better, perhaps, to reserve it for description with other works of the same cla.s.s.
Of the two synagogues the older is that which was founded in the twelfth century, but seized in A.D. 1405 by the Toledans--instigated by the preaching of San Vicente Ferrer--and dedicated as a church under the name of Sta. Maria la Blanca.[212] The modernized exterior is of no interest, but the interior is fairly preserved by the zeal, I believe, of some Spanish antiquaries, having long been disused as a church. In plan it consists of a nave, with two aisles on either side. A quasi-chancel was formed at the east end (in the sixteenth century apparently) by the prolongation of the central compartment or nave beyond the aisles, and the intermediate aisles were also lengthened to a less extent at the same time. There are eight horseshoe arches rising from octagonal columns in each of the arcades, and the whole of them, as well as their capitals, are executed in brick, covered with plaster. The capitals are exceedingly elaborate, but very slightly varied in pattern: they have but little connexion with any of the usual types of Byzantine or Romanesque capitals, though they have rather more, perhaps, of the delicate intricacy of the former than of any of the features of the latter, and they are, I imagine, very much later than the original capitals which they overlay. All the Moorish decorative work seems to have been executed in the same way in plaster. This was of very fine quality, and was evidently cut and carved as if it had been stone, and seldom, if ever, I think, stamped or moulded, according to the mistaken practice of the present day. The consequence is that there is endless variety of design everywhere, and--wherever it was desired--any amount of undercutting. The spandrels above the arches are filled in with arabesque patterns, and there is a cusped wall arcade below the roof; but almost all of this is evidently of much later date than the original foundation, as the patterns are all of that large cla.s.s of Moorish devices which, though they retain many of their old peculiarities, borrow largely at the same time from the traceries and cusping of late Gothic work. Unfortunately in such work the material affords so small an a.s.sistance in the detection of alterations, that it requires the exercise of considerable caution to ascertain their exact limits; and in Toledo, as in most places, people seem always disposed to claim the highest possible antiquity in all cases, seldom allowing anything to have been done by the Moors after the restoration of the Christian rule, though, in fact, the exact converse of this would be nearer the truth.
The roof has coupled tie beams--placed a very slight distance apart--an arrangement of which the Moorish carpenters seem to have been always very fond. The pavement is very good, but must, I imagine, be of about the date of the conversion of the synagogue into a church. It is divided into compartments by border tiles, laid down the length of the church on either side of the columns. The s.p.a.ces between these are filled in with a rich diaper of encaustic and plain red tiles, whilst the general area between these richer bands is paved with large red, relieved by an occasional encaustic tile. The latter have patterns in white, dark blue, and yellow, and in all cases they are remarkable for the beautiful inequality both of the colours and of the surface of the tiles. Both colour and material are in themselves better than the work of our tile-manufacturers at the present day, and ill.u.s.trate very well the difference between hand-work and machine-work, which I have already noticed in comparing the old and new modes of dealing with plaster. The Moorish tiles are very commonly seen in Toledo, and were used both for flooring and inlaying walls, and in some cases for the covering of roofs. This synagogue of Sta. Maria la Blanca is on the whole disappointing. I went to it expecting to see a building of the ninth or tenth century, and found instead a fabric possibly of this age, but in which--thanks to the plasterers of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries--nothing of the original building but the octagonal columns and the simple form of the round horseshoe arches is still visible.
Nevertheless it well deserves examination, and a more accurate knowledge of the detail of Moorish work would, I dare say, have enabled me to separate more clearly the work of the original church from the additions with which it has been overlaid.
[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 29.
STA. MARIA LA BLANCA, TOLEDO. p. 318.
INTERIOR, LOOKING EAST.]
The other synagogue is now converted into the church called ”del Transito,”[213] and about the date of this there is no doubt. It was erected by Samuel Levi,[214] a rich Jew, who held the office of treasurer to Pedro the Cruel, and was completed in A.D. 1366; but it did not long retain its first purpose, the Jews having been expelled the kingdom in 1492,[215] and this synagogue having then been given by Ferdinand and Isabella to the order of Calatrava.
The building is a simple parallelogram, 31 feet 5 inches wide, by 76 feet in length. The lower portion of the side walls is quite unornamented for 20 or 25 feet in height; but above this is very richly adorned with plaster-work. There is, first, a broad band of foliage, with Hebrew inscriptions above and below it, and above this on each side an arcade of nineteen arches, springing from coupled shafts, eight of its divisions being pierced and filled with very elaborate lattice-work.
The end wall (now the altar end) has a very slight recess in the centre, and the whole of it to within some seven feet of the floor is covered with rich patterns, inscriptions, and coats of arms, whilst above the arcade is continued on from the side walls in eight divisions. The arcades are all cusped in the usual Moorish fas.h.i.+on, the outline of the cusps being horseshoe, but without an enclosing arch. The end opposite to the altar has two windows pierced in the upper arcade, and three windows below breaking up into the band of foliage and inscriptions.
The whole is now whitewashed, and though the detail is all fantastic and overdone, the effect is nevertheless fine, owing to the great height of the walls and to the contrast between the excessive enrichment of their upper and the plainness of their lower part.
The Retablo over the princ.i.p.al altar is a work of the end of the fifteenth century, but not of remarkable merit, having paintings of Scripture subjects under carved canopies; there is another of the same cla.s.s against the north wall. The roof is a grand example of the Moorish ”_artesinado_”[216] work. It has coupled tie-beams, and a deep cornice, which is carried boldly across the angles, so as to give polygonal ends to the roof, which is hipped at the ends, the rafters sloping equally on all four sides. These rafters are only introduced to improve the appearance of, and--it may be--the possibility of hearing what was read in, the synagogue. The pitch of the real roof is very flat, and where a flat roof is absolutely necessary, this kind of ceiling is undoubtedly very effective. At some height above the plate the sloping rafters are stopped by a flat ceiling below the collar rafters, panelled all over in the ingeniously intricate geometrical figures of which the Moorish architects were so fond, and in the device of which they were always only too ingenious. The rafters as well as the tie-beams are used in pairs placed close to each other, and the s.p.a.ce between them is divided into panels by horizontal pieces at short intervals, with patterns sunk in the panels. There is a western gallery, and some seats made of glazed encaustic tiles on each side of the sanctuary.
The exterior has arcades answering to those of the interior: it is built mainly of brick, with occasional bands of rough stonework. The bricks are 11 in. by 7 in. by 1 in. in size, and are used with a mortar joint 1 in. in thickness.
It is impossible to deny the grandeur of the internal effect of this room. The details are entirely unlike what I should wish to see repeated; but the proportions, the contrasted simplicity and intricacy of the lower and upper part of the walls, the admission of all the light from above, and the magnificence of the roof, might all be emulated in a Gothic building, and I have seen few rooms which have appeared to me to be more suggestive of the right form and treatment for a picture gallery or saloon for any state purpose.
The two synagogues I have described stand now in the most deserted and melancholy part of Toledo. The old _Juderia_, or Jews' quarter, is decayed and abandoned. The Jews, of course, are all expelled from it, and the Christians seem to have avoided their quarter as though there were a curse on it. Samuel Levi, the founder of El Transito, built for himself a magnificent palace near it, of which, I believe, some part still exists, though I did not see it.
The Moorish houses, which I must now shortly describe, appear to be very numerous and of all dates, from the twelfth century down to the conquest of Granada; and it seemed to me that up to this time almost _all_ the houses must have been the work of Moorish architects. The Jews and Moors were both very numerous bodies--so much so that Toledo is charged by an old writer with having had in it none others,--and there is nothing to show that the Christians ever employed any other architects. The common type of house is one which is completely Moorish in plan, even when the details are not so. It almost always had a long dark entrance pa.s.sage, with an outer door to the street, studded thickly with nails of the most exaggerated size, and furnished with great knockers. The outer room or pa.s.sage--ceiled with open timbers, boarded or panelled between--opens into the _patio_ or central court, over which in hot weather an awning or curtain could be hung. This _patio_ is surrounded by open pa.s.sages on all sides, supported by wooden posts, or sometimes on granite columns, and the staircase to the upper floors rises from one angle of it. The woodwork is generally well wrought with moulded ends to the joists and moulded plates. Here are usually one or two wells, the court having been the impluvium where all the water from the roof was collected in a large cistern below the pavement, Toledo is still a clean city, and Ponz,[217]
defending its credit from an attack by an Italian writer, maintains that the women are so clean that they wash the brick-floors of their houses as often as they do their dishes!
[Ill.u.s.tration: Knocker and Nails on Door, Toledo.]
This is the type of house to be seen probably in every street in the city; but here and there are still left other houses of distinctly Moorish architecture, and of extreme magnificence in their adornment, Looking to the frail material of all these enrichments, the wonder is, not that so few houses remain, but rather that anything at all exists; and even in their present forlorn state there is something very interesting in these houses and rooms and decorations, so utterly unlike anything to which a northern eye is ever accustomed at home. The examples of this cla.s.s which I saw seemed to be all of the same date--either of the fourteenth or fifteenth century--and though full of variety in their detail, extremely similar in their general effect. A room in the Casa de Mesa is the finest I saw, and I suppose that even in the South of Spain there are few better examples of its cla.s.s. Its dimensions are 20 ft. 3 in. in width, by about 55 ft. in length and 34 ft. in height. The walls are lined at the base with very good encaustic tiles, rising nearly 4 ft. from the floor; above this line they are plain up to the cornice, save where the elaborately-decorated entrance archway--an uncusped arch, set in a frame, as it were, of the most fantastic and luxuriant foliage, arcading, and tracery--occupies a considerable part of one of the side walls. A very deep cornice of but slight projection, with a band of enrichment below it, surrounds the room, and this is interrupted by the doorway at the side, and by a small two-light window at one end. This window of two lights, with a cusped round-arched head to each light and some delicate tracery above, is framed in a broad border of tracery work, copied from the latest Gothic panelling, so that the whole design is a complete mixture of Gothic and Moorish detail. The ceiling is in its old state and of the usual _artesinado_ description. Its section is that of a lofty-pointed arch, truncated at the top, so as to give one panel in width flat, the rest being all on the curve. The roof is hipped at both ends and panelled throughout, each panel being filled in with a most ingenious star-like pattern, of the kind which one so commonly sees in Moorish work. The patterns are formed by ribs (square in section) of dark wood, with a white line along the centre of the soffeit of each. The sides of the ribs are painted red, and the recessed panels have lines of white beads painted at their edges, and in the centre an arabesque on a dark blue ground. The colours are so arranged as to mark out as distinctly as possible the squares and patterns into which it is divided, and the sinking of some panels below the others allows the same pattern to be used for borders and grounds with very varied effect. The reds are rather crimson in tone, and the blues very dark. The plaster enrichments on the walls seemed, as far as I could make out, to have been originally left white, with the square edges of the plaster painted red; but I cannot speak quite positively on this point.
A room in a garden behind the house No. 6, in the Calle la Plata, is an almost equally good example, though on a smaller scale, and with a flat ceiling. The great entrance archway in the middle of one side is fringed with a crowd of small cusps, but otherwise it is treated very much in the same way as the door in the Casa de Mesa. The cornice here also is very deep, and the band of plaster enrichment below it is filled with Gothic geometrical tracery patterns. The ceiling is particularly good, being diapered at regular intervals with figures formed by two squares set across each other, with an octagonal cell sunk in the centre of each. This room is about 36 ft. long by 11 ft. 8 in. wide, and 11 ft. 5 in. high to the band below the cornice, and a little over 16 ft. in total height.