Part 17 (1/2)

My notice of these various works has been, as it were, only the preface to the real glory of Toledo; for interesting and unique as some of them, and strange and novel as all of them are, there is a higher value and a greater charm about the n.o.ble metropolitan church of Spain than about any of them: a charm not due only to its religious and historical a.s.sociations, but resulting just as much from its own intrinsic beauty as an example of the pure vigorous Gothic of the thirteenth century, such as when I left France on my first Spanish journey I supposed I should not see again till my eyes rested once more on Chartres, Notre Dame, Paris, or Amiens! Here, however, 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.[225] They converted it into a mosque, and in course of time enlarged and adorned it greatly. At the capitulation to Alonso 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 the king, took it forcibly from them and had it consecrated as their cathedral.[226] Of this building nothing remains. The first stone of the new cathedral was laid with great ceremony by the king Don Fernando III., a.s.sisted by the Archbishop, on the 14th of August, A.D. 1227;[227] 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.

The cathedral is built east and west, ”according to the universal tradition of the Church,” says Blas Ortiz, forgetting apparently that this is no tradition of the Roman Church. I think it is always attended to in Spain, save in cities like Barcelona, where the commercial intercourse with Italy perhaps introduced the Italian tradition. The feeling about the Orientation of churches was stronger among the English and Germans than anywhere else, and possibly the Spanish tradition dates from the time of the Visigothic kings.

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, which I copy from Blas Ortiz:--

”Aqui: jacet: Petrus Petri: magister Eclesia: Scte: Marie: Toletani: fama: Per exemplum: pro more: huic: bona: Crescit: qui presens: templum: construxit: Et hic quiescit: quod: quia: tan: mire: Fecit: vili: sentiat: ire: ante: Dei: Vultum: pro: quo: nil: restat: inultum: Et sibi: sis: merce: qui solus: cuncta: Coherce: obiit: x dias de Novembris: Era: de M: et CCCXXVIII (A.D. 1290).”

I did not see this inscription, and am unable to say, therefore, whether it is original; but I believe there is little doubt of this.[228] I should have much more doubt as to the nationality of the architect. 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, as I have said before, 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 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 circ.u.mstance 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, as has been said before, to act as architects for Christian buildings whether secular or ecclesiastical, and, indeed, to monopolize all the science and art of the country which they no longer ruled. In such a state of things, I can imagine nothing more natural than that, though the Toledans may have been well content to employ Mahomedan art in their ordinary works, yet, when it came to be a question of rebuilding their cathedral on a scale vaster than anything which had as yet been attempted, they would be anxious to adopt some distinctly Christian form of art; and, lacking entirely any school of their own, would be more likely to secure the services of a Frenchman than of any one else; whilst the French archbishop, who at the time occupied the see, would be of all men the least likely to sympathise with Moresque work, and the most anxious to employ a French artist. But, however this may have been, the church is thoroughly French in its ground-plan and equally French in all its details[229] for some height from the ground; and 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, and not to such an extent as to be recognized as Moresque anywhere else but here in the close neighbourhood of so much which suggests the probability of its being so. 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. It is just what we see at the present day, and we owe an incidental debt of grat.i.tude to this old architect for showing us that in the thirteenth century, just as much as in the nineteenth, it was possible for an artist to believe in the fitness and religiousness of one style as contrasted with another, and steadily to ignore the fantastic conceits of the vernacular architecture of the day and place in favour of that which he knew to be purer and truer, more lovely and more symbolical.

From A.D. 1290, the date of the death of the first architect, to A.D.

1425, I have not met with the name of any architect of this cathedral; but from that year to the end of the last century the complete list is known and published,[230] and contains of course many well-known names.

The plan of the cathedral is set out on an enormous scale, as will be seen by the table of comparative dimensions which I give below, as well as by comparison with the other plans in this volume.[231] In width it is scarcely exceeded by any church of its age, Milan and Seville cathedrals--neither of them possessing any other great claim to respect--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 b.u.t.tresses in its outer wall. Two western towers were to have been erected beyond the west ends of the outer aisles;[232] and there were grand entrances in each transept, and three doorways at the west end. The great cloister on the north side, and all the chapels throughout (save two or three of the small chapels already mentioned, which still remain in the apse), are later additions. 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 n.o.ble church that is so magnificent, there being very little indeed that is either attractive or interesting on the exterior. There is absolutely no good general view to be had of it; for a network of narrow winding lanes encompa.s.ses the building on all sides, leaving no open s.p.a.ce anywhere, save at the west end; and here the exterior has been so much altered as to deprive the view of its value. I had some difficulty in mounting to the roof, the canon in authority sternly and rudely refusing me permission; but as the sacristan considered that I had done my duty in asking, and that the canon had exceeded his in refusing, in the end he took me everywhere. We ascended by a staircase in the archbishop's palace, which leads by a gallery thrown over the road to the upper cloister. This extends above the whole of the great cloister, and has a timber roof carried on stone shafts, which appear by their mouldings to be of the fifteenth century. This upper cloister is entirely surrounded by houses occupied, some by clergy, and some by the servants of the church, and where little choristers in red _capotes_ and white laced albs run about playing in their spare moments. Nothing that I have met with in Spain exceeds the intolerable stench which everywhere pervades these ecclesiastical tenements! But the look-out is rather pleasant, for the cloister court is planted thickly with fine shrubs and trees which shoot up as high as the top of the walls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Stone Roof of Outer Aisle and Chapels, Toledo.]

The exterior of the church, seen from this point, is altogether in a great mess--no other word so well describes its state! So far as I could make it out, I think the original mode of roofing the church was as follows: the aisle next the nave was covered with a timber roof sloping down from the clerestory windows; whilst the outer aisle and the chapels beyond it were roofed with stone roofs laid to a flat pitch, and sloping down to a stone gutter between the two, which again carried the water east and west till it discharged in a pipe through each b.u.t.tress. In place of this, a gabled roof now covers both aisles with a gutter against the clerestory and overhanging eaves on the outside. The main roofs were probably steep and tiled; that of the choir appears to have been carried on stone columns or piers, in front of which was the parapet, so that there was a current of air throughout. In the apse I was able to see my way a little more clearly; for here the stone roofs of the chapels and outer aisle are still perfect, and most ingeniously contrived, as the accompanying diagram will explain. Here again I was unable to find out what was the original roof of the inner aisle; but it was possibly of stone like the others, though my impression on the spot was that it must have been of wood, and covered with tiles. The diagram shows the roof over one of the circular and two of the square chapels of the apse, and the three corresponding bays of the outer choir aisle. The triangular bays and square chapels have stone roofs sloping down to a gutter between them; whilst the bay between them had a square roof sloping slightly all ways, and over the outer chapel a roof sloping back to the same gutter. The water is all carried away by stone channel-drains to the outside of the walls. The whole of this contrivance is now obscured by an extraordinary jumble of tiled roofs one over the other, added, I suppose, from time to time as the original roof required repair.[233] There are double flying-b.u.t.tresses wherever there are transverse arches in the groining. These were altered in the fifteenth century by the addition of a fringe of cusping on the edge of their copings, which of course spoilt their effect, though this is not of much consequence now, as they are never seen. The nave also has double flying-b.u.t.tresses; and its clerestory and triforium were thrown into one, and large windows inserted, in the fourteenth century in place of the original work. The only portion of the original external walls of the aisle that I could see was on the south side of the choir. Here in the apse chapels there are good and rather wide lancet-windows with engaged shafts in the jambs, well moulded, and labels adorned with dog-tooth. The old termination of the b.u.t.tresses seems to be everywhere destroyed. The flying-b.u.t.tresses in the apse were finely managed. Owing to the arrangement of the plan two flying-b.u.t.tresses support each of the main piers, and they are double in height. Their arches are moulded with a very bold roll-moulding, with a smaller one on either side, and the piers which receive them are faced with coupled shafts with carved capitals. The arrangement of the b.u.t.tresses follows exactly (and of necessity) the planning of the princ.i.p.al transverse arches of the groining. From each angle of the apse there are two flying-b.u.t.tresses; these each abut against a pinnacle, which is again supported by two diverging flying-b.u.t.tresses. It might be expected that the effect would be confused, as it is in the somewhat similar plan of the chevet of Le Mans; but here the b.u.t.tresses and pinnacles seem to have been less prominent, and therefore to have interfered less with the general outline of the church which they support. The pinnacles to the b.u.t.tresses of the central apse are tolerably perfect, but they appear to be not earlier than the fifteenth century. Those of the intermediate aisle are all destroyed, but many of those in the outer aisle still remain. The chapel of San Ildefonso, too, beyond the chevet, retains its pinnacles and parapets; and behind these rises a flat-pitched tiled roof, which, as everywhere else throughout the cathedral, has the air of being a modern subst.i.tute for the old roof: undoubtedly the whole work wants steep roofs to make it equal in effect to the French churches from which it was derived, and in which this feature is usually so marked.

The external mouldings of the windows in this part of the church are very good, and of the best early-pointed work; among others I saw that the external label of the rose-window in the north transept is filled with quaint crockets formed of dogs' heads projecting from the hollow member of the moulding.

All these remains of the original design of the early church can only be seen by ascending to the roofs; and as they ill.u.s.trate the most interesting portion of the whole work, I have taken them first in order.

It is now time to take the rest of the fabric in hand; and for this purpose it will be necessary to confine myself henceforth almost entirely to the interior. The doorways will be mentioned further on, because they are all additions to, and not coeval with, the original fabric; and, similarly, the window-traceries--except in the case of one or two of the apse windows, and the openings of the triforium and clerestory of the choir--are none of them original.

[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 30.

TOLEDO CATHEDRAL. p. 241.

INTERIOR OF TRANSEPT, &c., LOOKING NORTH-WEST.]

The first view of the interior is very impressive. The entrance most used is that to which the narrow, picturesque, and steep Calle de la Chapineria leads--that of the north transept. The buildings on the east side of the cloister rise on the right hand, and chief among them the fine fifteenth-century chapel of San Pedro, which, in entire contempt of all rules as to orientation, runs north and south, and opens into the aisle of the church by a sumptuous archway. Near the end of this chapel an old and very lofty iron _grille_ crosses the road; and pa.s.sing through this, and by the group of beggars ever cl.u.s.tered round it, the fine fourteenth-century north doorway, rich in sculpture, is pa.s.sed, and the transept is reached. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.ble, and open, I think, to but one criticism, viz., 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 ordinary 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.

If my readers will refer to the engraving of the ground-plan, they will be struck by the extreme simplicity and uniformity of the original outline of the 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 recognized on the ground-plan. The aim of the great French architects of the period was to reduce their work to an almost cla.s.sic simplicity and uniformity; and their ambition was evidently shared by the architect who presided over the erection of this Cathedral at Toledo.

Let us now examine with some minuteness the arrangement of the plan of the chevet. This is rightly the first point to be considered; for this is always the keynote, so to speak, of the whole scheme of such a church; and it is here that the surest evidence is afforded of what I believe to be the foreign origin of the design; for not even in details is there anything by which it is more easy in some cases to trace the origin of an old church than in the general scheme of the ground-plan; and in large churches the plan of the chevet is that which regulates every other part. To this part therefore I must now address myself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Diagrams of Vaulting.]

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the ingenuity of the greatest French architects--the greatest school perhaps the world has ever seen--was taxed to the utmost to devise means for obviating all the difficulties attendant on the plan of an apse with an aisle or aisles continued round it.[234] The arrangement of the central vault is easy enough; but the great flying-b.u.t.tresses which support this have to be carried in part on the columns which form the divisions of the aisles surrounding the apse. From the centre of the apse, therefore, a number of lines drawn through its angles represent the lines of the flying-b.u.t.tresses, and mark the position for the outer orders of columns. These lines diverge so rapidly from each other that the compartments enclosed within them become extremely irregular in their outline; and this renders it very difficult to cover them with vaults which shall look thoroughly well, and in which the arched ribs shall not be crippled or irregular in their lines. The French architects had from the first realized the necessity for making the diagonal vaulting rib a semi-circle. They saw that the line thus obtained was a continuous line of the utmost value, leading the eye on in succession from one bay of vaulting to another without any interruption--gradually from one end of the vastest vault to the other. Whenever this form is given up the effect of vaulting is half destroyed; and it matters not whether we turn to the domical pointed vaults of the Angevine architects, or the vaults of some of our own cathedrals, with their pointed diagonal ribs, we shall at once see how inferior they are to the old French mode.[235] In these unequal vaulting bays in the apse it was impossible to make a straight diagonal rib a semi-circle, for then (I) the highest part of the vault would be higher than the intersection of the ribs, and the connexion of the intersection with the highest part of the transverse arch would be extremely bad, and all but unmanageable. To get over this difficulty, we find the architect of Bourges (A.D. 1230) planning his diagonal ribs on a curve (II); whilst at Chartres (A.D. 1220) the architect planned this rib on a broken line (III). The architect of the choir of Le Mans (just later in date than Chartres--circa A.D. 1230) improved enormously upon what his brethren had done by the introduction of a triangular compartment in the outer aisle, which enabled him to make the vaulting bays between them nearly square, and to obtain a light between each of the chapels of the apse, which vastly increased its beauty. The architect of Bourges had indeed introduced triangular-vaulting compartments in his outer aisle, but so clumsily, that he had increased rather than diminished the difficulty with which he was dealing; and the earlier architect of Notre Dame, Paris (A.D.

1170), had ingeniously planned almost all the vaults of his apse in triangular compartments, with great gain over the systems of those who had preceded him; but his plan had the grave defect of placing a column behind the eastern central arch of the apse, and so stopping all view eastward from the choir. It remained for the architect of Toledo Cathedral to resolve all these difficulties by a disposition of his columns so ingenious and so admirable as to be certainly beyond all praise. His plan looks indeed simple and very obvious; yet how many attempts had been made in vain to accomplish what he did; and how completely has he not overcome all his contemporaries! I hold it to be in the highest degree improbable that anyone could have devised this improvement who had not been actively engaged in the study of the French Cathedrals.[236] No churches exist in Spain which in the least degree lead up to the solution of the problems involved. And indeed almost at the same time that this church was commenced, we have Spaniards at work at other churches, as, _e.g._, at Lerida and Tarragona, in an entirely different and in a much more primitive style. The architect therefore--if he was a Spaniard--was one who had spent much time upon French buildings; but was much more probably a Frenchman, who also, unless I am mistaken, brought with him some of his countrymen to direct the sculpture of the capitals, &c., which, as well as the mouldings, are thoroughly good, pure examples of French Gothic of the date.

The engraving of the plan will best explain the beauty of the arrangement of the chevet.[237] There are twice as many columns between the aisles as 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 columns 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. Very few of these remain unaltered; but the sketch and plan which I give will show what their character was. The a.n.a.logy of the small chapels in the chevets of Paris, Bourges, and Chartres, would seem to prove that originally there was no larger chapel at the east end, and the similar arrangement of the vaulting compartments throughout seems to confirm this view.

In the eastern portion of the church a good deal of dog-tooth enrichment is introduced. I have noticed the same fact in the account of Burgos Cathedral, and suggested that it was imported there from Anjou. Here, however, the architect clearly knew not much, if anything, of Angevine buildings, and probably borrowed the dog-tooth from Burgos, though of the other peculiarities of detail in that church I see no trace.