Chapter 6

The plan is most curious, and on account of its irregularity as well as certain inconsistencies, it is difficult to guess how far it was originally conceived in its present form, or what alterations were made in the earlier centuries. Some changes must have been made in its vaulting. The chevet or Capilla Mayor, which at first very properly contained the choir, is surrounded by a double ambulatory, outside of which the thick walls are pierced by nine apsidal chapels. It is probable that these were originally constructed by the engineers to lighten the enormous bulk of the outer masonry. They are not quite semicircles in plan, and are vaulted in various simple ways. Where ribs occur, they meet in the key of the arch separating chapel from ambulatory. The piers round the apse itself are alternately monocylindrical and composite; the intermediate ones, subdividing unequally the "girola," are lofty, slender columns, while those of the exterior are polygonal in plan, with shafts against their faces. Some of the caps are of the best Romanesque types, and composed of animals, birds, and leaves, while others, possibly substituted for the original ones, have a plain bell with the ornamentation crudely applied in color.

The Capilla Mayor has both triforium and clerestory of exquisite early work. Dog-tooth moldings ornament the archivolts. Mohammedan influence had asserted itself in the triforium, which is divided by slender shafts into two windows terminating in horseshoe arches, while the clerestory consists of broad, round, arched openings.

The construction and balance of the apse thrusts were doubtless originally of a somewhat different nature from what we find at present, as may easily be observed from the materials, the function and positions of the double flying buttresses. They may have been added as late as three centuries after the original fabric. Lamperez y Romea's observations in regard to this are most interesting:--

"We must observe in the two present orders of windows, that the lower was never built for lights and its construction with double columns forming a hollow space proves it a triforium. That it was actually so is further abundantly proved by several circumstances: first, by a parapet or wall which still exists below the actual roof and which follows the exterior polygonal line of the girola, as well as by some semi-Romanesque traceries which end in the wall of the Capilla Mayor, and finally, by a continuous row of supports existing in the thickness of the same wall below a gutter, separating the two orders of windows. These features, as well as the general arrangement of the openings, demonstrate that there was a triforium of Romanesque character, occupying the whole width of the girola, which furthermore was covered by a barrel vault. Above this came the great platform or projecting balcony, corresponding to the second defensive circuit. Military necessity explains this triforium; without it, there would be no need of a system of continuous counterthrusts to that of the vaults of the crossing. If we concede the existence of this triforium, various obscure points become clear."

The Capilla Mayor has four bays prior to reaching the pentagonal termination. The vaulting of the most easterly bay connects with that of the pentagon, thus leaving three remaining bays to vault; two form a sexpartite vault, and the third, nearest the transept, a quadripartite. All the intersections are met by bosses formed by gilded and spreading coats-of-arms. The ribs do not all carry properly down, two out of the six being merely met by the keystones of the arches between Capilla Mayor and ambulatory. The masonry of the vaulting is of a reddish stone, while that of the transepts and nave is yellow, laid in broad, white joints.

In various portions of the double ambulatory passage as well as some of the chapels, the fine, deep green and gold and blue Romanesque coloring may still be seen, giving a rich impression of the old barbaric splendor and gem-like richness so befitting the clothing of the style. Other portions, now bare, must surely all have been colored. The delicate, slender shafts, subdividing unequally the ambulatory, have really no carrying office, but were probably introduced to lessen the difficulty of vaulting the irregular compartments of such unequal sides. Gothic art was still in its infancy, and the splendid grasp of the vaulting difficulties and masterly solution of its problems exemplified in so many later ambulatories, had not as yet been reached. Here we have about the first fumbling attempt. The maestro is still fighting in the dark with unequal thrusts, sides and arches of different widths, and a desire to meet them all with something higher and lighter than the old continuous barrel vault. A step forward in the earnest effort toward higher development, such as we find here, deserves admiration. The profiles of the ribs are simple, undecorated and vigorous, as were all the earliest ones; in the chapels, or rather the exedras in the outer walls, the ribs do not meet in a common boss or keystone, its advantages not as yet being known to the builders. A good portion of the old roof-covering of the Cathedral, not only over the eastern end, but pretty generally throughout, has either been altered, or else the present covering conceals the original.

Thus it is easy to detect from the outside, if one stands at the northwestern angle of the church and looks down the northern face, that the upper masonry has been carried up by some three feet of brickwork, evidently of later addition, on top of which comes the present covering of terra-cotta tiles. The old roof-covering here of stone tiles, as also above the apse, rested directly on the inside vaults, naturally damaging them by its weight, and not giving full protection against the weather. The French slopes had in some instances been slavishly copied, but the steep roofs requisite in northern cathedrals were soon after abandoned, being unnecessary in the Spanish climate. Over the apse of Avila, there may still be found early thirteenth-century roofing, consisting of large stone flags laid in rows with intermediary grooves and channels, very much according to ancient established Roman and Byzantine traditions. Independent superstructure above the vault proper, to carry the outside covering, had not been introduced when this roofing was laid.

In its early days many a noted prelate and honored churchman was laid to rest within the holy precinct of the choir in front of the high altar or in the rough old sepulchres of the surrounding chapels. With the moving of the choir, and probably also a change in the church ceremonies, came a rearrangement of the apse and the Capilla Mayor's relation to the new rites.

The retablo back of the high altar, consisting of Plateresque ornament, belongs for the most part to the Renaissance. The Evangelists and church fathers are by Pedro Berruguete (not as great as his son, the sculptor Alfonso), Juan de Borgoña and Santos Cruz. In the centre, facing theambulatory behind, is a fine Renaissance tomb of the renowned Bishop Alfonso Tostada de Madrigal. He is kneeling in full episcopal robes, deeply absorbed either in writing or possibly reading the Scriptures. The workmanship on mitre and robe is as fine as the similar remarkable work in Burgos, while the enclosing rail is a splendid example of the blending of Gothic and Renaissance.

The glass in the apse windows is exceptionally rich and magnificently brilliant in its coloring. It was executed by Alberto Holando, one of the great Dutch glaziers of Burgos, who was given the entire contract in 1520 by Bishop Francisco Ruiz, a nephew of the great Cardinal Cisneros.

Such, in short, are the characteristics of the chevet of the Cathedral of Avila, constructed in an age when its builders must have worked in a spirit of hardy vigor with the trowel in one hand and the sword in the other. As we see it to-day, it imparts a feeling of mystery, and its oriental splendor is enhanced by the dim, religious light.

In entering the crossing, we step into the fullness of the Gothic triumph. The vaults have been thrown into the sky to the height of 130 feet. It is early Gothic work, with its many errors and consequent retracing of steps made in ignorance. The great arches that span the crossing north and south had taken too bold a leap and subsequently required the support of cross arches. The western windows and the great roses at the end of the transepts, with early heavy traceries, proved too daring and stone had to be substituted for glass in their apertures; the long row of nave windows have likewise been filled with masonry. Despite these and many similar penalties for rashness, the work is as dignified as it is admirable. Of course the proportions are all small in comparison with such later great Gothic churches as Leon and Burgos, the nave and transepts here being merely 28 to 30 feet wide, the aisles only 24 feet wide. Avila is but an awkward young peasant girl if compared with the queenly presence of her younger sisters. Nevertheless Avila is in true Spanish peasant costume, while Leon and Burgos are tricked out in borrowed finery. The nave is short and narrow, but that gives an impression of greater height, and the obscurity left by the forced substitution of stone for glass in the window spaces adds to the solemnity. The nave consists of five bays, the aisle on each side of it rising to about half its height. The golden groining is quadripartite, the ribs meeting in great colored bosses and pendents, added at periods of less simple taste. In the crossing alone, intermediary ribs have been added in the vaulting.

The walls of the transept underneath the great blind wheels to the north and south are broken by splendid windows, each with elaborate tracery (as also the eastern and western walls), heavy and strong, but finely designed. The glazing is glorious, light, warm, and intense. The walls of the nave, set back above the lowest arcade some eighteen inches, have triforium and clerestory, and above this again, they are filled quite up to the vaulting with elaborate tracery, possibly once foolhardily conceived to carry glass. Each bay has six arches in both triforium and clerestory, all of simple and early apertures. The glazing of the clerestory is white, excepting in one of the bays. In this single instance, a simple, geometric pattern of buff and blue stripes is of wonderfully harmonious and lovely color effect.

The shafts that separate nave from side aisles are still quite Romanesque in feeling,--of polygonal core faced by four columns and eight ribs. The capitals are very simple with no carving, but merely a gilded representation of leafage, while the base molds carry around all breaks of the pier. It may be coarse and crude in feeling and execution, certainly very far from the exquisite finish of Leon, nevertheless the infancy of an architectural style, like a child's, has the peculiar interest of what it holds in promise. Like Leon, the side aisles have double roofing, allowing the light to penetrate to the nave arcade and forming a double gallery running round the church.

Many of the bishops who were buried in the choir in its old location were, on its removal to the bay immediately west of the crossing, also moved and placed in the various chapels. The sepulchre of Bishop Sancho Davila is very fine. Like his predecessors, he was a fighting man. His epitaph reads as follows:--

"Here lies the noble cavalier Sancho Davila, Captain of the King Don Fernando and the Queen Doña Isabel, our sovereigns, and their alcaide of the castles of Carmona, son of Sancho Sanches, Lord of San Roman and of Villanueva, who died fighting like a good cavalier against the Moors in the capture of Alhama, which was taken by his valor on the 28th of February in the year 1490."

The pulpits on each side of the crossing, attached to the great piers, are, curiously enough, of iron, exquisitely wrought and gilded. The one on the side of the epistle is Gothic and the other Renaissance, the body of each of them bearing the arms of the Cathedral, the Agnus Dei, and the ever-present lions and castles. The rejas, closing off choir and Capilla Mayor in the customary manner, are heavy and ungainly. On the other hand, the trascoro, that often sadly blocks up the sweep of the nave, is unusually low and comparatively inconspicuous. It contains reliefs of the life of Christ, from the first half of the sixteenth century, by Juan Res and Luis Giraldo. The choir itself is so compact that it only occupies one bay. The chapter evidently was a modest one. The stalls are of elaborate Renaissance workmanship. The verger now in charge, with the voice of a hoarse crow, reads you the name of the carver as the Dutchman "Cornelis 1536."

Strange to say, there are no doors leading, as they logically should, into the centre of the arms of the transept. Through some perversity, altars have taken their place, while the northern and southern entrances have been pushed westward, opening into the first bays of the side aisles. The southern door leads to a vestibule, the sacristy with fine Gothic vaulting disfigured by later painting, a fine fifteenth-centurychapel and the cloisters. None of this can be seen from the front, as it is hidden by adjoining houses and a bare, pilastered wall crowned by a carved Renaissance balustrade. The galleries of the present cloisters are later Gothic work with Plateresque decorations and arches walled up.

Avila Cathedral is, as it were, a part and parcel of the history of Castile during the reigns of her early kings, the turbulent times when self-preservation was the only thought, any union of provinces far in the future, and a Spanish kingdom undreamed of. She was a great church in a small kingdom, in the empire she became insignificant. Much of her history is unknown, but in the days of her power, she was certainly associated with all great events in old Castile. Her influence grew with her emoluments and the ever-increasing body of ecclesiastical functionaries. In times of war, she became a fortress, and her bishop was no longer master of his house. The Captain-General took command of the bastions, as of those of the Alcazar, and soldiers took the place of priests in the galleries. She was the key to the city, and on her flat roofs the opposing armies closed in the final struggle for victory.

The Cathedral has, in fact, only an eastern and a northern elevation, the exterior to the west and south being hidden by the huge tower and the confused mass of chapels and choir which extend to the walls and houses.

The western entrance front is noble and dignified in its austere severity; probably as old as the clerestory of the nave, it is a grim sentinel from the first part of the fourteenth century. With the exception of the entrance, it speaks the Romanesque language, although its windows and some of its decoration are pointed. It is magnificent and impressive, very Spanish, and almost unique in the Peninsula. Four mighty buttresses subdivide the composition; between these is the entrance, and to the north and south are the towers which terminate the aisles.

The southern tower has never been finished. The northern is full of inspiration. It is broken at two stages by double windows, the upper ones of the belfry being crowned by pediments and surmounted by rich, sunk tracery. The piers terminate in hexagonal pinnacles, while the tower, as well as the rest of the front, is finished with a battlement. The later blocking up of this, as well as the superimposed roofing, is very evident and disturbing. All the angles of buttresses, of windows, arches, splays, and pyramids,--those also crowning the bulky piers that meet the flying buttresses,--are characteristically and uniquely decorated with an ornamentation of balls. It softens the hard lines, splashing the surface with infinite series of small, sharp shadows and making it sparkle with life and light. The angles recall the blunt, blue teeth of a saw.

The main entrance, as well as the first two bays of the naves underneath the towers, must originally have been of different construction from the present one. Inside the church, these bays are blocked off from nave and side aisles by walls, on top of which they communicate with each other as also with the eastern apse by galleries, probably all necessary for the defense of troops in the early days. Possibly a narthex terminated the nave back of the original entrance portal underneath the present vaulted compartment.

The main entrance door is indeed a strange apparition. In its whiteness between the sombre tints of the martial towers, it rises like a spectre in the winding-sheets of a later age. It is distressingly out of place and time in its dark framework.

"But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth, and some to honor, and some to dishonor."

The semicircular door is crowned by a profusely subdivided, Gothic archivolt and guarded by two scaly giants or wild men that look, with their raised clubs, as if they would beat the life out of any one who should try to enter the holy cavern. Saints Peter and Paul float on clouds in the spandrels. Above rises a sixteenth-century composition of masks and canopied niches. The Saviour naturally occupies the centre, flanked by the various saints that in times of peril protected the church of Avila: Saints Vincente, Sabina and Cristela, Saint Segundo and Santa Teresa. In the attic in front of a tremendous traceried cusp, with openings blocked by masonry, the ornamentation runs completely riot. Saint Michael, standing on top of a dejected and doubled-up dragon, looks down on figures that are crosses between respectable caryatides and disreputable mermaids. It is certainly as immaterial as unknown, when and by whom was perpetrated this degenerate sculpture now shamelessly disfiguring a noble casing. The strong, early towers seem in their turn doubly powerful and eloquent in their simplicity and one wishes the old Romanesque portal were restored and the great traceries above it glazed to flood the nave with western sunlight.

The northeastern angle is blocked by poor Renaissance masonry, the exterior of the chapels here being faced by a Corinthian order and broken by circular lights.

The northern portal is as fine as that of the main entrance is paltry. The head of the door, as well as the great arch which spans the recess into which the entire composition is set, is, curiously enough, three-centred, similar to some of the elliptical ones at Burgos and Leon. A lion, securely chained to the church wall for the protection of worshipers, guards each side of the entrance. Under the five arches stand the twelve Apostles, time-worn, weather-beaten and mutilated, but splendid bits of late thirteenth-century carving. For they must be as early as that. The archivolts are simply crowded with small figures of angels, of saints, and of the unmistakably lost. In the tympanum the Saviour occupies the centre, and around Him is the same early, naïve representation of figures from the Apocalypse, angels, and the crowned Virgin.

Two years before Luther, a true exponent of Teutonic genius, had nailed his theses to the door of a cathedral in central Germany, there was born in the heart of Spain as dauntless and genuine a representative of hercountry's genius. Each passed through great storm and stress of the spirit, and finally entered into that closer communion with God, from which the soul emerges miraculously strengthened. Do not these bleak hills, this stern but lovely Cathedral, rising _per aspera ad astra_, typify the strong soul of Santa Teresa? A great psychologist of our day finds the woman in her admirable literary style. Prof. James further accepts Saint Teresa's own defense of her visions: "By their fruits ye shall know them." These were practical, brave, cheerful, aspiring, like this Castilian sanctuary, intolerant of dissenters, sheltering and caring for many, and leading them upward to the City which is unseen, eternal in the heavens.

IV

LEON

Look where the flood of western glory falls Through the great sunflower disk of blazing panes In ruby, saffron, azure, emerald stains.

_Holmes._

In the year 1008 the ancient church of Leon witnessed a ceremony memorable for more reasons than one. It was conducted throughout according to Gothic customs, King, Queen, nobility and ecclesiastics all being present, and it was the first council held in Spain since the Arab conquest whose acts have come down to us. The object was twofold: to hold a joyous festival in celebration of the rebuilding of the city walls, which had been broken down some years before by a Moslem army, and to draw up a charter for a free people, governing themselves, for Spain has the proud distinction of granting municipal charters one or two hundred years before the other countries of Europe. For three centuries of Gothic rule, the kings of Leon, Castile and other provinces had successfully resisted every attempt at encroachment from the Holy See and, in session with the clergy, elected their own bishops, until in 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile takes the fatal step of sending Bernard d'Azeu to receive the pallium and investiture as Bishop of Toledo from the hands of Gregory VII. From this time forth, kings are crowned, queens repudiated, and even the hallowed Gothic or Mozarabic ritual is set aside for that of Rome by order of popes.

In 1135 Santa Maria of Leon is the scene of a gorgeous pageant. An Alfonso, becoming master of half Spain and quarter of France, thinks he might be called Emperor as well as some others, and within the Cathedral walls he receives the new title in the presence of countless ecclesiastics and "all his vassals, great and small." The monarch's robe was of marvelous work, and a crown of pure gold set with precious stones was placed on his head, while the King of Navarre held his right hand and the Bishop of Leon his left. Feastings and donations followed, but, what was of vastly more importance, the new Emperor confirmed the charters granted to various cities by his grandfather.

Again a great ceremony fills the old church. Ferdinand, later known as the Saint, is baptized there in 1199. A year or two later, Innocent III declares void the marriage of his father and mother, who were cousins, and an interdict shrouds the land in darkness. Several years pass during which the Pope turns a deaf ear to the entreaties of a devoted husband, the King of Leon, to their children's claim, the intercession of Spanish prelates, and the prayers of two nations who had good cause to rejoice in the union of Leon and Castile. Then a victim of the yoke, which Spain had voluntarily put on while Frederic of Germany and even Saint Louis ofFrance were defending their rights against the aggressions of the Holy See, the good Queen Berenzuela, sadly took her way back to her father's home, to the King of Castile.