Part 6 (1/2)

Everywhere here the b.u.t.tresses are finished with pinnacles, always planned in the same way, each group being planned on a square, counterchanged over the one below: they are of several stages in height, furnished throughout with crocketed finials on all sides, and at last with a single tall pinnacle. Nothing can be more wearisome than this kind of pinnacled b.u.t.tress, but the later Spanish authorities were very fond of it, and repeated it everywhere. The dome, or Cimborio, is altogether Pagan in its design and detail outside, and on the inside is so plastered with an _olla_ of pink cherubs, rays of light, and gilt scallopsh.e.l.ls of monstrous size, and the like, as to be utterly contemptible in its effect. It is, moreover, too small, and too little separated from the rest of the vaulting, to look really well. The church throughout is finished with hipped roofs in place of gables: but the parapets in front of these are all Renaissance, and marked at intervals by the favourite urns in which Renaissance architects still generally and most unfortunately indulge.

The cathedral was first used for service in A.D. 1560, when on all sides Renaissance buildings were being erected, and perhaps it would be more just to Juan Gil de Hontanon to look upon him as striving to the last to maintain the cause of Christian art against the inroads of the enemy, and failing in his detail not for want of will, but because it was simply impossible to resist the tide which had set in before he died.

Much, too, of the church must, no doubt, be attributed to other men; Juan de Alava, Rodrigo Gil de Hontanon, Martin Ruiz, and Juan de Ribero Rada, having been masters of the works after Juan Gil, and the church not having been completed until more than a century after its commencement.[97]

It will have been noticed that the old steeple is spoken of by the Junta of Architects as a work of so much importance as to make it advisable to change the position of the new cathedral, rather than interfere with it.

I do not quite understand this, for the greater part of it is now entirely of late Renaissance detail,[98] though some large crocketed pinnacles still exist at the angles of the highest stage. The lower part is very plain, but the upper stage of the square tower has a rich bal.u.s.trade, and windows and pilasters, and above it is an octagonal stage with pinnacles at the angles, and this in its turn is surmounted by a dome, with a lantern at the top. The outline is certainly fine, and its great height and ma.s.s make it a conspicuous object for a very long distance from Salamanca.

The mixed character of the detail in this church is well seen in the great doorway. Its jambs are richly moulded and carved, but the mouldings are all planned on a line receding but little from the face of the wall, so that the general effect is flat, and wanting in shadow. The main arch is a bold simple trefoil, but the label above it is carried on in an ogee line, and the arches below over two sculptured subjects, and over two door-openings under them, are elliptical. So, too, in the sculpture on the bas-reliefs over the door-openings, we have the richest luxuriance of the latest school of Spanish Gothic, with its beasts, its crisp foliage, and its wild love of heraldic achievements, and, mixed with all this, naked cherubs, clouds, and representations of Roman architecture.

In conclusion, I am bound to say of this great church that, whilst its exterior fails in almost every single particular, its interior, thanks to compliance with certain broad rules of Gothic building, is beyond question very grand and impressive. To the vast size and height of the columns this is mainly owing, for though they are cut up with endless little mouldings ingeniously ”stopped,” one does not observe their pettinesses, and the arches which they carry are bolder and more important than might have been expected.

Some of the side chapels have altars both at the east and the west; and where the old altars remain they have carved in stone an imitation of an altar frontal. They represent worked super-frontals with fringes, and frontals with fringed orphreys at either end: and I saw one altar with a painted imitation of embroidery all over it. A chapel on the south side of the nave has an altar entirely covered with glazed tiles, the walls around it being similarly inlaid.

Close to the cathedral is one of the University buildings, with a central dome and two dome-capped towers to the west of it, and near these again is another domed church, and in the distance this group is very remarkable and stately-looking.

I wandered all over Salamanca looking for old churches, and could find few of any interest.[99] The finest are all but Renaissance in their character and detail, and seem to have owed much to the influence of Hontanon. The convents and colleges, where not ruined, are grand in scale, yet they produce none of the effect which our Oxford buildings do: but, on the other hand, they are built of a much better stone, and of a rich, warm, yellow tint. The good people here are smartening up the entrance to the town with flower-gardens, seats, and acacias, and are certainly putting their best feet forward, though there is nothing else even approaching to smartness in the place. A walk round the old walls is a melancholy amus.e.m.e.nt. They are, in part, being levelled; still I saw two or three pointed gateways, which seemed to be of early date, but very simple. I saw also some convents in a dilapidated state, and indeed everywhere the state of these is very bad, and I never saw so many waste places or half-ruined buildings. A good deal of this is no doubt owing to the operations of the French during the Peninsular War, but something certainly to the natives, who are busier in pulling down than building up; or at any rate, when they do the latter, they combine it with the former; for in some repairs of one of the University buildings I found the men re-using old wrought stones from some fifteenth-century building.

A bull-fight had just been celebrated here, and the princ.i.p.al square in the city, the ”Plaza Mayor,” one of the best I have seen in Spain, had been fitted up for the occasion as an arena, with seats sloping up from the ground to the first floor windows of the houses all round it. (There was a regular arena, but it was being demolished, to give place, I presume, to one on a grander scale.) Another Plaza close to it is the princ.i.p.al market-place, and affords good opportunities for the study of the costumes of the peasantry.

[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 9.

ZAMORA. p. 94.

THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE DOURO.]

I was fortunate in happening to light upon one very curious church here--that of San Marcos. The engraving of the plan[100] will show how very cleverly its architect managed to combine the scheme of a circular church with the usual Spanish triapsidal arrangement. The apses are vaulted with semi-domes, whilst the rest of the church is covered with wooden roofs, and these all lean towards the central square, which has a hipped roof. The arches are all pointed, and there are rudely carved capitals to the columns. A simple corbel-table is carried along under the eaves, and there are one or two slits--they are not more--for light. This little church is close to the town walls, and the absence of windows gives it the look of a part of a fortress. The plan seems to me to be admirably suggestive: we are too much in the habit of working perpetually in certain grooves which have been cut for us by our forefathers, and most men now-a-days would be afraid to plan a little church like this, even if the idea of it came into their heads. Yet it struck me as being really an extremely useful and economical construction, and such a scheme might with ease be fitted specially for a cemetery chapel in place of one of the vulgar erections with which we are now everywhere indulged.

The church of San Martin has a fine early doorway, in which I first saw a very peculiar order of decoration, which I saw again at Zamora, and of which no doubt more examples exist in this district. My ill.u.s.tration will explain its design, one member of the archivolt of which is like a succession of curled pieces of wood put side by side and perfectly square in section. The effect of light and shade in such work is rather good, but it is nevertheless rather too bizarre to be quite pleasing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Archivolt. San Martin.]

Another little church--that of San Matteo--has a rather fine, though rude, Romanesque doorway, with a b.u.t.tress on each side, and a corbel-table above. But besides these I saw no remains of early work in Salamanca.

From Salamanca an uninteresting road leads to Zamora: occasionally there are considerable woods, and in other parts of the road the fields were well covered with vines. For two or three hours the domes of Salamanca are in sight, backed, as every view in Spain seems to be, by a fine line of distant mountains. No old churches are pa.s.sed on the road, unless I except a large convent, now desecrated and nearly destroyed, but which seemed by the glimpse I caught of it to have old parts.

The entrance to Zamora is very striking: the city crowns the long back of a rock, falling steeply on the south to the Douro, and on the north to another valley. At the extreme end of this hill is the cathedral, as far away from the bulk of the people as it can be, but, for all that, very picturesquely and finely perched. Below the cathedral is a scarped rock, and to the left the n.o.ble river flows round a wooded point, and then out of sight under a long line of green vine-covered hills. All this view is taken in from the end of an old bridge, carried on sixteen or seventeen pointed arches, across which, near the southern end, is built a picturesque and tall gate-tower. The long line of houses occupies the top of the rock, and then opposite the bridge the street descends by a steep-stepped hill, and the houses cl.u.s.ter round the water-side.

The want of water in most Spanish landscapes is so great, that I was never tired of the views here, where it is so abundant. One of the best, perhaps, is that from just below the cathedral, looking past the picturesque bridge across the cattle-peopled plains to a long line of hills which bounds the horizon, with the dead-level line with which so many of the Spanish table-lands finish above the banks of their rivers.

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 A.D. 1125 to 1149, having been appointed through the influence of, and consecrated by, his namesake, the French Archbishop of Toledo.[101]

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,[102] 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 10.

ZAMORA CATHEDRAL. p. 92.

INTERIOR OF NAVE, LOOKING EAST]

This 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, that in the centre being of considerable length, and groined with the common intersecting ribs.[103]

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 one of the French bishops already referred to.