Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain Part 16

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.

The "Taller del Moro," so called because it was turned into a workshop for the cathedral, and is in the Calle del Moro, is a more important work, consisting of three apartments, lavishly decorated. Don Patricio de la Escosura, in the letterpress to 'Espana Artistica y Monumental,'

considers the date of this building to be between the ninth and tenth centuries;[218] but I see no reason whatever for believing that its plaster decorations are earlier than 1350, or thereabouts.

The list which I have already given of Moorish works will show how many I have to leave undescribed; but I had not time to see all, and it is not worth while to describe with any more detail those that I did manage to see, for they are all extremely similar in the character of their decorations.

The work of the same kind in the churches of Toledo is of more interest, because here it is of that partly Moorish and partly Christian character, which shows that the Mahomedan architects, to whom no doubt we owe most of it, wrought under the direction to a considerable extent of their Christian masters, and in some respects with very happy results. In most of the general views of Toledo, some steeples which are attached to churches of this cla.s.s are to be seen, and they give much of its character to the city. I saw six of these, namely, those of San Tome, San Miguel, San Pedro Martyr, Sta. Leocadia, San Roman, and La Concepcion; whilst among the churches in the same style are parts of Sta. Isabel, San Eugenio, San Bartolome, Sta. Ursula, Sta. Fe, Santiago, and San Vicente.

The whole of these works are very similar in their general character, being built rather roughly of brick, with considerable use of cusped arcades in a succession of orders one over the other, the churches generally being finished with apses at the east end, and the towers being built without b.u.t.tresses, and roofed with tiled roofs of moderate pitch.

The steeple of San Roman is the finest example of its cla.s.s to be seen here. For half its height it is perfectly plain, built of rough stone, with occasional courses of brick, and quoined with brick. The string-courses are all of brick, unmoulded. The character of the three upper stages will be best understood by the ill.u.s.tration which I give.

The cusped arch of the lower of these stages is certainly very pretty, but the common form of trefoiled Moorish arch enclosed within it seems to me to be the most frightful of all possible forms. It is neither graceful in itself, nor does it convey the idea of repose or strength; and it is so completely non-constructional, that the lower portion of the apparent arch is never built as an arch, but always with horizontal courses. In the belfry stage the bold variation of the openings is worthy of notice; and throughout the whole the utmost praise is due to the architect who, with none but the commonest materials, and at the least possible expense in every way, has, nevertheless, left us a work much more worthy of critical examination than most of the costly works in brick erected by ourselves at the present day. It is amazing how much force is given by the abandonment of mouldings and chamfers, and the trust in broad, bold, square soffeits to all the openings. I must not omit to mention that the small red shafts in the arcade below the belfry seem to be made of terracotta.

[Ill.u.s.tration: San Roman. Toledo.]

The construction of the steeple is very peculiar. In the lowest stage it is divided by two arches springing from a central pier, and the two compartments thus formed are roofed with waggon-vaults. In the next stage the central pier is carried up, and has four arches springing from it to the walls. The four s.p.a.ces left between these arches are vaulted with barrel-vaults at right angles to each other. The steps of the ascent to this tower are carried on arches against the side walls, with occasional openings in the vaults when necessary for pa.s.sing.

San Roman has a nave and aisles, with arcades of two arches between them; a chancel, mainly of Renaissance style, covered with a dome, but with some late Gothic groining to its apse; and a south chancel aisle ending without an apse. The tower is on the north side of the chancel.

The whole church is plastered and whitewashed most painfully, but still retains one or two interesting features. The footpace in front of the altar has a good pavement of large plain red tiles, laid diagonally, with small encaustic blue and white glazed tiles at intervals. The whole pavement is divided into a number of strips by rectangular bands of blue stone. The altar at the east end of the south choir aisle also deserves a note, being built with a solid black stone front, carved in imitation of embroidery and fringes, with an inscription on the superfrontal, and a s.h.i.+eld suspended in the centre of the frontal. This strange device for economizing altar vestments was not common, I think, here, but several examples remain in the new cathedral at Salamanca. The reredos over this altar has a very sweet painting of the Last Supper, the figure of our Lord being much raised above those of the apostles, and the table at which He sits being polygonal.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Santa Magdalena. Toledo.]

Sta. Magdalena has a smaller and simpler tower of the same cla.s.s; it is perfectly plain below the belfry stage, which has two windows in each face. The bells hang here, as is so often the case in Southern buildings, in the window; and in all these buildings, as in most other old examples of brickwork, the putlog-holds (or holes for the insertion of the scaffold-poles) are left open. The bricks, too, are used very roughly and picturesquely with a very thick mortar-joint, and the consequence is that every part of this work has a value in texture and light and shade undreamt of by those who have never seen anything but our own smooth, smart, and spiritless modern brick walls, built with bad bricks and no mortar.[219]

The steeple of San Tome is so absolutely identical in its details--save that its shafts of glazed earthenware are alternately green and yellow--with that of San Roman, that it is unnecessary to describe it.[220]

San Pedro Martyr has a steeple which is much wider on one side than on the other, but is otherwise similar to that of San Roman in its general design. San Miguel, and Sta. Leocadia, and La Concepcion, have steeples more like that of La Magdalena, the towers being small, and with only one arcaded stage below the belfry. The masonry and brickwork is the same in all these examples, but their scale differs considerably, the steeple of San Roman being by far the largest and loftiest, that of San Tome the next, and the others a good deal smaller.

All these steeples seem to me to ill.u.s.trate not only the proper use of brick, already mentioned, but also the great difference between old and new works in the degree of simplicity and amount of cost with which their authors appear to be satisfied. It is seldom, indeed, at the present day, that we see a steeple erected which has not cost twice as much, in proportion to its size and solidity, as either of these old Toledan examples; and it is to be feared that few of us now have the courage to trust entirely in the virtue of doing only what the money given to us to spend will properly allow, without raising that silly and too-frequently-heard wail about our work having been spoilt for want of money, which no medieval work, however poor, ever was!

I have been unable to satisfy myself, by any doc.u.mentary evidence, as to the age of these buildings. There is some record of extensive works in the church of San Tome, in the beginning of the fourteenth century,[221]

but, as we see that the church has since been paganized without damage to the town, it is possible that they may also have escaped the previous works. On the other hand, the king Don Alonso VIII. is said to have been proclaimed from the steeple window of San Roman, in 1166; and, looking to the character of the Puerta Visagra--an undoubted work of the commencement of the twelfth century--I do not know whether we should be justified in refusing to give the steeple of San Roman the date claimed for it, though my impression when I was looking at it, without consulting any authorities, was, that this work was none of it older than the end of the thirteenth century. The first impressions of an English eye in looking at this Moorish work are not, however, much to be depended on, the profusion of cusped arches, in which the Moorish architects so early indulged, always giving their work a rather late effect.

Among the churches of Moresque character that I saw, I may specially mention those of Santiago and Sta. Leocadia. The former appeared to me to be a work mainly of the fourteenth century. It is a parallel-triapsidal church, and has some old brick arcading on the exterior of the chancel aisle, but is generally so bedaubed with plaster and whitewash as to be uninteresting. It is said to have an _artesinado_ ceiling, but I do not recollect this, and I believe it has a plaster ceiling below the old one. The pulpit is a rather striking work of that mixed Moorish and Gothic detail which prevailed in the fifteenth century. One fact I noticed here, and again at Valencia Cathedral, was, that the pulpit had no door, and the only access seemed to be over the side, by aid of a ladder! When pulpits were erected, it is fair to suppose that they were meant to be used; but in the Spain of the present day it is, perhaps, not of much consequence if they are unusable, as sermons do not seem to be very much in vogue.

Of the other churches in the city Sta. Isabel has a polygonal apse, with each side arcaded with a Moorish trefoil arch. San Eugenio has a similar apse, with a second stage, with multifoil arcading all along it; and San Bartolome has three of these cusped and arcaded stages in its apse. Sta.

Ursula has a stone apse, circular in plan, coursed with brick, and pierced with three Moorish windows. La Concepcion has a polygonal apse of rude stonework below, and is coursed with bricks from mid-height upwards, with three Moresque windows set within square recessed panels; whilst Sta. Fe presents the unusual feature of b.u.t.tresses to the apse, and has an interlacing arcade below the eaves, and long lancet windows set within Moresque cusped panels. Sta. Leocadia (commonly called Cristo de la Vega), just outside the city, and in the valley below its walls, also retains the apse of its church, erected on a site which is said to have been first built upon as early as the fourth century. This is entirely covered with arcading from the ground to the eaves, arranged in three equal orders, the lower cusped, the next having the common Moorish trefoil, and the upper being round-arched. Some of the panels of these arcades are pierced for light. The existing building is probably in no part earlier than the twelfth century; it consists of a small modern nave, a sanctuary of two bays with round transverse arches, and cusped Moresque arches in the side walls. The apse at the east end is roofed with a semi-dome. At the west end is a small modern cemetery, full of gravestones, inscribed at least as fully, fondly, and foolishly, as those we indulge in in our own cemeteries.

In addition to these more important works there are, in the cathedral, a door leading into the chapter-room, and a recessed arch in one of the chapels on the south side of the nave, executed by Moorish artists probably in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It has been absurdly enough suggested that these are parts of the ancient mosque which stood on the same site; but there is no ground whatever for the idea, the work being evidently of much later date, and it being at the time a common fas.h.i.+on to introduce some work of this kind into buildings which otherwise are purely Gothic.

The last head under which I have to describe Moorish work, is, perhaps, also the most interesting. The walls, gateways, and bridges of Toledo are, I think, the finest I have anywhere seen; in part, at least, of extreme age, very perfectly preserved, and on a grand scale. There is a double line of wall on the unprotected side of the city towards the _Vega_, the inner line said to be the work of the Visigoths, before the Moorish conquest, in 711,[222] and the outer built in 1109, by Alonso VI. Both walls seem to go from the Bridge of Alcantara on one side of the city, to the Bridge of St. Martin on the other. Outside the wall the hills and walls slope down rapidly to the valley; whilst within them the uneven surface is covered thickly with houses everywhere, until the Tagus, winding round three parts of the city in its deep, savage, and solitary defile--a solitariness all the more impressive from being so near to the busy hive of men--encloses it, and makes defensive erections almost unnecessary.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Puerta del Sol. Toledo.]

I have already given some account of the Bridge of Alcantara.[223] It is of two lofty arches, with a bold projecting pier between them. Here is one of the best points of view of the two lines of wall, which are broken constantly by round or square projecting towers, and ascend and descend in the most picturesque fas.h.i.+on, to suit the rugged inequality of the rocks on which they are built. I know no view more picturesque and magnificent. The first gateway reached is the Puerta del Sol, which is so admirable an example of the picturesqueness of which the style is capable, that I cannot resist giving an ill.u.s.tration of it. It is, indeed, not only picturesque, but in all respects a dignified and n.o.ble work of art. The variety of arches, one behind the other, which is seen here, was a very favourite device with the Moorish architects. Here, I think, there are four, two pointed and two round, but all horseshoe in their outline. The outer gateway on the old Bridge of St. Martin has five such arches, two of them being round and one pointed horseshoe, one a plain round, and one a plain pointed arch. In the Puerta del Sol the intersecting arcades in brickwork over the arch, and the projecting turrets on a level with them, are extremely picturesque. The materials used are wrought stone, rough walling stones, and brick. The battlements are of a type which was repeated by the Christians in most parts of Spain, but was, no doubt, derived first of all from the Moors. The situation of the gateway is charming; with due regard to military requirements it turns its side to the enemy, and is reached by a winding road, which bends round at a sharp angle just before reaching it. To the left is seen the sweet view over the _Vega_, watered and made green by the kind river; a view which gains immensely on one's liking, compared, as it always is, with the dreary arid hills beyond, and with recollections of the weary waste over which so much of the traveller's road to Toledo must needs lie. The age of this gateway is not known, but it dates probably from the end of the twelfth, or beginning of the thirteenth century. So, at least, I judge by comparing it with the next gateway, that called the Puerta de Visagra, the finest gateway in the outer wall (which was erected circa 1108-26), and which cannot, therefore, be earlier than the beginning of the twelfth century.

The design of this Puerta de Visagra is clearly due to a Moorish architect, and it is extremely interesting to find the Christian king, so soon after his conquest of the city, making use of the Moors for his work, and to find them doing their best, apparently in their capacity as builders, to second his endeavours to make the recapture of the city by the Infidels impossible. The materials of this gate are the same as those of the other, but its character is much heavier and ruder. The contrast between the grand outer arch and the extremely small inner arch is very curious; the ground has, however, risen considerably in front of it, so that its real proportions are very much concealed. The wall is carried out in advance of this gateway, and has an angle-tower, which was schemed, no doubt, to secure the proper defence of the entrance.

Further along, beyond the point at which the two walls unite, we reach the Bridge of St. Martin--a n.o.ble arch of even grander scale than that of Alcantara, and, like it, guarded at either end by gateways, of which that on the further side has the remains of Moorish work in the arches which span it, and which have been already mentioned; it is finished with the Moorish battlement. This bridge has five arches, of which the largest is magnificent in scale,--no less than 140 (Spanish) feet wide by 95 high. The arches are very light and lofty, and spring from grand piers, behind which the rocky defile is seen in its greatest grandeur.

It seems to have been built in 1212, and repaired, the central arch being rebuilt,[224] by Archbishop Tenorio, circa 1339.