Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain Part 23

In A.D. 1340 the Chapter determined to erect cloisters, under the direction of an architect named Sancii, and bought a site for them to the north of the church; and the _operarius_ or canon in charge of the work seems to have raised alms for them even so far off as at Valencia and in the Balearic Isles. The work was begun in A.D. 1357 and finished in 1368, in which year the Chapter entered into a contract[342] with an architect, one Pedro Zacoma, for the erection of the campanile. In A.D.

1363, however, it was deemed necessary, on account of the position of the church just outside the old walls, and on the north of the town, that it should be fortified; and to accomplish this work, and others of the same kind ordered in A.D. 1374 and 1385, the cloisters so recently built were destroyed. The steeple is said to have been finished in 1392,[343] Pedro Zacoma having acted as architect as late as A.D. 1376.

The church bears evident marks of many alterations and additions. It consists of nave and aisles, transepts, central apse, and two apsidal chapels on the east side of the south, and one on the east of the north transept. The piers are plain square ma.s.ses of masonry, and the main arches are semi-circular, unmoulded, and springing from a very plain abacus. There is a kind of triforium, an arcade of three divisions in each bay, and a fair pointed vault of ten bays--two to each bay of the nave arcade--carried on groining-shafts corbelled out from the wall. The north transept retains a waggon-vault, the axis of which is north and south, whilst the south transept has two bays of cross vaulting. The eastern apse is circular in plan, but divided into seven groining bays, and lighted by three windows of three lights. The apses of the south transept are also circular, lighted by lancets, and groined with semi-domes, though the arches into the transept are pointed. The general character of the later part of this church is, I should say, that of late first-pointed work; yet it is pretty clear that it is almost all a work of the fourteenth century. There is a fine fourteenth-century south porch, with some good arcading in its side walls, in which the tracery is all executed with soffeit-cusping.

Of the western steeple I need not say very much, as my sketch shows the nature of its design, and the evidence as to its date is evidently very accurate. The character of the architectural detail is quite that of flamboyant-work, and the outline is bold, original, and good. It is seldom indeed that the junction of the tower and spire is more happily managed than it is here; and before the destruction of the upper part of the spire, the whole effect must have been singularly graceful. This is the more remarkable in a country where a genuine spire is so rare a feature; but the architect was fortunate in following the customs of the country when he made his steeple octagonal in plan, for it is extremely difficult--one may almost say impossible--to put a spire upon an octagonal tower the outline of which shall not be graceful. In an arch against the wall of this tower is a tomb resting on lions jutting out from the wall, and with the date 1387 in the inscription. It is a good example of the late date to which this early-looking type of monument continued to be used in Spain.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Spire of San Feliu.]

This church has a rather elaborate wooden Retablo, carved and gilt with subjects painted on its panels. The pulpit is also old, and has rich, late flamboyant tracery panels: it is placed against a pier on the south side of the nave, and a second modern pulpit faces it on the north. The old metal screen also remains: it is rather rude, and has p.r.i.c.kets for candles along it, each of which has a sort of frame which looks as though it were meant to hold a gla.s.s.

There are also a few remains of old domestic buildings. A house near the cathedral has the usual Catalan features of trefoiled _ajimez_ windows, and a doorway with a prodigiously deep archivolt. Another house near San Feliu has a broad window with a square-headed opening; the head is an ogee arch, with tracery in the tympanum, and over all is a square-headed label-moulding. It is not an elegant window, yet it has some value as an example of an opening as large as we usually adopt now-a-days, and with a square head. The most interesting house, however, is the Fonda de la Estrella, the princ.i.p.al inn in the town. The windows here are capital examples of shafted windows of the end of the twelfth century. The shafts are very delicate (4 inches by 6 ft. 1 inch); the capitals are well carved with men and animals, and the carved abacus is carried from window to window. The windows are of three lights, and with only a narrow s.p.a.ce of wall between them. The back of this house is less altered than the front: on the ground it has an arcade of four round arches, on the first floor five windows of the same sort as these just described, but simpler, and above this a series of pilasters, which now carry the roof. There must have been arches I think to this open upper stage.

There is another house in the same street, and just opposite the inn, of rather later date, but also with early _ajimez_ windows, and this had also an open stage below the roof.

The whole city looks picturesque and old, and I daresay a more careful search than I had time for would be rewarded with further discoveries of old remains. Most of the houses are arcaded below, and their lower stories are groined, the cells of the vaults being filled in with bricks laid in herring-bone patterns.

From Gerona to Barcelona there are two railways branching from the station at Empalme. That which follows the coast pa.s.ses by several small towns facing the sea, in which there are many remains of old walls and castles, and not a few _ajimez_ windows. It is, in short, a charming ride in every way. The other line going inland also pa.s.ses a very striking country, and some old towns. Hostalrich is a very picturesque old walled town, with its walls and towers all fairly perfect. Fornelles has a good church, with a low crocketed spire on an octagonal steeple, brought to a square just below the belfry-stage. Granollers has a rather good fourteenth-century church, of the same general character as the Barcelona churches of the same date. It has a nave of five bays, and an apse of seven sides, with a tower at the north-west angle. Some trace of an earlier church remains in a round-arched western door. The western bay is occupied by a late fifteenth-century groined gallery carried on an elliptic arch, with a parapet pierced with richly-cusped circles. The staircase to this gallery is in a sort of aisle or side chapel, and has an extremely well managed iron hand-railing, supported by occasional uprights, and quite worthy of imitation. The tower has a delicate newel staircase in its angle: the newel has a spiral moulding, and the under side of the steps is very carefully wrought. The upper part of the steeple is like those of Barcelona cathedral--an irregular octagon, and has a traceried parapet and low spire. There is a very rich late wooden pulpit, corbelled out from the wall, through which a door is pierced, and some rich woodwork is placed at the head of the steps leading to it.

The apse has two-light and single-light windows in the alternate sides, and the nave the latter only. Small chapels are formed between the b.u.t.tresses, and these are also lighted with small windows. On the whole this church has a good many features of interest, and its very considerable height gives it greater dignity than our own churches of the same cla.s.s have.

On the road from Gerona into France I have seen only one or two churches. At Figueras the cathedral has a steeple extremely similar to that just described at Granollers, and evidently of the same date. The sides of the octagon are not equal, and bells are hung in the windows, and one in an arched frame at the top. This tower is on the north side of the nave, which has four bays, transepts, and a Renaissance central dome covered with glazed tiles. The fabric of the nave seems to be of the thirteenth century, having lancet windows and b.u.t.tresses of great projection rather well designed, chapels occupying the s.p.a.ce between them. The west door label runs up to, and is terminated by, a long cross. At la Junquera, between Figueras and the frontier, the little Parroquia has the date of A.D. 1413 on the door. Its only feature of interest is the tower, which has a staircase carried on arches thrown from side to side of the tower, and having a square opening or well-hole in the centre. The same kind of staircase has been described in the church of San Roman at Toledo.

From hence a pleasant road among the mountains, beautifully clothed here with cork-trees, and disclosing charming views at every turn, leads by the frontier fortress of Bellegarde, over the Col de Pertus, and so on down the eastern side of the Pyrenees to Perpinan. Here, if we look only at the map of modern France, my notes ought to stop. But Perpinan was of old a Spanish city, and its buildings are so thoroughly Spanish in their character that I may venture to say a very few words about them.[344]

The church of San Juan is of very remarkable dimensions. The clear width of the nave is sixty feet, but in the easternmost bay this is gathered in to fifty-four feet, which is the diameter of the seven-sided apse.

Guillermo Sagrera, master of the works of this cathedral, was one of the architects summoned to advise about the erection of the nave at Gerona, and I think there can be but little doubt that the plan of this church was his handiwork, and that it was erected, therefore, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It will be seen that he was one of the architects who spoke most strongly in favour of the erection of a broad unbroken nave. The vault he erected here is of brick with stone ribs, and the brickwork is rather rough, with very wide mortar joints, and looks as if from the first it were intended to plaster and paint it. The roofs of the chapels which are built between the large b.u.t.tresses have flat gables north and south, and the same arrangement is carried round the apse. The most striking feature in this cathedral is that very rare thing--a very fine mediaeval organ. It is corbelled out from the north wall of the nave, and is of great size and height. The pipes are arranged in traceried compartments at five different levels. This complicates the machinery for the supply of wind, but adds greatly to the picturesque character of the instrument. Originally this organ had great painted shutters, which are now nailed up against the wall close to the south porch. The width of its front is about twenty-five feet, its projection from the wall three feet six inches, and the organist sits in a gallery at its base.[345]

There are several good old houses here: but I must content myself with the mention of one only in the Rue de la Barre. Here we have the peculiarities of the Spanish houses, as they are seen along the coast from Gerona to Valencia, very decidedly developed: the windows are all _ajimez_, with the usual delicate trefoiled head to the lights, and slender shafts between them, and the arch-stones of the doorway are more than usually enormous, being little less than six feet in length.

A drive of a few miles from Perpinan leads to the extremely interesting church at Elne, consecrated in _A.D._ 1058.[346] Here, as in San Pedro, Gerona, and to the east of it in the cathedral at Agde, there are occasional lines of black volcanic scoriae used in the Romanesque steeple and west front, and with good effect. The nave of the church has a pointed barrel vault, and the aisles half-barrel vaults, but all the cross arches are semi-circular. At the west end is a sort of thirteenth-century narthex, and the three apses at the east have semi-domes. On the north side of the church is a n.o.ble cloister, planned just like that in the cathedral at Gerona with the most complete disregard to symmetry. It is extremely similar to it also in general design: but it is very remarkable as having its east and north sides erected about the end of the thirteenth century in evident and very close imitation of the earlier work on the other two sides. The vaulting throughout the cloister is of the later date, and raised considerably above the level of the old vault. The whole of this cloister is wrought in a veined white marble, and a door from it into the church is built in alternated courses of red and white marble.

On the whole S. Elne well deserves a visit, not only on account of the extreme interest of its church and cloister, but, to the student of Spanish architecture, on account of the very important link which it supplies in the chain which connects the early Spanish with the early French buildings of the middle ages.

The history of Cataluna shows how intimate was the connection of the people and towns on both sides of the mountains, and it is here and elsewhere in the south of France that we see the germ of almost all the mediaeval Spanish art.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GERONA:--Ground Plan of Cathedral &c.

S. Daniel or(?) S. Nicholas.

S. Pedro De Los Galligans.

Plate XVIII

Published by John Murray. Albemarle Street 1865]

CHAPTER XVI.

MANRESA--LeRIDA.

THE railway which connects Barcelona with Zaragoza enables the ecclesiologist to see some of the best buildings in this part of Spain with great ease. As far as Manresa its course is extremely picturesque, as it winds about among the Catalan hills, in sight, for a considerable part of the way, of that wonderful jagged mountain-range of Montserrat, which, after much experience of mountains, strikes me more each time that I see it as among the very n.o.blest of rocks. I know not its height above the sea, but its vast precipitous ma.s.s, rising suddenly from among the ordinary features of a landscape, and entirely unconnected with any other mountain range, produces an impression of size which may possibly be vastly in excess of the reality. Its sky-line is everywhere formed by grand pointed pinnacles, or aiguilles of rock, and the whole ma.s.s is of a pale grey colour which adds very much to its effect. The convent is a considerable distance below the summit; but as there appears, so far as I can learn, to be nothing left of any of its mediaeval buildings, I was obliged to deny myself the pleasure of the climb to the summit of the rock, which a visit to the monastery would have excused, and in part, indeed, entailed. To the north of the line of the railway the hills rise gradually almost to the dignity of mountains, and suggest a beautiful situation for that old episcopal city--Vique--whose fine cathedral seems to have been destroyed and rebuilt, but where there is still to be seen a very rich late middle-pointed cloister. Everywhere the richly-coloured soil teems with produce; here vineyards and there corn-fields, all of them divided by long parallel lines of olives and standard peaches; whilst the deep river dells, clothed with cork-trees, stone pines, or underwood, add immensely to the interest of the road, which constantly crosses them.

Beyond Manresa the character of the country changes completely; and when he has once reached the frontier of Aragon, the traveller has his only pleasure in the fine distant views of the Pyrenees; and if his journey be made in the spring--in the sight of a vast extent of corn-fields, stretching on all sides far as the eye can see. In the summer nothing can be more saddening than the change which comes over this country; the corn is all cut before the end of May, and then the universal light-brown colour of the soil makes the landscape all but intolerably tame and uninteresting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MANRESA: COLLEGIATE: CHURCH:--Ground: Plan: Pl. XIX.

Published by John Murray Albemarle St. 1865]

Two or three old buildings are seen from the railway. Between Sardanola and Sabadell is a house with a tower, in which is a very good round-arched _ajimez_ window. At Tarrasa the churches evidently deserve examination. There is one with a lofty central lantern, and of transverse triapsal plan, which seems to be entirely Romanesque in character; and there is another of the usual later Catalan type, seven bays in length, with an apse of five sides, a tower on the south side of the choir, and a large rose-window at the west end. Near the same town, to the north, is a Romanesque village church with a lofty belfry, which, like that of the early church in the town itself, has belfry-windows of two lights, with a dividing shaft, and a low square spire-roof. A church of the same type is seen near Monistrol--the station for Montserrat,--and from this point there is nothing to be noticed until Manresa is reached, picturesquely situated on the steep hill above the river Cardener, with two or three churches and convents, and a great Collegiata--or collegiate church--towering up imposingly above everything else. But if the situation of this church is n.o.ble, the building itself is even more so; and having pa.s.sed it in my first journey, I was so much struck by its size and character that I made a point of going again to the same district, in order to examine it at my leisure. The town is poor and decayed; but I was there on a _festa_, and have seldom had a better opportunity of seeing the Catalan peasantry, who thronged the streets, the Plazas, and the churches, and made them lively with bright colours and noisy tongues. There was a church consecrated on the same site in A.D. 1020, and it is of this probably that a fragment still remains on the north side. The rest has been destroyed, and Fr. J. Villanueva[347] says that the existing church was commenced in A.D. 1328,--a date which accords very well with the detail of the earlier portion of the work,--but he does not give his authority for the statement. I have not been able to find any other evidence which would fix the date of the dedication or completion of the building; but as Arnaldo de Valleras, one of the architects consulted in 1416 as to the design for Gerona cathedral, speaks of himself as then engaged on the construction of the church of Manresa, there can be but little doubt that at this time the Collegiata was still unfinished, having, as the detail of the design suggests, been a long time in progress. It is of the common Catalan type of the fourteenth century, and though it is one of the most important examples of its cla.s.s, it presents so few new or unusual features that it hardly seems to require a very lengthy description. Its design is in nearly all respects of the same kind as those of the Barcelonese churches of the same age; but its plan[348] is very remarkable, as giving, perhaps, the widest span of nave anywhere to be seen in a church with aisles and a clerestory. Or perhaps I ought to limit myself to examples on the mainland, for at Palma in Mallorca the width of the nave of the cathedral seems to be even greater, and the plan is almost exactly the same. The scheme is very similar to that of Sta. Maria del Mar, Barcelona, but the width of the nave here is considerably greater, and the general effect of the interior is even finer. The b.u.t.tresses are necessarily of vast size, and are formed partly inside and partly outside the church. A lofty tower is erected over one of the bays of the north aisle, and the two nave columns which carry it are in consequence built of larger dimensions than any of the others. A fine Romanesque doorway still remains in the wall, just outside this tower, and leads now into the modern cloister court; but the princ.i.p.al entrances to the church are by grand doorways of the same age as the church, whose jambs and arches have rich continuous mouldings. These doorways are opposite each other, and just to the west of the apse, a position of much importance in regard to the ritual arrangements of the church. There is also a western doorway, but this, together with the rest of the west front, has all been modernized, whilst the cloister and its chapels appear to be entirely modern.

The magnificent scale of the plan is perhaps hardly supported as it should be by the beauty of the design in detail. In its present state it is hardly fair to judge of the original effect of the exterior, but inside one is struck by the enormous width and height, and not at all by the beauty of the details. The columns are of vast height and size: but plain piers, with poor bases and capitals, and poverty-stricken arches, seem out of place in such a church, and, owing to the enormous size of the vault, the clerestory windows are but little seen in the general view of the interior.

The columns are simple octagons in plan, and of great size: they have poor, shallow, carved capitals, which support the very thin-looking main arches, and the large moulded piers which carry the groining. This is quadripart.i.te throughout, and has very bold ribs, with carved bosses at the meeting of the diagonal ribs. The window traceries throughout are of rich geometrical character, and savour rather of German influence than of French. Those in the aisles are generally of two lights, and in the clerestory of three and four lights--the window in the eastern bay of the apse being of four lights, whilst those in the other bays are only of three.

The whole roof of the aisles is paved with stone laid on the back of the vault, as at Toledo cathedral, with gutters following the lines of the vaulting ribs, and the water is carried down into the pockets of the vaults, and thence through the b.u.t.tresses into gurgoyles. Over this roof--which seemed to me to be undoubtedly the old one--a modern wooden roof covered with pantiles has been erected, which blocks up all the lower part of the clerestory windows, and is carried in a very clumsy fas.h.i.+on on arches thrown across between the flying b.u.t.tresses. The nave roof is now all covered with pantiles laid on the vault itself, so that from below the church has the effect, already noticed at Barcelona, of being roofless. This is certainly not the old arrangement, but whether of old there was any visible roof to any of these late Catalan churches I am wholly unable to say.

The flying b.u.t.tresses are double in height, the lower arches ab.u.t.ting against the wall a few feet above the sills of the clerestory windows, and the upper somewhat above their springing. It is possible that this upper flying b.u.t.tress is an addition to the original design, provided to meet some settlement in the fabric, for many of the b.u.t.tresses have only the lower arch, which would hardly be the case if they had all been executed at the same time. The b.u.t.tresses generally are finished with crocketed pediments, but there are now no traces to be seen of their pinnacles, or of the parapets between them. A lofty octagonal staircase turret is carried up to the height of the clerestory against one of the outer angles of the aisle wall, and a pa.s.sageway from it to the clerestory roof is boldly carried upon an arch, which takes the place of a flying b.u.t.tress.

[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 43.

MANRESA p. 342

INTERIOR OF THE COLLEGIATE CHURCH.]

The steeple is lofty: it is entered by old doorways opening on to the paved roof of the aisles, and is groined both under and above the bells.

An old newel staircase in one angle has been destroyed, and steps projecting from the side walls have been ingeniously introduced instead. On the top of the tower a large bell is suspended from the intersection of four arched stone ribs; these ribs rise about twenty-five feet from the roof, are about one foot six inches thick, and abut against piers or dwarf pinnacles at the base, about four feet deep by one foot eleven inches thick. Two architects, said to be French--though their names seem to me to be those of Catalans--Juan Font and Giralt Cantarell, are said to have worked at this steeple from 1572 to 1590,[349] and no doubt it was this upper portion on which they wrought.

The sacristies on the south-east side of the apse are old, but not interesting. The only antiquities I saw in them were four fine processional staves, with tops of silver richly wrought with tracery in the sides, and crocketed gables over the traceries. Behind the openings of tracery the plate is gilt, the rest being all silver.

The arrangement of the interior of the church for service follows that usually seen in these enormously wide buildings. Within the apse the choir is formed by means of iron _grilles_, leaving a pa.s.sage some ten feet wide all round it, and under the choir is a crypt as at Barcelona cathedral, approached in the same way, by a flight of steps from the nave. The Coro is placed, according to the common fas.h.i.+on, in the nave, occupying about two of its bays in length, and there is an equal s.p.a.ce to the west of it, between its eastern screen and the steps to the Capilla mayor. The width of the Coro is much less than that of the nave, and its enclosing walls are mainly old. At first sight, therefore, it seems to be a good example of an early introduction of this common Spanish arrangement: but on closer view it appears to have been taken down and rebuilt, and may not, possibly, retain its old position. But, on the other hand, the two great doors in the side walls would never have been placed where they are if the Coro had occupied its usual English position to the west of the altar enclosure. The plan of Barcelona cathedral has just the same arrangement of great doorways north and south between the Coro and the altar, and there, beyond any doubt, the Coro is in its old place; and seeing how close the points of similarity are in both churches, it must, I think, be a.s.sumed that even if this screen at Manresa has been rebuilt it still occupies its old place. It is a work of the fifteenth century, of stone, arcaded on either side of a central western doorway. The divisions of the arcade have figures painted within them of the apostles and other saints. The stalls and fittings of the Coro are all of Renaissance character.

On either side of the altar there still remain three octagonal shafts with carved capitals, to which, no doubt, were originally hung the curtains or veils which protected the altar. They are of the same date as the church, and about ten feet six inches in height. The footpace is also old, and placed exactly in the centre of the apse. The richest treasure here is, however, still to be described. Among a number of altar-frontals, neither better nor worse than are usually seen, there is still preserved one which, after much study of embroidery in all parts of Europe, I may, I believe, safely p.r.o.nounce to be the most beautiful work of its age. It is 10 feet long, by 2 feet 10 inches in height, divided into three compartments in width, the centre division having the Crucifixion, and the sides being each subdivided into nine divisions, each containing a subject from the life of our Lord.[350] An inscription at the lower edge of the frontal preserves the name of the artist to whom this great work is owing. It is in Lombardic capitals, and as follows:--

GERI: LAPI: RACHAMATORE: MEFECIT: INFLORENTIA.

The work is all done on fine linen doubled. The faces, hands, and many other parts--as, _e.g._, the masonry of a wall--are drawn with brown ink on the linen, and very delicately shaded with a brush. The use of ink for the faces is very common in early embroidery, but I have never before seen work so elaborately finished with all the art of the painter. The faces are full of beauty and expression, and have much of the tender religious sentiment one sees in the work of Fra Angelico. The drawing is extremely good, the horses like those Benozzo Gozzoli painted, and the men dressed in Florentine dresses of the early part of the fifteenth century. The subjects are full of intricacy, the Crucifixion having the whole subject, with the crucifixion of the thieves, and all the crowd of figures so often represented.

The work is marvellously delicate--so much so that, pa.s.sing the hand over it, it is difficult to tell exactly when it ends and the painting begins. The colours are generally very fresh and beautiful; but the gold backgrounds being very lightly st.i.tched down are a good deal frayed.

There are borders between and around all the subjects. Such a piece of embroidery makes one almost despair. English ladies who devotedly apply themselves to this kind of work have as yet no conception of the delicacy of the earlier works, and reproduce only too often the coa.r.s.e patterns of the latest English school.[351]

In the choir-aisle is a wheel of bells in its old case, and under the organ is the favourite Catalan device of a Saracen's head.

A picturesque effect was produced in the church here by the large white flannel hoods which all the women wore at ma.s.s. The church was crowded with people, and these white hoods contrasted well with the many-coloured bags or sacks--red and violet predominating--which the men always wear on their heads.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Wheel of Bells.]

I saw two other old churches here. That "del Carmen" is of the same age as the Collegiata, with a nave of six bays and an apse of seven sides.