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CHAP. PAGE
PAGE
A.--Catalogue of dated examples of Spanish Buildings, from the tenth to the sixteenth century inclusive 467
B.--Catalogue of Architects, Sculptors, and Builders of the Churches, &c., mentioned in this volume 471
C.--Documents relating to the construction of the new Cathedral at Salamanca 482
D.--Royal Warrant for the payment of the Master of the Works at Santiago 489
E.--Memoir of the construction of the Cathedral at Segovia, by the Canon Juan Rodriguez 490
F.--Catalogue of the subjects carved on the screens round the Coro of Toledo Cathedral 495
G.--Agreement between Jayme Fabre and the Sub-prior and Brethren of the Convent of San Domingo at Palma in Mallorca 500
H.--The Reports of the Junta of Architects assembled at Gerona to decide on the mode of building the nave of the Cathedral 501
INDEX 517
Frontispiece. Santiago Cathedral, Portico de la Gloria.
Vignette on Title-page, Segovia from the Alcazar. Page
Compartment of Nave, Burgos Cathedral 14
GROUND PLANS.
Plate
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN.
IRUN--SAN SEBASTIAN--BURGOS.
So little has it been the fashion hitherto to explore the North of Spain in search of artistic treasures, that it was with somewhat more than usual of the feeling that I was engaged in an adventure that I left Bayonne on my first journey West of the Pyrenees. Yet, in truth, so far as I have seen there is little in the way of adventure to anticipate even there in these matter-of-fact days; and, some slight personal inconvenience excepted, there is nothing to prevent any traveller of ordinary energy doing all that I did with complete success, and an uncommon amount of pleasure. For if there are no serious perils to be encountered, there is great novelty in almost everything that one sees; and whether we wish to study the people and their customs, or to visit the country and explore it in search of striking and picturesque scenery, or to examine, as I did, its treasures of ancient art, we shall find in every one of these respects so much that is unlike what we are used to, so much that is beautiful, and so much that is ancient and venerable by historic association, that we must be dull indeed if we do not enjoy our journey with the fullest measure of enjoyment. Indeed the drawbacks about which so much is usually said and written--the difficulty of finding inns fit to sleep in, or food fit to eat--seem to me to be most enormously exaggerated. It is true that I have purposely avoided travelling over the well-beaten Andalusian corner of Spain; and it is there, I suppose, that most English ideas of Spain and the Spaniards are formed. But in those parts to which my travels have taken me, but in which English travellers are not known so well as they are in Andalusia, I have certainly seldom found any difficulty in obtaining such creature-comforts as are essential. Somewhat, it is true, depends upon the time of year in which a journey is undertaken; for in the spring, when the climate is most enjoyable, and the country gloriously green and bright with wavy crops of corn, the traveller has to depend entirely upon the cook for his food; and has no other resource even where the cookery is intolerable to his English sense of smell, taste, and sight! But in the autumn, if he chances to travel, as I have twice done, just when the grapes are ripening, he may, if he choose, live almost entirely, and with no little advantage to his health, on grapes and bread, the latter being always pure, light, and good to a degree of which our English bakers have no conception; and the former tasting as none but Spanish grapes do, and often costing nothing, or at any rate never more than a merely nominal sum.
On the whole, from my own experience, I should be inclined to recommend the autumn as the most favourable season for a Spanish journey, the weather being then generally more settled than in the spring. But, on the other hand, there is no doubt that any one who wishes to judge fairly of the scenery of Old and New Castile, of great part of Aragon, and of Leon, ought on no account to visit these provinces save in the spring. Then I know no sight more glorious in its way than the sea of corn which is seen covering with its luxuriance and lovely colour the endless sweeps of the great landscape on all sides; whereas in the autumn the same landscape looks parched and barren, burnt up as it is by the furious sun until it assumes everywhere a dusty hue, painful to the eye, and most monotonous and depressing to the mind; whilst the roads suffer sometimes from an accumulation of dust such as can scarcely be imagined by those who have never travelled along them. Even at this season, however, there are some recompenses, and one of them is the power of realizing somewhat of the beauty of an Eastern atmosphere, and the singular contrasts of colours which Eastern landscapes and skies generally present; for nowhere else have I ever seen sunsets more beautiful or more extraordinary than in the dreariest part of dreary Castile.
So far as the inns and food are to be considered, I do not think there is much need ordinarily for violent grumbling. All ideas of English manners and customs must be carefully left behind; and if the travelling-clothes are donned with a full intention to do in Spain as Spain does, there is small fear of their owner suffering very much. But in Spain more than in most parts of Europe the foreign traveller is a rare bird, and if he attempt to import his own customs, he will unquestionably suffer for his pains, and give a good deal of unnecessary--because fruitless--trouble into the bargain.
In a Posada it is generally easy to secure a bed-room which boasts at any rate of clean, wholesome linen, though of but little furniture; and in the remoter parts of the country--as in Leon and Galicia--there is no difficulty in securing in the poorest Posada plenty of bird or fish of quality good enough for a gourmand. The great objection to these small inns is, that nothing but the linen for the beds and the face of the waiting-maid ever seems to be washed. The water is carried to and fro in jars of the most curious and pleasant form and texture, and a few drops are now and then thrown on the floor of the comedor or eating-room by way of laying the ancient dust; but washing in any higher sense than this is unknown. It must be said also, that the entrance is common to the mules and the guests; and that after passing through an archway where the atmosphere is only too lively with fleas, and where the stench is something too dreadful to be borne with ease, you turn into the staircase door, and up the stairs, only to find when you have mounted that you have to live, sleep, and eat above the mules; and , when you open your window, to smell as badly as ever all the sweets of their uncleaned and, I suppose, uncleanable stables!
In all--whether inns or lodgings--it is well to eat when the Spaniard eats, and not to attempt to do so at any other time, else much precious time and temper will assuredly be lost, and with results entirely incommensurate with the sacrifice. At whatever hour you rise the maid will bring a small cup of chocolate and a vast glass of water, with some sweet biscuits or toast. And you must learn to love this precious cup, if you intend to love Spain: nowhere else will you get chocolate so invariably well made; and if after you have taken it you drink heartily of the water, you have nothing to fear, and may work hard without fainting till you get your morning meal, at about eleven o'clock. This is a dinner, and can be followed by another at sunset, after which you can generally find in a caf? either coffee, chocolate, or iced lemonade, whilst you watch the relaxation of the domino-playing natives.
The journeys which I have undertaken in Spain have all been made with the one object of inspecting the remains of Gothic building which I either hoped to, or knew I should, find there. My knowledge of Spanish scenery has therefore been very much limited, and it is only incidentally that I am able to speak at all of it. Yet I have seen enough to be able to recommend a great extent of country as thoroughly worthy of exploration by those who care for nought but picturesque scenery. The greater part of Catalonia, much of Aragon, Navarre, the north of Leon, Galicia, and the Asturias, are all full of lovely scenery, and even in other districts, where the country is not interesting, there seem always to be ranges of mountains in sight, which, with the singular purity of the atmosphere through which they are seen, never fail of leaving pleasant recollections in one's mind. Such, for example, is the view of the Guadarrama Mountains from Madrid--a view which redeems that otherwise forlorn situation for a great city, and gives it the only charm it has. Such again are the mountain backgrounds of Leon, Avila, and Segovia.
In my first Spanish tour I entered the country from Bayonne, travelled thence by Vitoria to Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, Madrid, Alcal?, Toledo, Valencia, Barcelona, L?rida, and by Gerona to Perpi?an. In the second I went again to Gerona, thence to Barcelona, Tarragona, Manresa, L?rida, Huesca, Zaragoza, Tudela, Pamplona, and so to Bayonne; and in the third and last I went by Bayonne to Pamplona, Tudela, Tarazona, Sig?enza, Guadalajara, Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Avila, Salamanca, Zamora, Benavente, Leon, Astorga, Lugo, Santiago, la Coru?a, and thence back by Valladolid and Burgos to San Sebastian and Bayonne.
Tours such as these have, I think, given me a fair chance of forming a right judgment as to most of the features of Spanish architecture; but it were worse than foolish to suppose that they have been in the slightest degree exhaustive, for there are large tracts of country which I have not visited at all, others in which I have seen one or two only out of many towns which are undoubtedly full of interesting subjects to the architect, and others again in which I have been too much pressed for time. Yet I hardly know that I need apologize for my neglect to see more when I consider that, up to the present time, so far as I know, no architect has ever described the buildings which I have visited, and indeed no accurate or reliable information is to be obtained as to their exact character, or age, or history. The real subject for apology is one over which I have had, in truth, no control. The speed with which I have been compelled to travel, and the rapidity with which I have been obliged to sketch and take dimensions of everything I have seen, have often, no doubt, led to my making errors, for which, wherever they exist, I am sincerely sorry. In truth, the work I undertook was hardly the mere relaxation from my ordinary artistic labour for which it was first of all intended, and has been increased not a little by the labour which I have undertaken in the attempt to fix by documentary evidence, where possible, the ages of the various parts of the buildings I have described.
It will be observed that I have not visited the extreme south of Spain; and this was from the first a settled purpose with me. We have already been treated almost to surfeit with accounts of the Moorish remains at Granada, Seville, Cordoba, and other places in the south; but beside this my anxiety was to see how the Christians and not how the Moors built in Spain in the middle ages, and I purposely, therefore, avoided those parts of the country which during the best period of mediaeval art were not free from Moorish influence. The pages of this book are the best evidence I can give of the wisdom of such a decision, and I need only say here that I was more than satisfied with the purity and beauty of the Christian architecture of Spain, and that I have no hesitation in the advice which I give to others to follow in my track and to make good the deficiencies in my investigations, of which I am so thoroughly conscious.
It was after a hurried journey by night to Paris, and thence the next night on to Bordeaux, that I arrived, after a few hours spent in that interesting old city, at the end of the second day in Bayonne. Here my first work was to furnish myself with money and places in the Spanish diligence; and in both these matters I received my first lesson in one peculiarity of Spaniards--that of using foreign words in another and different sense from that to which we are accustomed. Napoleons are said to be the best coin for use in Spain, and I furnished myself with them only to discover, when it was too late, that in Spain a Napoleon means a silver five-franc piece, and that my gold Napoleons were all but useless out of Madrid. And again, when I asked for places in the coup? of the diligence, I found that I was really trying to secure seats in the banquette--the coup? being called the berlina, and the banquette the coup?.
At Bayonne there is not very much to be seen beyond the cathedral, the river crossed by the Duke for his attack on Soult, and a charming view from the top of the cathedral tower of the lower ranges of the Pyrenees. The Trois Couronnes is the most conspicuous peak, and its outline is fine; but here, as generally in the distant views of the chain which I obtained, there is a lack of those snow peaks which lend so much beauty to all Alpine views. The exterior of the cathedral has been almost entirely renewed of late, and a small army of masons was busy in the cloister on the south side of the choir. It is to be hoped that the stoppage of the funds so lavishly spent upon the French cathedrals may happen before the Bayonne architects and masons have come round to the west end. At present there is a savage picturesqueness about this which is beyond measure delightful, whilst the original arrangement of the doorways and porches on the west and south, with enormous penthouse roofs over them, is just so far open to conjecture and doubt as to be best left without very much alteration. The general character of the interior of the cathedral is only moderately good, the traceries of the lofty traceried triforium and the great six-light windows of the clerestory in the nave being unusually complicated for French work. The choir is of late thirteenth century work, very short, with five chapels in the chevet.
In the afternoon we followed the stream and drove to Biarritz. A succession of vehicles of every kind, crowded with passengers, gave strong evidence of the attractions either of the place or else of the Emperor and Empress, who had been there for a week or two; and the mob of extravagantly dressed ladies, French and English, who thronged the bathing-places and the sandy plain in front of the Villa Eug?nie, accounted for the enormous black boxes under which all the vehicles seemed to groan. The view from the cliffs on the western side of Biarritz is strikingly beautiful, embracing as it does the long range of the Pyrenees descending to the sea in a grand mass above Fuenterrabia, and prolonged as far as the eye could reach along the coast of Biscay. The next morning we left Bayonne at four o'clock for Burgos. We had seats in the coup?, the occupants of the berlina on this journey being a son of Queen Christina, with his bride. In Spain every one seems to travel by the diligence; you seldom meet a private carriage; there are no posting arrangements; and owing to the way in which the diligences on the great roads are crowded, it is very difficult indeed to stop on the road without running great risk of indefinite delays in getting places again.
There is a rather characteristic church of late date here. It stands on ground sloping steeply down towards the river, and has a bald look outside, owing to the almost complete absence of window openings, what there are being small, and very high above the floor. The plan is peculiar: it has a nave and chancel, and aisles of two bays to the eastern half of the nave, so that the western part of the nave corresponds in outline very nearly with the chancel. There is a tower at the west end of the south aisle. The groining is many-ribbed, and illustrates the love of the later Spanish architects for ogee surface-ribs, which look better on a plan of vaulting than they do in execution. The east end is square, but the vaulting is apsidal, the angles of the square end being cut across by domical pendentives below the vaulting. The most remarkable feature is the great width of the nave, which is about fifty-four feet from centre to centre of the columns, the total length not being more, I think, than a hundred and fifty feet. The church floor was strewed with rushes, and in the evening when I visited it the people stole in and out like ghosts upon this quiet carpeting. This church was rebuilt in A.D. 1508, and is of course not a very good example of Spanish Gothic.
Close to the bridge, on the opposite side of the Ebro to Miranda, is a church of which I could just see by the dim light of the morning that it was of some value as an example of Romanesque and Early Pointed work. The apse, of five sides, has buttresses with two half-columns in front of each, and an arch thrown across from buttress to buttress carries the cornice and gives a great appearance of massiveness to the window arches with which it is concentric. The south doorway is of very fine Early Pointed style, with three shafts on each jamb, and five orders in the arch.
A few miles before our arrival at Burgos, we caught the first sight of the three spires of the cathedral; and presently the whole mass stood out grandly, surmounted by the Castle hill on the right. One or two villages with large churches of little interest were passed, the great Carthusian Convent of Miraflores was seen on the left, and then, passing a short suburb, we stopped at the Fonda de la Rafaela; and after an hour spent in recovery from dust, dirt, and horrid hunger, betook ourselves to the famous Cathedral, with no little anxiety as to the result of this first day of ecclesiologizing in Spain.
The railroad, which is now open to Burgos, follows very much the same line as the old road. As far as Miranda the scenery is generally very beautiful, and here there is a junction with the wonderfully-engineered railway to Bilbao, which is continued again on the other side until it joins the Pamplona and Tudela Railway near the latter city. It is therefore a very good plan to enter Spain by the steamboat from Bayonne to Bilbao, to come thence by railway, join the main line at Miranda, and so on to Burgos, or else by the valley of the Ebro to Tudela and Zaragoza. The passage of the Pancorbo defile by the railway is even finer than by the road; and for the remainder of the distance to Burgos the traveller's feeling must be in the main one of joy at finding himself skimming along with fair rapidity over the tame country, in place of loitering over it in a tiresome diligence.
BURGOS.
There are some views of Burgos Cathedral which are constantly met with, and upon which I confess all my ideas of its style and merits had been founded, to their no little detriment. The western steeples, the central lantern, and the lantern-like roof and pinnacles of the chapel of the Constable at the east end, are all very late in date--the first of the latest fifteenth century, and the others of early Renaissance work; and their mass is so important, their character so picturesque, and their detail so exuberantly ornate, that they have often been drawn and described to the entire exclusion of all notice of the noble early church, out of which they rise. The general scheme of the ground-plan of the cathedral is drawn with considerable accuracy in the illustration which I give of it. The fabric consists of a thirteenth-century church, added to somewhat in the fourteenth century, altered again in the fifteenth, and even more in the sixteenth century. The substratum, so to speak, is throughout of the thirteenth century, but the two western steeples, with their crocketed and perforated spires, the gorgeous and fantastic lantern over the crossing, and the lofty and sumptuous monumental chapel at the east end, are all later additions, and so important in their effect, as at first sight to give an entirely wrong impression both of the age and character of the whole church. The various dates are, as well as the scale will admit, explained by the shading of the plan. The early church seems to have consisted of a nave and aisles of six bays, deep transepts, and a choir and aisles, with apses and chapels round it. The transepts probably had chapels on the east, of which one still remains in the north transept; but this is the only original chapel, none of those round the chevet having been spared. Externally, the two transept fronts are the only conspicuous portions of the old church, but, on mounting to the roof, the flying buttresses, clerestory windows, and some other parts, are found still little damaged or altered. Never was a church more altered for the worse after its first erection than was this. It is now a vast congeries of chapels and excrescences of every shape and every style, which have grown round it at various dates, and, to a great extent, concealed the whole of the original plan and structure; and of these, the only valuable Mediaeval portions are the cloisters and sacristies, which are, indeed, but little later in date than the church, and two of the chapels on the north side of the chevet, one of which is original, and the other at any rate not much altered. The rest of the additions are all either of the latest Gothic, or of Renaissance.
The principal entrances to this church of "Santa Maria la Mayor" are at the west end and in the north and south transepts--the two last original, the former a modern alteration of the old fabric, made only a few years ago, and of the meanest kind. The Archbishop's palace occupies the space on the south side of the nave; and the ground on which the whole group of buildings stands, slopes so rapidly from the south up to the north, that on the south side a steep and picturesque flight of steps leads up to the door, whilst on the north, on the contrary, the door is some fifteen feet above the floor, and has to be reached by an elaborate flight of winding steps from the transept. Owing to the rapid rise of the ground, and to the way in which the church is surrounded by houses, or by its own dependent buildings, it is very difficult to obtain any good near views of it, with the exception of that of the west end from the Plaza in front of it; but the views from the Prado, from the opposite side of the river, and from the distant hills and country, are all very fine; and it must be allowed that in them the picturesque richness of the later additions to the fabric produces a very great effect.
Having thus given some general idea of the plan of the church, I will now describe its parts more in detail.
On entering the nave at the west end, the effect of the arcades, triforia, and clerestory is very fine, though much damaged by the arrangement of the choir, which, as in most Spanish churches, is brought down into the nave, enclosed with close walls or screens, and entered only from the transept at its eastern end. An altar is placed against the western entrance of the choir, and the nave being only six bays in length, and equally divided, the view is--it may easily be imagined--very confined and cramped. Otherwise, the architectural features of the nave are thoroughly good. The original scheme evidently included two western steeples, the piers which support them--large clusters of engaged shafts--being larger than any of the others, yet of the same date. The nave columns are circular, with eight engaged shafts around them. The bases are circular, finished on squares, with knops of foliage filling in the spandrels. The abaci are all square in plan, and both bases and caps are set at right angles to the direction of the arches they support. One of the smaller columns carries the pier arch, the other three carry the transverse and diagonal groining ribs, whilst the wall ribs are carried on shafts on each side of the clerestory window. The pier arches are of ordinary early-pointed character, and well moulded. There is not much variety in the general design of the nave and transepts, though some changes of detail occur. The triforium in both is very peculiar, as will be seen by the illustration which I give of one bay of the nave. The openings vary considerably in number, and the piercings of the tympanum and in the enclosing arch are also singularly arranged. I know nothing like this singular triforium elsewhere. It is certainly more curious than really beautiful, but at the same time it is valuable, as seeming to prove this part of the work to be from the hand of a native artist. The enclosing label is in all cases a segment of a circle, and filled with sculptured heads at short intervals apart. At first sight this triforium hardly seems to be of early date, having suffered by the addition of pinnacles covered with crockets in front of, and open traceried parapet walls between, the detached shafts on which the early traceries were carried; the result is, that one of the most striking features in the church is completely spoiled, and a general effect of very poor and tawdry design is felt more or less throughout the whole building.
The original clerestory still, in great part, remains; it is simple, but good and vigorous in style, and with but one special peculiarity in its detail. The windows are for the most part of two lights, with a quatrefoiled circle in the head; and the peculiarity referred to here is the omission to carry the chamfer round the extrados of the arched heads to the lights or the circle; the effect produced is peculiar, the tracery not looking as if it were properly constructed, but as if the wheel had been loosely placed within the arch without having any proper connection with it. I have noticed the same arrangement in a church at Valladolid, and it must, I think, be regarded either as a freak of the workmen, or more probably as the exhibition of some degree of ignorance of the ordinary mode of executing the mouldings in window traceries.
But here, with this one exception, as in almost all the details throughout the original work of this cathedral, there is little, if anything, to show that we are not in France, and looking at some of its best and purest thirteenth-century Gothic. There is no trace of Moorish or other foreign influence, the whole work being pure, simple, and good. In the aisles two only of the original windows still remain, and these show that they were lighted originally by a series of well-shaped lancets, with engaged jamb-shafts inside. The vaults are all slightly domical in section; the diagonal ribs generally semi-circular, as also are the wall-ribs. The masonry of the cells is arranged in lines parallel to the ridge, but considerably distorted near the springing.
It will be as well, perhaps, to leave the description in detail of the early features of the exterior for the present, and to complete the notice of the interior first of all.
And here it is necessary to say a few words as to the cathedral arrangements commonly seen in Spain, which exist in full force at Burgos, and must be constantly referred to in all my notices of Spanish churches.
At Burgos the Coro occupies the three eastern bays of the nave, and the only entrance to it is through a doorway in its eastern screen. The stalls, screens, and fittings are all of early Renaissance work, and were the gift of Bishop Pascual de Fuensanta, between A.D. 1497 and A.D. 1512. There are about eighty stalls, in two rows, returned at the ends, and very richly carved, over the lower stalls with subjects from the New, and over the upper stalls with subjects from the Old Testament. In the centre of the choir, concealed by the great desk for the books , lies a magnificent effigy of Bishop Maurice, the founder of the church. It is of wood, covered with metal plates, and very sumptuously adorned with jewels, enamels, and gilding. He was bishop from A.D. 1213 to A.D. 1238, and his effigy appeared to me to be very little later than the date of his death.
Bishop Maurice was buried in the church, and his monument was afterwards moved to the front of the Trascoro by Bishop Ampudia, before his death, in A.D. 1512. It has never been moved from the spot in which it was then placed, and yet, owing to the rearrangement of the stalls, it is now in the very midst of the Coro, and affords an invaluable piece of evidence of the fact already stated, that of old the stalls did not occupy their present place in the nave.
There is nothing else worthy of note in the Coro. Its floor is boarded, and a long passage about six feet wide, between rails, leads from its door through the choir to a screen in front of the high altar. The people occupy the choir, hemmed in between these rails and the parclose screens under the side arches. The altar has a late and uninteresting Retablo, in Pagan style, carved with large subjects and covered with gold. The steps to the altar are of white, black, and red marble, counterchanged; and at the entrance to the choir under the lantern are two brass pulpits or ambons, for the Epistoler and Gospeller, an admirable and primitive arrangement almost always preserved in Spanish churches.
The columns of the choir arches have been modernized, and there is consequently but little of the old structure visible on the inside, the Retablo rising to the groining, and concealing the arches of the apse. Between these arches sculptures in stone are introduced, which are said to have been executed by Juan de Borgo?a, in 1540. They are bold and spirited compositions in high relief, and give great richness of effect to the aisle towards which they face. The subjects are-- the Agony in the Garden; our Lord bearing His Cross; the Crucifixion; the Descent from the Cross and the Resurrection; the Ascension. Numbers 1 and 5 are not original, or at any rate are inferior to and different in style from the others.
The other chapel I believe to be the one remaining evidence of the original plan of the chevet; and, looking at it in connexion with the other portions of the work, and especially with the blank wall between which and the cloister the new sacristy is built, it seems pretty clear that originally there were only three chapels in the chevet, and all of them pentagonal in plan. Between these chapels and the transepts there would then have been two bays of aisle without side chapels, and on the eastern side of each of the transepts a small square chapel, one of which still remains. This plan tallies to some extent with that of the cathedral at Leon , and is in some respects similar to that of the French cathedrals of Amiens, Clermont, and some other places. In fact, the planning of this chevet is one of the proofs that the work was of French, and not of Spanish origin.
At the east end of the cathedral is a grand chapel, erected about A.D. 1487, by the Constable D. Pedro Fernandez de Velasco and his wife. This remarkable building was designed by an architect whose work we shall see again, and of whom it may be as well at once to say a few words. Juan de Colonia--a German by birth or origin, as his name shows--is said to have been brought to Burgos by Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena when he returned from the Council of Basle. There is evidence that he built the chapel of the great Carthusian monastery of Miraflores, on the hill just outside the town; and there is, I believe, but little doubt that he wrought here too. His work is very peculiar. It is essentially German in its endless intricacy and delicacy of detail, but has features which I do not remember to have seen in Germany, and which may fairly be attributed either to the Spaniards who worked under him, or to an attempt on his own part to accommodate his work to Spanish tastes.
A quaint little vestry is contrived outside the south-east angle of the octagon, and in it are preserved some pieces of plate of the same age as the chapel. Among these are--
A chalice of silver gilt, enamelled in white and red, with its bowl richly set with pearls strung on a wire: the knop is richly enamelled, and its edge set with alternate emeralds and sapphires; whilst the sexfoiled foot is in the alternate compartments engraved with coats-of-arms, and set with sapphires. It is a very gorgeous work, and, though all but Renaissance in style, still very finely executed.
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