Read Ebook: Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain by Street George Edmund

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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.

A pax; the Blessed Virgin Mary holding our Lord, and seated on a throne covered with pearls and other jewels. The figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary is enamelled with blue, and our Lord is in ivory. The old case for this is preserved, and has a drawer below it which contains papers referring to the gift of it.

Another small pax; a flat plate enamelled, with crocketed pinnacles at the side, but no figure.

A fine thurible for incense, in the form of a ship, with Adam and Eve on the lid.

A very good flagon, richly chased all over, sexfoil in section, and with a particularly good spout and handle.

There are many other chapels, as will be seen by reference to the plan, added to various parts of this cathedral, though none of them are of anything like the same importance as that of the Constable, which gives, indeed, much of its character to the exterior of the whole church, so large, lofty, and elaborate is it. On the south side of the south aisle of the nave is one which in the treatment of its groining cells, which are filled with tracery, seems to show the hand of Juan de Colonia; whilst another chapel on the north side of the nave, partly covered with a late Gothic vault, and partly with a dome, may be either a later work of his, or, more probably, of his son Simon de Colonia; another to the east of this is remarkable for the cusps, which come from the moulded ribs and lie on the surface of the vaulting cells in a way I do not remember to have seen before. In these chapels we see the dying out of the old art in every stage of its progress; and I think that both here and elsewhere in Spain the change was much more gradual than it was in most other parts of Europe, many of the early Renaissance masters having availed themselves largely of the picturesque detail of their predecessors' work.

The central lantern was the last great work executed in this cathedral, and its history must be given somewhat at length, as it is of much interest. In the Royal Library at Madrid there is preserved a MS., from which we learn that the "crossing" of the cathedral fell on the 4th of March, 1539; and that Felipe de Borgo?a, "one of the three 'maestros' who in the time of our Emperor came to our Spain, from whom we have learned perfect architecture and sculpture, though in both they say he had the advantage over the others," was intrusted with the execution of the new work erected in its place. This Cimborio or lantern was completed, according to this MS., in December, A.D. 1567, Maestro Vallejo being mentioned as having wrought at the work under Felipe de Borgo?a; Cean Bermudez, without giving his authorities, says, that the Bishop , on the fall of the "crucero," summoned Felipe de Borgo?a from Toledo, where he was at work with Berruguete on the stalls, to superintend the cathedral architects Juan de Vallejo and Juan de Casta?eda. Maestro Felipe seems to have died in A.D. 1543, so that it is probable that after all most of the work was done after his death by Juan de Vallejo, who was sufficiently distinguished to be consulted with the architects of Toledo, Seville, and Leon about the building of the new cathedral at Salamanca in A.D. 1512, and had also, between the years A.D. 1514-1524, built the very Renaissance-looking gateway which opens from the east side of the north transept into the Calle de la Pellegria. The whole composition of this lantern is Gothic and picturesque; yet there is scarce a portion of it which does not show a most strange mixture of Pagan and Gothic detail. The piers which support it are huge, ungainly cylinders, covered with carving in low relief, and everywhere there is that combination of heaviness of parts and intricacy of detail, which in all ages marks the inferior artist. I cannot help lamenting much, therefore, the fall of the old work in A.D. 1539. There is no evidence, so far as I know, as to what it was that fell, but the nearly coeval church of Las Huelgas has a fine simple lantern, and it is probable that some such erection existed in the cathedral, and that Bishop Luis de Acu?a y Osorio raised it, and, by increasing its weight, caused its fall. The central lantern is so completely a feature of English buildings, or of those built in lands over which our kings also ruled, that any evidence of their early existence here would have been most valuable, seeing how close the connexion was at the time of its erection between the families of the kings of Castile and of England.

The groined roofs next to the lantern, on all sides, were of necessity rebuilt at the same time, and with detail quite unlike that of the original vault.

The exterior of the cathedral may be described at less length than the interior, presenting, as it does, fewer alterations of the original fabric, and much of what has been said of the one necessarily illustrating the other also.

The western doors are three in number, but have been completely modernized. Of old the central door, "del Pardon," had effigies of the Assumption, with angels and saints; the northern door "the mystery of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin;" and the southern door her coronation. Above the side doorways the two steeples rise, whilst in the centre is a finely-traceried rose-window, which lights the nave; and above this two lofty traceried openings, each of four lights, with effigies of saints standing one under each light, the whole forming a screen connecting the steeples, and entirely masking the roof. The steeples, up to this level, are of the original foundation, much altered in parts, and now put to strange uses, their intermediate stages being converted into dwelling-houses, and lively groups of cocks and hens being domesticated on a sort of terrace a hundred feet from the floor. The upper part of the towers and the spires was added in the fifteenth century, by Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena , who employed Juan de Colonia to design them. German peculiarities do not gain in attractiveness by being exported to Spain, and this part of Juan de Colonia's work is certainly not a success. Nothing can be less elegant than the termination of the spires, which, instead of finishing simply and in the usual way, are surrounded near the top by an open gallery, and then terminated with the clumsiest of finials. This work was commenced in A.D. 1442, and when the bishop died in A.D. 1456, one spire was finished, and the other, being well advanced, was soon completed under Bishop Luis Acu?a y Osorio, the founder also of the central lantern. Between the two towers is a figure of the Blessed Virgin, with the words "Pulcra es et decora." On the upper part of the towers, "Ecce Agnus Dei," and "Pax vobis;" and on the spires, "Sancta Maria," and "Jesus." These words are in large stone letters, with the spaces round them pierced.

The detail of the spires is coarse, and the open stonework traceries with which they are covered are held together everywhere by ironwork, most of which appeared to me to have been added since the erection. The crockets are enormous, projecting two feet from the angles of the spires, curiously scooped out at the top to diminish their weight, and with holes drilled through them to prevent the lodgement of water. The bells are, I think, the most misshapen I ever saw; and, as if to prove that beauty of all kinds is sympathetic, they are as bad in sound as they are in form!

The north transept differs but little from the other. The doorway--De Los Apostoles--is reached from the transept floor by an internal staircase of no less than thirty-eight steps , and the whole front is of course much less lofty than that of the south transept, owing to the great slope of the ground up from south to north. Above the doorway is an early triplet, and above this the roof-screen and pinnacles, the same as in the other transept. The doorway has in the tympanum our Lord, seated, with St. Mary and St. John on either side, and angels with the instruments of the Passion above and on either side. Below is St. Michael weighing souls, with the good on his left, and the wicked on his right. The orders of the archivolt have-- seraphim, angels, and figures rising from their graves: and the jambs have figures of the twelve apostles.

The ascent to the roofs discloses the remaining early features. These are the clerestory windows, and the double flying buttresses, of which I give an illustration. The water from the main roofs is carried down in a channel on the flying buttresses and discharged by gurgoyles. There are some sitting figures of beasts added in front of the buttresses which are not original. The parapet throughout is an open trefoiled arcade, with an angel standing guard over each buttress. The detail of the clerestory windows is very good; they are of two lights, with a cusped circle above, and a well-moulded enclosing arch. The windows in the apse are built on the curve. The capitals of the shafts in and under the flying buttresses are well carved, and there is a good deal of dog-tooth enrichment. At the back of the screen-walls, in front of the roofs of the nave and transepts, is seen the old weather-moulding marking the line of the very steep-pitched roof , and the stones forming which are so contrived as to form steps leading up to the ridge, and down again to the opposite gutter. In the transept, pinnacles take the place of the angels over the buttresses, and their design is very piquant and original. The moulded stringcourse at the base of these pinnacles is of a section often seen in French work, and never, I believe, used by any but French workmen.

All the steep roofs have long since vanished, and in their place are flat roofs, covered with pantiles laid loosely and roughly, and looking most ruinous. It may well be a question, I think, whether the steep roofs were ever erected. The very fact that they were contemplated in the design and construction of the stonework, appears to me to afford evidence of the design not having been the work of a Spaniard: and it is of course possible that, at the first, the native workmen may have put up a roof of the flat pitch, with which they were familiar, instead of the steep roofs for which the gables were planned. But, assuming that the steep roofs were erected, they must, no doubt, have been damaged by the fall of the lantern in 1539, and as it was reconstructed with reference to roofs of the pitch we now see, the roofs must have been altered at the latest by that time.

It is quite worth while to ascend to the roofs, if only to see what is, perhaps, the most charming view in the whole church; that, namely, which is obtained from the south-east angle of the lantern, looking down into the cloister, above the traceries of which rise the quaint pinnacles and parapets of the old sacristy, and the great angle pinnacles of the cloister itself, whilst beyond are seen the crowded roofs of the city, the all but dry bed of the Arlanzon dividing it in two parts, and beyond, on the one side, the steeple of the Convent of Las Huelgas rising among its trees, and on the other the great chapel of Miraflores, crowning a dreary, dusty, and desolate-looking hill in the distance.

One of the doors on the east side of the cloister opens into the old sacristy, a grand room about forty-two feet square, the groining of which is octagonal, with small three-sided vaulting bays filling in the angles between the square and the octagon. The corbels supporting the groining shafts are very quaintly carved with the story of a knight battling with lions.

To the south of this sacristy is another groined chamber, in which is kept the coffer of the Cid, and where the groining ribs are painted in rich colour for about three feet from the centre boss. A door out of this leads into the Chapter-house, a room with a flat wooden ceiling of Moresque character. It is made in parqueterie of coloured woods arranged in patterns with gilt pendants, and the cornice is of blue and white majolica, inlaid in the walls: the combination of the whole is certainly very effective. East of these rooms were others, of which traces still remain on the outside; but they have been entirely destroyed, and streets now form, on the east and on the south, the boundaries of the church and its dependent buildings. Advantage was taken of the rise of the ground to make a second cloister below that which I have been describing. In the centre of the enclosure stands a cross, but the arches are built up, and the cloister is now used for workshops, so that there is here none of that air of beauty which the gardened cloisters of Spain usually possess. In the north-west angle of this lower story is a sacristy, reached by a staircase from one of the choir chapels, and still in use for it.

I have now in a general way gone over the whole of this very interesting church, and have said enough, I hope, to prove that popular report has never overrated its real merits, though no doubt it has regarded too much those points only of the fabric which to my eye seemed to be least worthy of praise--the late additions to it rather than the old church itself. As to the charm of the whole building from every point of view there cannot be two opinions. It has in a large degree that real picturesqueness which we so seldom see in French Gothic interiors, whilst at the same time it still retains much of that fine Early Pointed work which could hardly have been the work of any but one who knew well the best French buildings of his day; whoever he was--and amid the plentiful mention of later artists I have looked in vain for any mention of him--he was no servile reproducer of foreign work. The treatment of the triforium throughout is evidently an original conception; and it is to be noted that the dog-tooth enrichment is freely used, and that the bells of the capitals throughout are octagonal with concave sides. The crocketing of the pinnacles is, I believe, quite original; and the general planning and construction of the building is worthy of all praise. Nor was the sculptor less worthy of praise than the architect. The carving of foliage in the early work is good and very plentiful; the figured sculpture is still richer, and whether in the thirteenth-century transept doors, the fourteenth-century cloisters, or the fifteenth-century Retablos, is amazingly good and spirited. The thirteenth-century figures are just in the style of those Frenchmen who always conveyed so riant and piquant a character both of face and attitude to their work. The later architects all seem to have wrought in a fairly original mode; and even where architects were brought from Germany, there was some influence evidently used to prevent their work being a mere repetition of what was being done in their own land; and so aided by the admirable skill of the Spanish artists who worked under them, the result is much more happy than might have been expected. Much, no doubt, of the picturesque effect of such a church is owing to the way in which it has been added to from time to time: to the large number, therefore, of personal interests embodied in it, the variety of styles and parts each of them full of individuality, and finally to the noble memorials of the dead which abound in it. In France--thanks to revolutions and whitewash without stint--the noblest churches have a certain air of baldness which tires the eye of an Englishman used to our storied cathedrals: but in Spain this is never the case, and we may go to Burgos, as we may anywhere else in the land, certain that we shall find in each cathedral much that will illustrate every page of the history of the country, if well studied and rightly read.

There is one point in which for picturesque effect few countries can vie with Spain--and this is the admission of light. In her brilliant climate it seems to matter not at all how many of the windows are blocked up or destroyed: all that results is a deeper shadow thrown across an aisle, or a ray of light looking all the brighter by contrast; and, though it is often a hard matter to see to draw inside a church on the brightest day, it is never too dark for comfort, and one comes in from the scorching sun outside and sits down in the darkest spot of the dark church with the utmost satisfaction. I saw an evidence here one night of the natural aptitude of the people for such effects, in the mode of lighting up the cathedral for an evening service in a large chapel at the east end. There was one lantern on the floor of the nave, another in the south transept, and the light burning before the altar: and in the large side chapel was a numerous congregation, some sitting on the floor, some kneeling, some standing, whilst a priest, holding a candle in his hand, read to the people from the pulpit. In this chapel the only other light was from the lighted candles on the altar. The whole church was in this way just enough lighted to enable you to see your way, and to avoid running against the cloaked forms that trod stealthily about; and the effect would have been inexpressibly solemn, save for the occasional intrusion of a dog or a cat, who seem to be always prowling about, and not unfrequently fighting, in Spanish churches.

Leaving the other churches and buildings of Burgos for the present, let us now cross the Arlanzon by one of its many bridges, and presently striking to the left we shall come upon the well-worn path by the side of the convent-stream, which in less than a mile from the city brings us to a postern of Las Huelgas.

If I am correct in attributing this peculiar church to the Angevine influence of the Queen, I prove at the same time a most important point in the history of the development of style in Spain. The planning of the church at Las Huelgas influenced largely the architects of Burgos, the capital of Castile and Leon. The groining of the only original chapel in the transept of the cathedral is a reproduction of the octopartite vault of the lantern at Las Huelgas; and one may fairly suspect that so, too, was the original lantern of the cathedral. Then, again, in a fourteenth-century chapel, north of the choir of the cathedral, we see the same device adopted for obtaining an octagonal vault over a square chamber; and again in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in a chapel on the south of the nave, in the old sacristy, and finally in the all but Renaissance chapel of the Constable, we have the Spanish octagonal vault, supported on pendentives, evidently copied by the German architect from the pendentives of the Romanesque churches on the Rhine. In these Burgalese examples we have a typal vault which is extensively reproduced throughout Spain, and which I last saw at Barcelona, in work of the sixteenth century. It is a type of vault, in its later form, almost peculiar to Spain, and when filled in with tracery in the cell, I believe quite so. And it is undoubtedly more picturesque and generally more scientific in construction than our own late vaults, and infinitely more so than the thin, wasted-looking vaults of the French flamboyant style.

But to proceed with my notice of the church of Las Huelgas. The nave is groined throughout with a quadripartite vault; but beyond this I can say but little, as it is screened off from the church for the use of the nuns, and the only view of it is obtained through the screen. The main arches between the nave and aisles are very simple, of two orders, the inner square, the outer moulded. Above these is a string-course level with the springing of the groining, and then a clerestory of long, simple lancet windows, the whole forming a noble and impressive interior. Above the nuns' stalls on the south I noticed a good fifteenth-century organ, with pipes arranged in a series of stepped compartments, and painted shutters of the same shape; below the principal range of pipes those of one stop are placed projecting horizontally from the organ. This is an almost universal arrangement in Spanish organs, and is always very picturesque in its effect, and I believe in the case of trumpet-stops very useful, though somewhat costly.

The detail generally of all the architecture here is very good, and in particular nothing can be more minute and delicate in execution than some of the sculpture of foliage in the eastern chapels, where also, as is frequently the case in early Spanish buildings, the dog-tooth enrichment is freely introduced wherever possible. The design of the interior of the choir is very good; below are lancet windows, with semi-circular inside arches; and above, lancets with double internal jamb-shafts, very picturesquely introduced high up in the walls, and close to the groining. I could only get a glimpse of the exterior of the apse, owing to the high walls which completely enclose the convent on the east. It has simple but good buttresses, but otherwise there seems nothing worthy of note. The rest of the exterior is, however, very interesting. The general view which I give shows the extremely simple and somewhat English-looking west front; the gateway and wall, with its Moorish battlements, dividing an inner court from the great court north of the church; and the curious rather than beautiful steeple. An arched bell-cot rises out of the western wall of the lantern, and a tall staircase-turret out of the western wall of the north transept. The cloister, which is carried all along the north aisle of the nave of the church, is very simple, having two divisions between each buttress, the arches being carried on shafts, coupled in the usual early fashion, one behind the other. A very rich first-pointed doorway opens into the second bay from the west of this cloister, and a much simpler archway, with a circular window over it, into the fifth, and at its east end a most ingenious and picturesque group is produced by the contrivance of a covered passage from the cloister to the projecting transept-porch. The detail here is of the richest first-pointed, very delicate and beautiful, but, apparently, very little cared for now. The cloister is entirely blocked up and converted into a receptacle for lumber, but I was able to see that it is groined. The rose window in the transept-porch, with doubled traceries and shafts, set one behind the other, with fine effect, the elaborate corbel-tables, and the doorway to the smaller porch--rich with chevron and dog-tooth--ought to be specially noticed: their detail being tolerably convincing as to their French origin. There are some curious monuments inside the transept-porch, which I was not able to examine properly, as when I went to Las Huelgas a second time, in order to see them, I found the church locked for the day. To see such a church properly it is necessary to rise with the lark; for after ten or eleven in the morning it is always closed.

There is a good simple gateway of the thirteenth century leading into the western court of the convent, but otherwise I could see nothing old, though I daresay the fortunate architect who first is able to examine the whole of the buildings will find much to reward his curiosity. For there is not only a very fine early cloister, but also, if Madoz is to be trusted, a chapter-house, the vaulting of which is supported on four lofty columns, and which is probably, therefore, a square chamber with nine vaulting bays.

The king seems to have founded a hospital for men at the same time as, and in connexion with, the convent; but I saw nothing of this, and I do not know whether it still exists.

The convent seems to have been quite independent of the Bishop, save that each abbess after her election went to ask him to bless the house, when he always answered by protesting that his consent to do so was in no wise to be construed in any sense derogatory to his power, or as binding on his successors. I observe that the abbesses here were elected for life until A.D. 1593, but that from that time they have held office for three years only; though in a few instances they have been re-elected for a second such term.

Let us follow them thither. The walk is dreary enough on this hot September day, and terribly deep in dust; but yet, as it rises up the slope of the hills on the side of the river opposite to the cathedral and city, good views are obtained of both. It is but a couple of miles to the convent, which stands desolately by itself, and never was there a spot which, in its present state, could less properly be called Miraflores, where not even a blade of grass is to be seen. The church stands up high above all the other buildings, but its exterior is not attractive; its outline is somewhat like, though very inferior to that of Eton College chapel, and its detail is all rather poor. The windows, placed very high from the floor, are filled with flamboyant tracery, the buttresses are plain, and the pinnacles and parapet quite Renaissance in their character, and are, no doubt, additions to the original fabric. The west gable is fringed with cusping--a very unhappy scheme for a coping-line against the sky! A court at the west end opens into the chapel by its west door, which is close to the main entrance to the convent; but we were taken round by several courts and quadrangles, one of them a cloister of vast size, surrounded by the houses of the monks. These are of fair size, each having two or three rooms below, and two above. Their entrance doorways are square-headed, quaintly cut up into a point in the centre of the lintel, and by the side of each door is a small hatch for the reception of food. Another smaller cloister, close to the south door of the church, has fair pointed windows, with their sills filled with red tiles, and edged with green tiles. Besides these remains, the only old work I saw was a good flat ceiling, panelled between the joists, and richly painted in cinquecento fashion. A good effect was produced here by the prevalence of white and red alternately in the patterns painted on the joists.

The chapel is entered from the convent by a door on the south side, in the third bay from the west. It consists of five bays and a polygonal apse, and is about 135 feet long, 32 wide, and 63 feet in height. The western bay is the people's nave, and is divided from the next by a metal screen. The second bay forms the Coro, and has stalls at the sides, and two altars on the east, one on each side of the doorway in the screen which separates the Coro from the eastern portion of the chapel. This last is fitted with five stalls on each side against the western screen, and with twenty on either side, all of them extremely rich in their detail: there is a continuous canopy over the whole, and very intricate traceries at the back of each stall.

A step at the east end of the stalls divides the sacrarium from the western part of the chapel; and nearly the whole of the space here is occupied by the sumptuous monument of the founder and his second wife, Isabel or "Elizabeth," as she is called in the inscription. In the north wall is the monument of the Infante Alfonso, their son; and against the south wall is a sort of throne with very lofty and elaborate canopy, which is said by the cicerone to be for the use of the priest who says mass. Finally, the east wall is entirely filled with an enormous Retablo. The groining throughout has, as is usually the case in late Spanish work in Burgos, a good many surface ribs, and enormous painted bosses at their intersections. These are so much undercut, so large, and so intricate in their design, that I believe they must be of wood, and not of stone. They are of very common occurrence, and always have an extravagant effect, being far too large and intricate for their position. The apse is groined in thirteen very narrow bays, and its groining ribs are richly foliated on the under side. Pagan cornices of plaster and whitewash have been freely bestowed everywhere, to the great damage of the walls, and to such an extent as to make the interior look cold and gloomy. The windows are filled with what looks like poor Flemish glass, though it may perhaps be native work, as the names of two painters on glass, Juan de Santillana and Juan de Valdivieso, are known as residents in Burgos at the end of the fifteenth century, about the time at which it must have been executed.

The monument of Juan and Isabel is as magnificent a work of its kind as I have ever seen--richly wrought all over. The heraldic achievements are very gorgeous, and the dresses are everywhere covered with very delicate patterns in low relief. The whole detail is of the nature of the very best German third-pointed work rather than of flamboyant, and I think, for beauty of execution, vigour and animation of design, finer than any other work of the age. The plan of the high tomb on which the effigies lie is a square with another laid diagonally on it. At the four cardinal angles are sitting figures of the four evangelists, rather loosely placed on the slab, with which they seem to have no connexion; the king holds a sceptre, the queen a book, and both lie under canopies with a very elaborate perforated stone division between the figures; round the sides of the tomb are effigies of kings and saints, figures of the Virtues, sculptured subjects, naked figures, and foliage of marvellous delicacy. A railing encloses the tomb. The whole is the work of Maestro Gil de Siloe; and from the Archives of the Church it appears that, in A.D. 1486, he was paid 1340 maravedis for the design of the work, that he commenced its execution in A.D. 1489, and completed it in A.D. 1493. The monument cost 442,667 maravedis, exclusive of the alabaster, which cost 158,252 maravedis.

About the same time the same sculptor executed the monument of Alfonso, son of Juan and Isabel, in the north wall of the sacrarium. This, though less ambitious than the other, is a noble work. It consists of a high tomb with a recessed arch over it, and pinnacles at the sides. The high tomb has a great shield held by angels, with men in armour on either side; under the arch above the Infante kneels at a Prie-Dieu. The arch is three-centred, edged with a rich fringe of foliage and naked figures; and between it and the ogee gable above it is a spirited figure of St. George and the Dragon. The side pinnacles have figures of the twelve apostles, and one in the centre the Annunciation.

The Retablo is no less worthy of notice. Its colour as well as its sculpture is of the richest kind. Below, on either side of the tabernacle , are St. John Baptist and S. Mary Magdalene, and subjects on either side of them; on the left the Annunciation, and S. Mary Magdalene anointing our Lord's feet, and on the right the Adoration of the Magi, and the Betrayal of our Lord; whilst beyond, Alfonso and Isabel kneel at faldstools, with their coats-of-arms above them. Above the Tabernacle is the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, and above this a grand circle entirely formed of clustered angels, in the centre of which is a great crucifix surmounted by the Pelican vulning her breast. Within this circle are four subjects from the Passion, and a King and a Pope on either side holding the arms of the Cross, which is completely detached from the background. On either side are S. John and S. Mary; and beside all these, a crowd of subjects and figures, pinnacles and canopies, which it is impossible to set down at length. The whole of this work was done by the same Gil de Siloe, assisted by Diego de la Cruz, at a cost of 1,015,613 maravedis, and was executed between A.D. 1496 and 1499. Behind the Retablo some of the old pavement remains, of encaustic tiles in blue, white, and red.

Having completed my notice of the three great buildings of Burgos and its neighbourhood, and which in their style and history best illustrate the several periods of Christian art, I now proceed to give some notes of the Conventual and Parish Churches, which are numerous and fairly interesting. In Burgos, however, as is so often the case on all parts of the Continent, the number of desecrated churches is considerable. The suppression of monasteries involved their desecration as a matter of course; and without religious orders it is obviously useless to have churches crowded together in the way one sees them here. I remember making a note of the relative position of three of these churches, which stand corner to corner without a single intervening house; and though this is an extreme case, the churches were no doubt very numerous for the population. Unluckily a desecrated church is generally a sealed book to an ecclesiologist. They are usually turned to account by the military; and soldiers view with proverbially jealous eyes any one who makes notes!

Just above the west front of the Cathedral is the little church of San Nicolas, mainly interesting for its Retablo, which, however, scarcely needs description, though it is gorgeously sculptured with the story, I think, of the patron. Its date is fixed by an inscription, which I give in a note. On either side are monuments of a type much favoured in Spain, and borrowed probably from Italy, of which the main feature is, that the figures lie on a sloping surface, and look painfully insecure. Here too I saw one of the first old western galleries that I met with in my Spanish journeys; and as I shall constantly have to mention their existence, position, and arrangement in parochial churches, it may be as well to say here, that at about the same date that choirs were moved westward into the naves of cathedrals, western galleries, generally of stone, carried on groining, and fitted up with stalls round three sides, with a great lectern in the centre, and organs on either side, were erected in a great number of parish churches. It cannot be doubted that in those days the mode of worship of the people was exactly what it is now; no one cared much if at all for anything but the service at the altar, and the choir was banished to where it would be least seen, least heard, and least in the way! At present it seems to me that one never sees any one taking more than the slightest passing notice of the really finely-performed service even in the cathedral choirs; whilst in contrast to this, in the large churches, with an almost endless number of altars, all are still used, and all seem to have each their own flock of worshippers; and though it is a constant source of pain and grief to an ever-increasing body of English Churchmen that the use of their own altars should be so lamentably less than it ever was in primitive days, or than it is now in any other branch of the Catholic Church, it is some comfort to feel that our people have tried to retain due respect for some of the other daily uses of the Church, inferior though they be. In Spain, though I was in parish churches almost every day during my journey, I do not remember seeing the western gallery in use more than once. Sometimes it has been my fate to meet with men who suppose that the common objection to galleries in churches is, that there is no old "authority" for them. Well, here in Spain there is authority without end; and I commend to those Anglicans who wish to revive or retain their use in England the curious fact, that the country in which we find it is one distinguished beyond all others by the very decided character of its Romanism, and the period in which they were erected there, one in which Rome was probably more hostile to such as they than any other in the whole course of her history.

The gallery of San Nicolas is less important than most of its class are; and there is indeed little to detain any one within its walls. Externally there is a low tower rising out of the west end of the south aisle. This has a fine third-pointed south doorway with an ogee crocketed canopy, and a belfry stage of two lancet-lights on each face, roofed with a flat roof of pantiles. The remainder of the church has been much altered; but a good flying-buttress remains on the south side, and one or two lancet-windows which convey the impression that the first foundation of the church must have been in the thirteenth century. The east wall is not square, but built so as to suit the irregular site. The whole church is ungainly and ugly on the exterior, and its planning and proportions neither picturesque nor scientific. It is, in short, one of those churches of which we have so many in England, from which nothing is to be learnt save on some small matter of detail; and the alterations of its roofs, windows, and walls have in the end left it an ungainly and uncouth outline, which is redeemed only by its picturesque situation on the slope of the hill just above the cathedral parvise, with which it groups, and from which it is well seen.

Following the steep path of the east end of San Nicolas, I soon reached the fine church of San Esteban. It stands just below the castle, the decaying walls of which surround the slope of melancholy hill which rises from its doorway; these, though now they look so incapable of mischief, yet effectually thwarted the Duke of Wellington. It is quite worth while to ascend the hill, if only for the view. San Esteban, shorn as it is--like all Spanish churches--of more than half its old external features, with pinnacles nipped off, parapets destroyed, windows blocked up, and roofs reduced from their old steep pitch to the uniform rough, ragged, and ruinous-looking flat of pantiles, which is universal here, forms, nevertheless, a good foreground for the fine view of the cathedral below it and the other points of interest in the town beyond. Yet these are fewer than would be expected in such a city, so long the capital of a kingdom and residence of a line of kings. There are no steeples worthy of remark save those of the cathedral, the churches are all, like San Esteban, more or less mutilated, and there is--as always in cities which have been great and now are poor--an air of misery and squalor about only too many of the buildings on which the eye first lights in these outskirts of the city.

I have not been so lucky as to find any record bearing in any way upon the erection of San Esteban, and I regret this the more, as its place among the churches of Burgos is no doubt next after the cathedral, and in all respects it is full of interest.

The ground plan will explain the general scheme of the building--a nave and aisles, ended at the east with three parallel apses, a cloister, and a large hall on the south of and opening into the cloister. The north side of the cloister has been much mutilated by the erection of chapels and a sacristy, whilst the north wall of the church is blocked up by low buildings built against it. The only good view of the exterior is that from the south-west. Spanish boys did their best to make sketching it impossible, yet their amusements were after all legitimate enough for their age, and it is very seldom in Spain that a sketcher is mobbed and annoyed in the way he commonly is in France or Italy when he ventures on a sketch in an at all public place.

The erection of this church may, I believe, be dated between A.D. 1280-1350; and to the earlier of these two periods the grand west doorway probably belongs. The tympanum contains, in its upper compartment, our Lord seated, with St. John the Evangelist, the Blessed Virgin and angels kneeling on either side--a very favourite subject with Burgalese sculptors of the period; below is the martyrdom of the patron saint, divided into three subjects: St. Stephen before the king; Martyrdom of St. Stephen, angels taking his soul from his body; and the devil taking the soul of his persecutor. The jambs have each three figures under canopies, among which are St. Stephen and St. Laurence. The doorway is built out in a line with the front of the tower buttresses, and above it a modern balustrade is placed in advance of the west window, which is a fine rose of twenty rays. This window at a little distance has all the effect of very early work; but upon close inspection its details and mouldings all belie this impression, and prove it to be certainly not earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century. The whole of the tracery is thoroughly geometrical, and the design very good. Above it is a lancet window on each face, and then the lower part only of a belfry window of two lights, cut off by one of the usual flat-pitched tiled roofs. A staircase turret is carried up in the south-west angle and finished with a weathering at the base of the belfry stage. The buttresses are all plain, and, as I have said, shorn of the pinnacles with which they were evidently intended to be finished.

This church seems to be always locked up, and I think it was here that the woman who lives in the cloister and shows the church told me that there was service in the church once only in the week; and certainly it had the air which a church misused in this way usually assumes.

We were admitted by the cloister, a small and much mutilated work of circa A.D. 1300. It opens by four arches into a large hall on its south side, which is groined at a higher level than the cloister. The groining of the cloister is good, and the ribs well moulded; but the window tracery is all destroyed, and most of the windows are blocked up. The central court is very small, as indeed is the whole work; but a cloister may be of any size, and in some of our many collegiate erections of the present day it would be as well to remember this, and emulate really and fairly the beautiful effects always attained by our forefathers in this way.

In the western wall of the cloister are two arched recesses for monuments, one of which has a coped tomb, with eight steps to the foot of the cross, which is carved upon its lid. The eastern side is later than the rest, and its groining probably not earlier than A.D. 1500.

Entering the church from hence we find a very solid, simple, and dignified building, spoilt indeed as much as possible by yellow wash, but still in other respects very little damaged. It is groined throughout, and the groining has the peculiarity of having ridge ribs longitudinally but not transversely. This is common in Spain; but it is impossible to see why one ridge should require it and the other not, and the only explanation is that possibly the architect wished to lead the eye on from end to end of the building. In the groining of an apse this ridge-rib in its western part always looks very badly, and jars with the curved lines of all the rest of the ribs. The columns of the nave arcades are circular, with eight smaller engaged shafts around them, those under the western tower being rather more elaborate and larger than the others. Here we see a clear imitation of the very similar planning of the cathedral nave. The planning of the east end is more interesting, because, whilst it has no precedent in the cathedral, it is one of the evidences we have of the connexion of the Spanish architecture of the middle ages with that of other countries, which we ought not to overlook. I have said something on this in speaking of the plan of Las Huelgas. Here, however, I do not think we can look in the same direction for the original type of plan; for, numerous as are the varieties of ground-plan which we see in France, there is one--the parallel-triapsidal--which we meet so seldom that we may almost say it does not occur at all. In Germany, on the other hand, it is seen everywhere, and there, indeed, it is the national plan: in Italy it is also found constantly. In Spain, however, it was quite as much the national ground-plan as it was in Germany; almost everywhere we see it, and in any case the fact is of value as proving that the Spaniards adopted their own national form of Gothic, and were not indebted solely to their nearest neighbours, the French, for their inspiration and education in architecture, though undoubtedly they owed them very much.

San Esteban is lighted almost entirely from windows set very high up in the walls. Those in the apses are in the position of clerestory windows, their sills being level with the springing of the groining. The consequence of this arrangement--a very natural one in a country where heat and light are the main things to be excluded from churches--was that a great unbroken space was left between the floor and the windows; and hence it happened that the enormous Retablos, rising seldom less than twenty feet, and often thirty, forty, or even sixty feet from the floors, naturally grew to be so prominent and popular a feature. In San Esteban the Retablos are none of them old, but doubtless take the place of others which were so.

The western gallery is so good an example of its class, that I think it is quite worthy of illustration. It is obviously an insertion of circa A.D. 1450, and is reached by a staircase of still later date at the west end of the south aisle. I cannot deny it the merit of picturesqueness, and the two ambons which project like pulpits at the north and south extremities of the front add much to its effect. The stalls are all arranged in the gallery in the usual fashion of a choir, with return stalls at the west end and a large desk for office books in the centre. The organ is on the north side in the bay east of the gallery, and is reached through the ambon on the Gospel side. This organ, its loft, and the pulpit against it are all very elaborate examples of Plateresque Renaissance work.

Of the fittings of the church two only require any notice, and both of them are curious. One is an iron lectern, just not Gothic, but of very fair design, and of a type that we might with advantage introduce into our own churches. The other is a wooden bier and herse belonging to some burial confraternity, and kept in the cloister; the dimensions are so small , that it was no doubt made for carrying a corpse without a coffin. One knows how in the middle ages this was the usual if not invariable plan, and as these herses are evidently still in use , it has possibly never been given up.

The main thing, I think, that struck me in the architecture of San Esteban, was the very early look of all its proportions and details compared to what seemed to be their real date, when examined more in detail and with the aid of mouldings, traceries, and the like; and its value consists mainly in the place it occupies among the buildings of Burgos, illustrating a period of which otherwise there would be very little indeed in the city.

From San Esteban I found my way first through the decayed-looking and uninteresting streets, and then among the ruined outskirts of the north-eastern part of the city, to the church of San Gil, situated very much in the same kind of locality as San Esteban, on the outskirts of the city. This church is just mentioned in 'Espa?a Sagrada' twice: first as being named, with ten other churches in Burgos, in a Bull of A.D. 1163; and subsequently, as having been built by Pedro de Camargo and Garcia de Burgos, with the approbation of Bishop Villacraces in A.D. 1399; and Don Diego de Soria, and his wife Do?a Catalina, are said to have rebuilt the Capilla mayor in A.D. 1586.

The Retablos of the two chapels, north and south of the choir, are very sumptuous works.

Against the north-west pier of the crossing there stands what is perhaps the most uncommon piece of furniture in the church, an iron pulpit. It is of very late date, but I think quite worthy of illustration. The support is of iron, resting on stone, and the staircase modern. The framework at the angles, top and bottom, is of wood, upon which the ironwork is laid. The traceries are cut out of two plates of iron, laid one over the other, and the ironwork is in part gilded, but I do not think that this is original. The canopy is of the same age and character, and the whole effect is very rich, at the same time that it is very novel. I saw other iron pulpits, but none so old as this.

I visited two or three other parish churches, but found little in them worth notice. San Lesmes is one of the largest, consisting of a nave with aisles, transepts, apsidal choir, and chapels added in the usual fashion. The window tracery is flamboyant, and the windows have richly moulded jambs, and are very German in their design. The south door is very large and rich, of the same style, and fills the space between two buttresses, on the angles of which are St. Gabriel and the Blessed Virgin. Close to San Lesmes are the church of San Juan, and another, the dedication of which I could not learn, whilst opposite it is the old Convent of San Juan, now converted into a hospital. The entrance is a great doorway, remarkable for the enormous heraldic achievements which were always very popular with the later Castilian architects. The church of San Juan is now desecrated; it is cruciform in plan, with a deep apsidal chancel, and seems to have had chapels on the east side of the transepts. The church is groined throughout, and its window tracery poor flamboyant work. San Lucas has a groined nave of three bays, and there is another church near it of the same character. They both appear to have been built at the end of the sixteenth century.

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