When the Toledans wore their famed steel, and damascene armour was the fashion and not a curiosity, the “discreet and noble males” Manrique so magnificently addresses, may have lived up to the high civic ideal of these verses, but it is much to be doubted if the modern Toledans, who no longer seek distraction in the excitement of excellent steel, and fashion paper-knives for books they never read, of damascene instead of exquisite armour, maintain this level of austere civic virtue.
To our lasting gratitude, Cardinal Quiroga, at the instance of the Augustines, ordered El Greco’s immortal and glorious picture of the “Burial of Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz.” It is no exaggeration to describe this picture as one of the greatest of Spain. One puts it only immediately below the
THE BURIAL OF THE COUNT OF ORGAZ
THE BURIAL OF THE COUNT OF ORGAZ
masterpieces of Velasquez. The Toledans went wild with admiration, and writing of it a century ago, Antonio Ponz describes their admiration as still unabated. At the time part of the excitement was due to the superb portraits of well-known personages, which the townspeople contemplated with ever fresh delight. We, who have not this interest in the picture, may wisely, nay, must enforcedly, follow their example to-day. “Since its appearance,” writes Ponz, “the city has never tired of admiring it, visiting it continually, always finding new beauties in it, and contemplating the life-like portraits of the great men of Toledo.”
How modern, how seizing, what a subtle, magnificent impressionist the man was! is the first surprised exclamation when confronted with all these living, speaking faces of old Spain. Faces so Spanish, so delicately and forcibly varied and individual in their maintenance of a rigid, racial type. Every shade of national character stands out separate and in union with the general expression: harsh pride, insane wilfulness, stupendous fanaticism, exalted and untender mysticism, a sensuality so dominant as to tread on cruelty, a delicate humour, an inflated self-consciousness, exquisite kindliness, morose indifference, the very genius of selfishness and a sterile sensibility. Did ever a canvas before so perfectly gather all the fugitive moods, all the underlying currents, all the grace and charm, the vices and defects of a single race, and give them complete stability in their wavering expression? This is to carry portraiture to the rarest perfection. Among these twenty or so living faces, there is not one that is insignificant or mediocre, not one that apart would not make a superb picture, not one that does not carry the enveloping stamp of moment, race and environment. In some the type is so unchanged that to-day in Spain such faces may be seen looking precisely as they did then; unaltered even by costume, so marked is the individuality, so seemingly imperishable the large strong utterance of the Castillian physiognomy. This picture has something of the eternal freshness of “Don Quixote.” There is the simple, unconscious stroke of Cervantes in the fashioning of these hidalgoes’ heads, something of his mild incomparable humour, something of his nobility and the underlying depth of sadness in his easy wit. No painter who was not both witty and humorous could observe so deeply, so wisely, with such an obvious kindliness of regard; could accentuate so suggestively, so delicately, national traits, and yet not break the consistent harmony of a solemn scene; could tell posterity so much with the most charming air of telling it nothing. “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz” proves El Greco something more than a complete artist; it proves his intellectual force, for here he brings all the distinguished qualities of the brain to the very different qualities of the painter’s eye and hand.
Of these latter it would be difficult to say too much. Look at the wonderful shadow of death in the livid grey of the corpse, and then at the brilliance of St Augustine’s episcopal robes! Examine above all the lovely head of the boy, St Stephen, not in the least Spanish, a dream of sweet and stainless youth, with warm-hued beauty to thrill the glance, and just enough of heaven about the young brown head to suggest the absent aureole. And from these fresh-tinted cheeks, so purely rounded, look at the two emaciated and pallid monks behind, and then down at little Acolyte, who has much more of the air of a proud and charming little princess, with a practised grace of gesture and an inherited dignity of glance than a church lad. Is it possible to paint more supremely four such different hours and moods of life—dawn, radiant morning, dull twilight, and cold night,—to unite in a higher degree the skill and power of a master? No wonder the enthusiastic sonneteer addressed him as “Miraculous Greek” and “Divine Greek.” This picture has indeed genius’s rare and inimitable touch of divinity. All else, with patience and talent, may be acquired but this, and had El Greco never painted anything else, by the “Burial” of Santo Tomé alone he would stand apart in the history of Spanish art, with the world’s select few.
It is a singular fact, as I have pointed out, that such a painter’s influence on the town he lived in should not be more marked in every way than references to the period would lead us to assume. He had pupils certainly, but we only hear of two, Luis Tristan, his favourite, and Fray Bautista Maino. Tristan has left a good deal of work in Toledo which is often taken to be El Greco’s in decline. Apart from the master’s, it is notable in its way, still and rather colourless; but a story told of master and pupil bears retelling as an excellent trait in El Greco. The one characteristic we are permitted to gather from the obscurity that envelopes the man, is a haughty conviction of the value of his art. There was no lack of confidence here, no feeble self-depreciation, no meek concern for the judgment of others. In all altercations between him and the purchasers, the purchasers were naturally the blockheads, and in no circumstance whatever could he possibly err, not even when he was convicted of wilfully contorting and dislocating the human body. He only went on seeing more and more crooked by a natural perversity. Now, not content to worship art and its rights in his own emphatic work, he taught his disciples to do likewise in theirs. This is his uncompromising method of teaching such a lesson.
The monks of La Sisla, a vanished powerful monastery of the middle ages, ordered of young Tristan a picture for their chapel. Tristan painted the picture and brought it to the abbot, claiming in payment two hundred dollars. The abbot, noting the painter’s youth, objected to the price, and said it was far too high. Tristan modestly protested, and referred the abbot to his master, who shortly called on El Greco at an hour when Tristan was working in his studio. He opened the interview by remarking that he believed there was a mistake in the terms demanded by Tristan. “What were they?” dryly asked El Greco. The abbot blandly named two hundred dollars. “A mistake,” cried El Greco, “I should think so indeed.” He jumped up and flung himself violently on the astounded youth, and began to thump him. “How comes it, you rascal, you could make such a mistake? How dare you ask such a sum as two hundred dollars for a picture worth five hundred? This will teach you to go about the world asking such prices and proving yourself an ass.” Thump, thump, and the unfortunate abbot looked on while the blows hailed on the shoulders of the too humble artist. “I buy that picture for five hundred dollars,” said El Greco to the abbot, when he had finished Tristan’s castigation, whereupon the abbot, who knew his man and was glad enough to get off quietly by the immediate payment to Tristan of five hundred instead of two, politely requested permission to keep the picture. Here was a master worth having. If he did use physical violence to his pupils, he paid a lordly price for the privilege, and in the reckoning it may be said the pupils were more than compensated for affront or wound.
In space so limited, it is not to be hoped to find room for mention of all El Greco’s pictures in Toledo. All I can endeavour to do is to indicate the best, and thus, perhaps, provoke in the reader by whom his work is ignored, a desire for fuller knowledge than I am able to impart. The first picture he painted here, the “Assumption” of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, was purchased by Don Sebastian of Bourbon, and though the copy in its place is not good, a fair idea of the picture might be obtained if the nuns had not the bad taste to place a large and unutterable atrocity in the shape of a hideous tabernacle in front of it. Whatever virtues the ladies of St Dominick may possess, an understanding of art is not among them. Before all their painted retablos, they place offensive dressed statues and tawdry ornaments, out of keeping with the cold severity of this beautiful church of El Greco’s. The pictures on either side of the “Assumption,” all Greco’s, are fine; St John the Baptist and St Paul below, St Benedict and St Bernard above. The Annunciation at the end of the church is by Carducci, and the St Ildefonso opposite by Luis Tristan, neither equal to the master’s strong, harmonious work, which they show out in greater relief.
Interest is attached to this church by the curious fact that not only did El Greco build it, and build it so well with such cold and classical correctness and simplicity, but here he lies at rest forever in his own large temple. The precise spot of his grave is not known, and it is quite an accident that such indication has been found. All the writers have been content with the loose statement that he was buried either in Santo Tomé or San Bartolomé, without a word of regret that he who wrought such lasting monuments with his hand has found no reverent hand to carve a slab above his dust. It was only quite lately that the Spanish landscape painter, Señor de Berruete, to whose kindness I owe the information and a copy of the registrar of the death, by sheer dint of perseverance and conviction, brought to light the definite and correct knowledge at last of El Greco’s resting-place. He lies in some obscure corner of this church, forgotten by the nuns on whose business he first came to Toledo, and the record of his death and burial dryly runs:—Libro de entierros de Santo Tomé de 1601-1614, en siete del Abril del 1614 falescio Dominico Greco. No hizo testamento, recibio los sacramentos, enterose en Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Dio velas.
And that is all we know of his illness and death. He made no will, he received the sacraments, he died on the 7th of April 1614, and left tapers for his funeral. Under some stone of Santo Domingo he lies forever ignored and unhonoured!
Many of the convents that possessed pictures of El Greco have disappeared, amongst them the old convent of the Visitation called the Queen’s, which contained a superb Crucifixion. Of the figures at the foot of the cross, Palomino wrote: “They are very Titian-like, and how superior to anything else here!” We are told of a certain Magdalen, a lovely bit of colouring, painted while the influence of the Venetian school was still marked in his work, but this has become private property. Some of his best pictures were painted for the little town of Bayona near Cienpozuelos. The scenes from the dramatic life of Magdalen were so beautiful that Cardinal Portocarrero offered 5000 pesos (about a crown piece) and the same quantity of Giordanos to replace them to the church, which were indignantly refused. In the College of Atocha and the monastery of La Sisla there were considerable collections of some of the best Grecos. Into whose hands have they since passed? and in how many obscure parts of Spain may not these treasures lie hidden and unrecognised? Palomino tells us of “an unapproachable Judgment.” Alas! nobody to-day knows anything about it.
Three other great pictures, however, remain. In the little chapel of San José, opposite the Exchange of Carlos III., a painted insignificant edifice that has fallen into deserved decay, there are five or six Grecos, two of which arrest immediate attention. On the left is the singularly beautiful figure of St Martin, a portrait of the painter’s son, a delicate high-bred and dreamy young knight in armour, inappropriately cutting his mantle in two with Toledan steel to bestow half on the beggar standing beside his white horse. No Roman soldier this conception of Martin of Tours, making a gift of half of his single cloak, but a charming youth who is playing at charity as he rides out beyond the town, while above the river, in some Gothic-Arabian palace, he has his choice of variously-hued satin cloaks as well as damascene armour, and as he cuts his mantle, he has the dainty and sentimental air of one who muses tristefully on the absent or perfidious beloved, and hugs despair as the more graceful part of passion, the while anxiously asking himself if he shall meet her glance as he rides past her lattice. Except the lovely girl’s head of the Expolio, also said to be a family portrait, and if so proving, along with the St Martin, that El Greco was the father of beautiful children, El Greco has done no more witching and romantic work than this boyish figure of St Martin. The colouring is extraordinarily cold, and grey of an exquisite tone, with shadows of a dull silvered blue. It suggests the pale borderland where dream and reality meet and merge. When El Greco first came to Spain, he was fresh from the warm voluptuous school of Venice. Nothing proves more than the rapid alteration of his style, the invading influence of atmosphere. The austere and hieratic capital of Spain developed a racial coldness, till his art became like the city that remained its temple, something aloof from and above the gusts of temperament, an art unmoved by passion or the senses, too violent to be called serene, too reflective and intellectual to touch the heart. One would look in vain for the exquisite sweetness of Andrea del Sarto, for a particle of the delight and radiance the Italians had the secret of gathering into their canvases, for any of the superlative charm of da Vinci or the surpassing tenderness of Raphael. El Greco has much of the modern hardness, much of its quick impressionability, much of its accentuated indifference to mere loveliness, much of its cold force and deliberate self-cultivation. Instead of learning from error, he cultivated error as part of his individuality, a thing that was right in him since it defined his peculiar perception of things. Even in this fine picture, the horse is out of drawing, since it is a settled thing that no large work of his can utterly satisfy, can come to us without some distinguished blemish and oddness by which we recognise our Greco all in greeting him.
Opposite the St Martin is a Virgin and child, with two angels on either side, and below two saints. The angel, on the left hand, almost confronts me with inaccuracy in denying El Greco warmth. Nothing could be warmer, even on a Murillo canvas, than the soft brown head and shadowed cheek and eyes bent over the infant with an ineffable inward curve that suggests, but does not reveal, the hidden smile. There is a melting sweetness about this drooped visage that El Greco has not accustomed us to expect from him. Underneath, St Agnes strains upwards a very different cast of countenance: dark, severely outlined, intense, and full of pain and yearning, the brows are tragically marked, and the expression of the mouth is that of scornful resignation. By no means the legendary Saint Agnes, meek and mild, but vigorously individual and passionate, with a soul and intellect inconveniently above the little joys of maidenhood. The Virgin, too, as are all El Greco’s Madonnas, is off the beaten track. This maiden-mother has none of the bland and unintelligent sweetness of the Italian Madonna. The face is long and pointed, and about the brow and eyes there is something Greek, a scarce perceptible imperiousness, an intellectual quality in the expression of reverie, more marked still in the Virgin of San Vicente. As a whole, the picture is one of commanding interest.
The sacristan will assure you, despite the conviction of your eyes and senses, that the altar picture is a Murillo. Nowhere have I found sacristans so stupid and so ignorant as in Toledo. For that matter, stupidity reigns over the town. For a home of relics, never were relics more densely guarded, and there is not a single intelligent or recommendable guide to be had. One remembers a delicate little masterpiece of sensibility and pathos by Mr Henry James, “The Madonna of the Future,” with yearning, and wishes some learned monomaniac would start across one’s path, like the neo-Florentine hero of that story, to guide one wisely through Toledo’s forlorn treasures. But Toledo does not seem to have inspired disinterested love in any human breast. Those who know her decline to share their knowledge, and those in care of her inheritance, from the canons of the Cathedral to the sacristans and keepers of the Museum, are, without exception, wrapped in an impenetrable fog of ignorance, accentuated by indifference. The Murillo of the sacristan of San José is a very striking Greco—one would recognise it a long way off by the stupendous height of St Joseph, the hand of twenty of the infant Jesus, and the flowing wealth of drapery in dull green, dim yellow, and faded pink, with the big deep folds so peculiarly the master’s. The sacristan also denied El Greco to be the painter of a grey mystical St Francis, an emaciated, spiritualised head, in a dim twilight, livid grey, half shadow, and ghostly white, blurred with faint yellow. The hands show out whitely in the intensity of gloom, and the expression in this grey atmosphere is mystic and serene. Not one of the best examples, but good enough to suggest that there may be some truth in the supposition that El Greco was the sculptor of the famous little statue of St Francis of Assisi in the Cathedral Treasury, and not Alonzo Cano or Pedro de Mena. But doubtful of my sacristan’s knowledge, I struck a match, mounted a chair, and convinced him by reading out the half obliterated Greek letters of Theotocopulos’s signature. Nothing but the patronymic could be deciphered, but the signature of the picture of the Escorial M. Demetrius Bikelas deciphered more fully: Δομἡνιχος Θεοτοχὁπουλος Κρἡς, ἑποἱει, which is our sole assurance of his birthplace.
There remains another great picture of El Greco to draw attention to, overlooking, as I am compelled to, the very names of so many others. The Assumption of San Vicente is no less magnificent than singular. Most rare is its realistic impression of a scene mid air. You feel about it the very hurricane of the upper air, the dizzy velocity of flight. This is no image of calm soaring through space, the idea of dreamy swim most painters of the Assumption are content to convey. The very modernity and the violent realism of El Greco’s genius forced him to forsake in all things the notion of simple reverie. He seeks to convey distinct impressions; veracity as far as possible must stamp these. He does not delight in pampering the spectator with sentimental musings or the inanely beautiful. Ugliness, too, has its beauty when accompanied by strength. You must understand to enjoy, must bring the brain as well as the senses to the contemplation of his work. Like all preoccupied artists, he inevitably sins by excess, and overtaxes the bewildered spectator. Something of his spirit went into our own Browning. His drawing is often like Browning’s verse, inexplicably rough and out of gear. But nothing could change either genius. One leaves you to make what you can of his volumes; the other leaves you for ever exasperated by eccentricities of pencil and brush it is now no use seeking to understand. For instance, in this picture, shocking and glorious at the same time, who is to account for the profile of the angel in yellow with the grand beating wings of shaded purple and grey that support the lifted Virgin through the rushing air? The limbs are grotesque, the pointed nose almost stands away from the face, the ears protrude in graceless deformity, and the chin is nearly rugged in its absurd upward curve. A more painful presentment of an angel sane man never painted. Yet look away, and you will see two exquisite slender limbs and feet, pointed downward in the air, to show that El Greco knew a lovely thing as well as any other painter. And yet higher still, examine the Virgin with her dark, oval, intellectual, modern visage, beautiful with the beauty of our own troubled and eager times, half spiritual, half poetical, but partaking not in the least of the old-fashioned ideal of maiden-mother, the mild benignant Madonna of Italy, the soulless Virgin of Spain, Eastern peasant women painted from the mistresses of Italian artists or from the pretty dancing girls of the Spanish people. Here is an innovation, here is originality: a mournful Mary, leaving earth with doubt and pain in her expression rather than rapture; with small refined face and intense brows; a Mary who bears the mark of our fugitive common suffering, the deep, enigmatic impress of life accompanied by thought, and not the stereotyped dolorous brand of the seven times stabbed mother Catholic art accepts. He boldly rejects the old ideal both in maiden and in mother, and paints a Mary who is neither sweet nor quiet. How tall she is too, and slenderly outlined beneath the superb green-blue drapery that bears her on its floating folds, as it waves down from the rich pink garment that covers the slim bust. Surely, in spite of defects so monstrous as to provoke laughter, angel’s limbs like gnarled trees, such biceps as no athlete ever possessed, hands to fell the heaviest beast, this picture for composition, for the vivid impression of intense velocity of upward flight, for the grand treatment of drapery and colour, for the vigorous reality of those outspread wings, and above all for that beautiful, delicately-strong grieved face of Mary, with the soft dark cloud of hair marking its most charming oval, this original conception of the Assumption may be reckoned as one of El Greco’s triumphs of art. It does not enchant, or captivate, but it seizes. Elsewhere you must look for delight. Here your satisfaction is disturbed by deliberate and deplorable defections, but you have boundless compensations.
El Greco’s portraits have none of the defects of his large compositions. The best perhaps is the admirable portrait of Cardinal Tavera in the Hospital de Afuera. This is in the full sense of the word a masterpiece. No blemish to irritate, no deliberate eccentricity to recall his wrong-headed theory that in painting colour alone is of importance and drawing of no value whatever. Here is a square of canvas of sober and solid worth, which might be the work of any of the best Italian masters for suavity and restraint, and has no fraternity whatever with the extraordinary St John the Baptist so near it, and so preposterously offensive. The other superb portraits by El Greco that Toledo holds are those of Antonio Covarrubias and Juan de Alava in the Provincial Museum at San Juan de los Reyes. The rest are chiefly at Madrid, and hold no inferior place in that glorious assembly. They stand out, individual, insistent, and seem to assure you with all the eloquence of so violent and marked a personality as El Greco’s, that in spite of the general Venetian tone that so vividly recalls Titian and Tintoretto, with whom proximity invites contrast, it is no imitator who has painted these magnificent portraits of lean Castillian gentlemen, with their austere pride of regard, their air of imperturbable breeding and beautiful hands. They are the work of one of the world’s masters, who himself created a school to which we owe Velasquez.
RELIGION and revolt are the chief features in Toledo’s story. When her sons were not quarrelling within or warring without, they were building churches and convents, and none more famous than San Juan de los Reyes, built in fulfilment of a vow by the Catholic kings after the victory of Toro, gained over the Portuguese sympathisers with the Beltraneja, Henry’s luckless heiress. The architect was Juan Guas, master builder of the Cathedral, and the church was finished in 1476, and given over by Isabel to the order of St Francis, magnificently endowed. It stands high above the bridge of San Martin and the Puerta del Cambron, the portico facing north and the lovely cloisters south. Writing of it, Señor Amador de los Rios in his Toledo Pintoresca, says: “This sumptuous monument belongs to the class of architecture known as gotica-gentil, and is indubitably one of the most famous of Toledo. Raised at the most flourishing period of the Castillian monarchy, it awakens before the vision of the enthusiastic traveller, memories of lofty and difficult enterprises, happily concluded by our elders, so that the vandalism of the present century stands sharply out with all its rubbish, and still more the envy of a neighbouring nation, that, while it was in the act of flinging the most unjust charges at the Spanish people, destroyed with steel and fire the most precious jewels of its art. I refer to the burning of San Juan de los Reyes by the French on their invasion. It would seem false that the armies of the Marshals, whose culture and value nobody may dare doubt, could display such rage against a few edifices, whose only wrong in their estimation was that they were erected by the victors of Cirinola and Pavia; false would it seem that Napoleon’s soldiers came to Spain to react the scenes of Attila and Genserico. But for our misfortune it is only too true.” One cannot blame the Spaniards for their bitterness towards the French. No invading nation ever behaved more shamelessly, comported itself with a more inexcusable barbarity than the French in the Peninsula. But on the other hand, the Spaniards themselves in reality care so little about the beautiful things they have inherited from bygone times, are so calamitously indifferent to their own historic glories, that we may well hesitate to credit the French with all the ruin we see about us in Spain. An archaeological body was appointed for the maintenance of public monuments, and see for yourself in Toledo and elsewhere what these gentlemen have been able to achieve. It is not money alone that is lacking, but competence and the great important instinct that it matters. The canons, those hopeless autocrats of ruined Toledo, who stand so deliberately on the brink of oblivion and the dark abyss of ignorance, have covered the beautiful bronze doors of the cathedral Puerta del Reloj with a hideous wooden screen. When I asked one of them the meaning of this disfigurement, he blandly assured me that it was to ward off draughts in winter, when the big stone forest is mighty cold. And so the lovely works of Zurreño and Dominguez might just as well have been riddled with French shot for all the pleasure they are permitted to give us to-day. So with everything in the hands of these terrible canons, who care for nothing on earth but their ease and their leisure. The famous archiepiscopal library which the Republic had wisely made state property, was given back to the canons by Alfonso XII., on the distinct understanding that it should remain open to the public. But the canons locked the doors, and whenever you ask to see it, you are informed that the librarian has the keys and is away at Madrid, where he expects to remain another fortnight. During the month I stayed at Toledo, to collect material for this volume, I was sent from one canon to another, all of whom “deeply sympathised,” but assured me in dull, indifferent tones that it was impossible for me to see the library. The Penetenciario was at Madrid. And for anything the canons cared, he might stay away six months, and keep the library keys with him all that time. I asked one canon what the rest did, if in the absence of their singular librarian, there happened to present itself a rare necessity for the chapter to open this hermetically sealed door. He smiled deprecatingly, but did not enlighten me. Not requiring information themselves, the search for it is a form of insanity not to be encouraged in others. And Señor Amador de los Rios and all other Spanish writers lament, and justly, the French invasion, but forget to note their own cruel inertia, the disastrous results of indifference and indolence.
There is nothing remarkable about the exterior of San Juan de los Reyes. Alonso de Covarrubias completed the portico in 1610. The effect of the rusty chains, the famous chains of the Christians of Granada round the walls, is hideous. The Spaniards are extremely moved by the sight of this queer ornament, one wonders why, and Amador de los Rios nearly weeps with rage because some of them have been removed. He solaces himself with drawing an elaborate picture of the awed and reverential attitude of emotional foreigners gazing upon them. The sculpture outside is very rough. Many will find the interior of this renowned edifice a distinct disappointment. One misses the mystery, the charm of aisled perspectives. There are here no long reaches of shadow and brilliant variations of light. The effect is bold, free, ample, but curiously short. The altar recess is shallow, the nave is broad and open, ending in a semi-circle and six lateral arches. The body of the church is divided by two light pillars, richly decorated. The beauty of the church consists in the extraordinary magnificence of its sculpture. Pillars and walls are extravagantly overlaid with the richest Gothic ornamentation, and the impression is rather bewildering than beautiful. It seems a bold thing to say of one of the most admired and renowned monuments of Toledo, that it is ugly from excess of sculptural splendour. It is too wide, too short, too solid and heavy, too open, above all too florid. I can think of no fitter comparison than a stout, low-sized, middle-aged woman, excessively bejewelled, carrying gracelessly garments too heavy and too gorgeous. It lacks the elusive charm of shadow, the subtlety of simplicity. San Juan de los Reyes is a church to visit and to wonder at, but not a place to muse in. You will admire the octagonal vault, the pinnacles, the gallery running out of the clerestory in front of the south window, pierced parapet and highly-wrought choir; you will marvel at the statues, the foliage, the rich Gothic fancies, the shields, all the magnificent elaboration of detail, the rarest to be found anywhere, and still will all this leave you cold and unimpressed. It is like an admirably finished poem, that appeals to the head and leaves the heart untouched.
From immemorial time the principal entrance has been covered with plaster, which only permits us to see the great Gothic window in the centre. The workmanship of the interior of the church leads us to infer that this entrance was more in keeping with the whole than the present façade of Covarrubias, which is decadent Gothic, constructed many years later, and only finished in the reign of Philip III. The length of this single nave is 200 feet, its width in the transept is over 70, and in the body of the church 43. There are seven chapels, four on one side and three on the other, all insignificant. The tomb of Don Pedro de Ayala, bishop of the Canaries, is a fine specimen of renaissance sculpture. The cupola rests on four admirably wrought pillars, its form is octagon, with an ogival dome and a window in each face. Nothing could be richer or more effective than the elaborately decorated sides of the transept. Such a splendid prodigality of Gothic sculpture was surely never lavished on so small a space. To give anything like a detailed account of it would require an art and a knowledge nothing less stupendous than the imagination that devised such work. The retablo, painted by Francis of Antwerp in the sixteenth century, that Ponz praised so enthusiastically, disappeared in the time of the fatal French occupation, when the church was the stables of Napoleon’s soldiers, and along with it the life-sized portraits of the founders, Fernando and Isabel. Hardly any of the old stainglass remains, to which fact is due the glaring effect of crude light upon the white stone. But this light permits you to examine at ease the superlative magnificence of the transept sides and the sculptured pillars. Everywhere the initials F and I, with the yoke and the arrows of both sovereigns. Letters and inscriptions are exquisitely finished, and nothing could be more graceful than the general effect of arches and capitals. The high broad nave forms a Latin cross, composed of apse, transept and the body of the church, all the most prodigious and exuberant specimen of florid renaissance. The choir is situated over a low, broad, painted vault. The pillars that support the four domes of the naves are richly sculptured and adorned with statues, and a fine frieze runs above the chapels on either side, with a window above each arch divided by graceful Gothic pillars. The inscriptions are many, and surprisingly clear and beautiful in finish. Here is one of the most elaborate in Gothic letters:
DETAIL OF ORNAMENT, INTERIOR OF S. JUAN DE LOS REYES
DETAIL OF ORNAMENT, INTERIOR OF S. JUAN DE LOS REYES
“Este monasterio è églesia mandaron hacer los muy esclarecidos Principes è señores D. Hernando è Doña Isabel, Rey y Reina de Castilla, de Leon, de Aragon, de Sicilia, los cuales señores por bienaventurado matrimonio y untaron los dichos Reinos, seyendo el dicho rey y señor natural de los reinos de Aragon y Sicilia, y seyendo la dicha señora Reina y señora natural de los Reinos de Castilla y Leon; el cual fundaron à gloria de nuestro señor Dios, y de la bienaventurado Madre suya Nuestra señora la Virgin Maria, y por especial devocion que le ovieron.”
The few pictures are quite worthless, but pictures are not needed in such a wealth of stone-work. What are needed to make San Juan de los Reyes less crude in its frank over-decoration are, shadow, the dim luminosity of stained glass, the softened glow of bejewelled light, the tender mystery and charm of pillared aisle, the grace of length to give majesty to solidity. It totally lacks the essential quality of reverence, that elusive and unanalysable suggestion of the beyond, the supreme, the intangible, of that inexplicable aspiration that ever stirs the soul of primitive and civilised man, and has taught him to seek its expression in the building of church and temple; in the white splendour of the Parthenon, the very soul of Greek genius in stone, in the grey dimness of Gothic cathedral, in which Christian fervour finds almost an immaterial beauty of definition, the quality of lofty distinction which belongs to the highest poetry and eloquence. Here you are not assailed by a sense of the melancholy loveliness of death, as when you stand beside some canopied tomb of greatness in the softened gloom of an old cathedral. There is none of the lingering charm of legend and peopled shade, none of the obscurity of deep recess, the chill shiver of vaulted solitude, the vibrant ache of other days, that serene and bewitching
CLOISTER, S. JUAN DE LOS REYES
CLOISTER, S. JUAN DE LOS REYES
misery we feel whenever we travel backward by the road of strange and wonderful experience that has moulded and developed humanity. For San Juan de los Reyes reveals to us nothing of that past whose enigma forever tortures the curious mind, nothing but the admirable skill of some unknown sculptors, provokes neither musing nor aspiration, nor instils the poisonous enchantment of artistic sadness.
For this reason the lovely cloisters, despite the defacing stamp of restoration and the preposterous glare of white plaster, win you to fervour and lure you to reverie. Ruined, monstrously ill-treated, they yet preserve a delicate freshness, an incomparable grace that give us some notion of the mediaeval paradise they must have been when flower and verdure bloomed between their fretted arches, and the statues in their canopied niches stood fresh from each master’s hands. Not melancholy cloisters these, but gay and charming, with their supreme elegance, their matchless distinction, an airiness and lightness, a gaiety not in the least ecclesiastical or claustral. They were built to harbour the measured mirth of breeding, the sweet and elegant piety of romance, the charity, the contentment that knows naught of suffering or revolt, all the placid and decorous joys of religion. Beautiful flowers and delicate foliage grew thickly in the broad sunny space between the double row of exquisite galleries, and branches spread and swayed against the arched columns of the upper cloisters. Truly it must have been delightful to have worn the habit of the Franciscan monk in the days of Isabella the Catholic, and the great Cisneros, the first novice of this convent, can have found no more vivid satisfaction in the hours he was busy making Spanish history than in the radiant peace of these most beautiful cloisters.
The architecture is superb; the richest specimen of florid ogival with twenty-four vaults, windows cut and chiselled with the fine perfection of the sonnet, pillars delicate enough and daintily wrought for some vision of dreamland, with once fifty-six statues of Franciscan monks between (the number now is sadly diminished, and some of the statues that have not been rashly replaced are in a state of most lamentable mutilation), and charming friezes. The whole effect is that of an exquisite harmony, a harmony that not even the profane and degrading hand of the modern restorer has been able to obliterate. Vulgarised certainly, since vulgarity is, alas! the fatal, the inevitable price we must pay for modern comforts and improvements, for the refining process of our material progress and the pleasures of civilisation.
The cloisters are composed of four double galleries, supported on twenty-four vaults between the upper and lower cloisters and a flat roof above. The pillars, like those of the church, are miraculously sculptured; not a space an inch big, without its Gothic fancy of animal and leaf, its finely-wrought crowd in flowing fold, grotesque and lovely forms and multiplied foliage of every kind. The pillars spread like palms above to sustain the arches that divide the vaults, with an indescribable grace of effect. Inscriptions vary the legend of frieze and ornament. Gothic windows between frail arches look into the airy and delightful gardens, where green southern growths have the curled droop of plumes and the very grass seems to smile through the golden wave along its green. If only the restorers had spared the white-wash. If only this joyous little poem of Gothic architecture were less vulgarly, remorselessly white; less, as Murray’s guide-book aptly remarks, like the frosted top of wedding-cake.
In a corner, fastened into the wall, is a fragment
S. LUKE ANGLE OF CLOISTER, S. JUAN DE LOS REYES
S. LUKE ANGLE OF CLOISTER, S. JUAN DE LOS REYES
of stucco arabesque from the ancient palace of King Rodrigo, restored by the Moors, afterwards given by Maria de Molino, the widow of Sancho el Bravo, to Gonzalo de Ruiz, Count of Orgaz. I have never seen a more beautiful specimen of azulejo. This vanished palace of King Rodrigo is one of the few the Moors deemed worthy of preservation. Very little of the Visigothic remains, for the Moors had no fancy to profit by what they found after their conquest, and what has been left us is rude and unimportant enough to make their sparing use of Visigothic inspiration no matter of regret. The capitals of the Cristo de la Luz, the arcades of San Roman, and some fragments of the patio of Santa Cruz, are the most notable examples, and are only of significance as a slight indication of the transitional period between two great civilisations, the Roman and Saracen. All over Toledo, in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the Moorish note in architecture prevailed, and, except Granada and Cordova, no other town of Spain possesses so much of the work of the Moors, is so strongly stamped with their individuality. This is due to the fact that even after the Christian Conquest most of the workmen employed were Moors, for the tolerance between Moors and Christians in Toledo under both rules seems to have been admirable. They fraternised here on both sides, whether Khalif or Castillian sovereign wielded the sceptre, hence the undisputed preponderance of mudejar architecture in the hieratic city of the Goths.
On the east side a portion of the monastery has been converted into a museum. Never was a collection more insignificant than that of the Museo Provincial of Toledo. The ground floor displays a quantity of wood carvings, of Moorish azulejo, which is always a delight for the eye, of bits of ancient monuments, of inscriptions, Arabic brims of walls, with inscriptions and Moorish work, ever worth examining. Most of the pictures and statues are exceedingly mediocre. But there is a superb bust of Juanelo by Berruguete, and two portraits of El Greco, Juan de Alava and Covarrubias, as well as his famous plan of Toledo, with the slim and musing youth, his poetic-looking son, who was the charming model of his St Martin as well. There is a Holy Family by Spagnoletto, St Vicente Ferrer by Giordano, some saints by Carreño, and an original canvas of Juan de Sevilla. Here, by examination of fourteen pictures of Luis Tristan, you may test the absurdity of the statement by more than one foreign art critic, that the disciple was greater than the master. If Tristan was more sane and sound than El Greco, he was certainly less distinguished and less great. There is a crucifix of Ribalta, a St Jerome of Carducci, some fine subjects from Holy Scripture by Frank, and a remarkable Christ of Morales, and a number of Flemish imitations. The saloon above, where most of these pictures are preserved, was the cell of the great Cisneros. The most interesting relic of all the collection of inscriptions and stones is the mutilated slab taken from the roof of the church of the Capucine Friars near the Alcázar, and found among the materials used for building the patio of this palace, whose broken letters show it to be a fragment of King Wamba’s tomb:
which Antonio Ponz recomposes thus:
In the now forsaken ghetto, where, in King Wamba’s days, stood a strong fortress called the Castillo de la Juderia, and which then was the centre of Toledo’s wealth and commerce, a flourishing quarter, full of the activities of business, of intelligence, of industry, where riches and science and the treasures of the King were gathered, where the money-changers clinked golden promise in the face of reckless and needy nobles, and rabbis read out the law in their beautiful temples to the prosperous and numerous descendants of the exiles of Babylon, to-day may be seen the lovely little synagogues, El Transito and Santa Maria La Blanca.
Writing several centuries ago to his fellow-Jews of Amsterdam, Hassadrin, a Jewish traveller, thus mentions El Transito, one of the marvels of Toledo: “I find in this town, with other antiquities, Roman, Gothic and Arabian, a spacious temple which, since 1355, with King Pedro’s permission, was built in this town for the Jewish people by Samuel Levi, his treasurer and private friend, which temple remains substantially intact, with all the early ornamentation seen on its four principal walls since its foundation, and thus its two atriums, its temple for women and other corresponding offices. All this I have drawn with as much care as possible, and with the expression of the smallest ornamentation, and have even copied three lines of Hebrew, which run along each of the walls, south, north, and west, without interruption; and here also four Hebrew inscriptions, the shortest in verse and rhythm, the two longest in prose; six others on the east wall.” But he bitterly complains that “they have white-washed the temple so thickly that, even though the letters were originally in relief, they are entirely obliterated, and much of the ornamentation remains hopelessly confused.” Those unwhitened above, that are left coloured and solid, he describes as “most beautiful.”[19]
When Samuel Levi built this lovely temple of semi-Moorish design, which the restorers are slowly relieving of its execrable load of whitewash that the venerable Hassadrin complained of to his fellow-townspeople of Amsterdam, the Jews were at their highest point of fortune in Toledo. They stood at the bedside of the sovereign in sickness, they counselled him in all difficulties; they filled his purse, kept his city flourishing. They might have known that they would soon pay dearly for all this power and glory. The anti-Semitic feeling has ever been the same, since the first Christian days to our own time. It breaks out in waves, like an epidemic, and always, it must be remarked, when the Jews are most prosperous and wealthy. So it has broken out in France at the end of this enlightened century, with all the virulence and spite and shameless injustice of the primitive centuries. It is no exaggeration to say, in the year 1898, that the French, if they dared, would gladly wreck—as, in the days of Samuel Levi, the Spaniards wrecked Levi’s palace and all the great Jewish houses of the Toledan ghetto—the Jewish centre, if the Jews still congregated in any particular part of Paris. It is not unjust to say that it is Jewish gold, Jewish power, Jewish subtlety and intelligence that inspire to-day, as then, this bitter and vindictive hate. For if the Jews remained poor, insignificant, ignorant, they would never have suffered persecution, which is proof sufficient that the war is rather one of race than of religion, rather one of base and brutal envy
DETAIL OF ORNAMENT, EL TRANSITO
DETAIL OF ORNAMENT, EL TRANSITO
on the Christian side than of anything resembling a religious crusade.
In all periods of its history, Toledo was subject to these sudden and inexplicable outbursts against the Jews, in spite of the historic legend that Toledo was first peopled and created by the Jews sent adrift by Nebuchadnezzar—a legend that should have entitled the unfortunates to regard themselves as at home upon her seven hills. Not so at any time. First the Carthaginians, then the Romans, then the Arians, the Christians, the Saracens, again, the Christians. Hideous persecution, continually and intermittently, of the chosen people, the followers of Moses and the prophets, the brethren of Christ, the apostles and Mary! One Toledan law against the Jews was a righteous one: the money-lenders were not allowed to exceed thirty-five per cent. on monies lent. Many a beggared scamp and spendthrift to-day would be the better off if such a law in usury had always existed. But there was no inducement to conversion, for the converted Jew was never recognised by his adopted brethren. He always wore a piece of coloured stuff on his shoulder as the señal de Judio. The Inquisition started the final and worst persecution of all, and the Catholic Isabel publicly banished them from the kingdom. Abhorrence of the race has never died, never even diminished, in the Peninsula. A grandee once married the granddaughter of a converted Jew, and, even a hundred and fifty years later, his descendants could not hope to marry into their own rank. He might have hoped for pardon and oblivion if he had married a ballet-dancer or a courtesan. In the Cathedral, a host is preserved, supposed to have been traversed by a Jewish spear which pierced it in three places, the sacrilege having taken place in Holland. The legend runs that the light from the holes was so intense that the Jew instantly became converted. There is also a legend of a highroad cross near the town having been struck by a Jewish sword, bleeding humanly as it fell upon the sacrilegious slayer, the drops of blood as he carried it home revealing to the Toledans his crime, which was naturally the motive of a fresh persecution of the race. So that God, finding the Christians too pacific and lukewarm, used this dumb instrument of painted wood to provoke an onslaught, and redden the streets of Toledo with Hebrew blood. These things you must read seriously when you take to study of the Spanish historians. So they explain to you the legend of the Cathedral gate, the Puerta del Niño perdido. In 1490, a Jew of Quintana went to Toledo to witness the edifying sight of an auto-da-fé. He stood on the brilliant and thronged little Zocodover, and watched the sombre flare of the torches, listened to the lugubrious chants. Turning to a neighbour, he exclaimed: “I know something that will drive these people wild, and will, at the same time, proclaim the triumph of the law of Moses.” He appointed a meeting with his neighbour at Tembleque, and settled to carry off a child of three or four. He stole the child from Toledo, and brought it to the village of La Guardia. At Passiontide, they met at a grotto outside La Guardia, and submitted the baby to a repetition of the insults and outrages Christ had endured; then lanced him, tore out his heart, and buried the little body. The child’s mother was blind, and at this instant miraculously recovered her sight. Not content with this, they bribed a recently converted Jew, Juan Gomez, to steal a host, paying him thirty reals for the sacrilege, and sent him off with the child’s heart to Zamora. Thus the crime was traced to Juan Gomez, who, opening his prayer-book in the cathedral of Avila, on his return, attracted attention by the wonderful projection of bright rays from the leaves. He was instantly seized, examined, papers were found on him, and he and the gang of Jewish torturers of babies were burnt by the Inquisition.
This charming little temple was built for Levi by the Jew, D. Meir Abdeli, a rabbi to whom an elaborate Hebrew inscription on one wall does honour as a man of transcendent virtue. The architecture is Morisco. Slowly the restorers are unveiling the admirably-wrought stucco walls, where the sculpture is as fine and delicate as the most exquisite lace, and has lain for centuries under a degrading coat of whitewash. You must mount the high scaffolding with lighted wax or lamp, and here you may examine at your leisure the inexhaustible delights of the Moorish-Andalusian style in its most florid period. The prodigality of ornament is as amazing as the Gothic wealth of sculpture of San Juan de los Reyes, but I confess this pleases far more. It is much more charming, more fairy-like, with that delicately-sensual note which forms the eternal witchery of the East. The friezes are magnificent, and nothing could be prettier than the effect of the semi-horseshoe windows and their frail pillars and arches. Above the famous Hebrew inscriptions, quotations from the Psalms mostly, run a row of arches, highly decorated, resting on slim columns fancifully wrought. Here the extreme elegance of design and finish touches upon preciosity. The Moorish windows are most lovely, perfect little poems in stone, of a marvellous fragility and grace. From their dainty lines and traceries, you look in stupor up at the massive artesonado ceiling, with its geometrical figures, its infinitude of design carven in heavy wood—blurred, it is true, and brutally defaced by time and neglect. Here and there the woodwork is discoloured, here and there hopelessly degraded; but some notion of its pristine magnificence may be gathered even yet.
El Transito was seized by Isabel the Catholic, on her expulsion of the Jews from her kingdom, and handed over to the Knights of Calatrava, whose arms are stamped on every corner of the temple. The Knights did what every other religious body in all ages and lands has done on taking possession of the temple of the dethroned gods. They marred the harmony of Eastern architecture by the erection of Christian altars, less flagrantly, of course, than the great Mosque of Cordova was marred. But still the false note is there: it greets us with singular bad taste in the fifteenth century retablo, in a plateresca altar, in mediocre sixteenth century paintings that represent scenes from the New Testament, oddly unsuitable to the walls of a synagogue, and out of keeping with the long Hebrew inscriptions in relief above the frieze. Some of these meritless canvases are attributed to John of Burgundy. There is a choir neither decorative nor impressive, and a plateresca door, a tolerable specimen of that Spanish architecture. These are mere blots upon a graceful whole. The Jews under Moorish influence, built this lovely little temple, and its spirit, its essence, its genius, remain Jewish after more than four centuries of dispossession.
The origin of the name Santa Maria la Blanca dates from the fourth century, when Our Lady, in a miraculous vision, is said to have chosen the spot for the erection of a church in her honour, which was covered with snow. Pope Liberius then ordered the church to be built and consecrated to the White Lady—Nuestra Señora la Blanca. Later, the church became the property of the Jews, who rebuilt above its ruins the imposing synagogue we see to-day, in the Moorish ninth century style. Unhappily for them St Vicente Ferrer, a mediaeval fanatic who to-day would be called a demagogue, came to Toledo in 1405, on his famous crusade against the unfortunate race. You may see the highly sculptured pulpit half Moorish, half Gothic, he preached his frantic sermons from to the inflammatory Toledans in the little church of Santiago below the Puerta del Sol, now closed up with a wooden statue of the saint in the middle, holding in one hand a wooden crucifix, and flourishing the other in exhortation to the populace to destruction and cruelty. The Man of Sorrow, who preached peace and goodwill to all men, love of enemies, forgiveness of injuries, himself a Jew, son of a Jewess, is held up to excite the furious passions of the mob, to urge them to crime and infamous injustice. How much fatal misery humanity in all ages, even in our own, might have been spared by the prevalence of so small a quality as a sense of humour! The Valencian saint himself died in bleak far-off Vannes, in Brittany.
But there was no humour then in grim and blood-saturated Toledo. The mob rushed from the church to the synagogue, tore the obnoxious Jews limb from limb, thrust them into the streets and the highways, robbed, tortured, wounded, took possession of their beautiful temple, sacked their houses, carried off their money-bags, (naturally), hooted, hissed, and kicked them precisely as it would to-day in Paris, for all our enlightenment and progress, if it dared. All this in the pacific name of Christ! Centuries after the synagogue became a Magdalen’s Asylum, under Cardinal Siliceo, until 1791, when it was converted into a barrack and military stores. It was only rescued from this ignoble use thirty years ago, and restored by public subscription.
Nothing could be more miserable than the exterior of Santa Maria la Blanca; nothing more squalid than its surroundings. A deserted quarter, mean little laneways, towzled babies, unfortunate beggars. “As soon as you descend the steps that lead to it,” writes Quadrado, “you are arrested by the surprise of this singular mingling of magnificence and nakedness, of capricious strangeness of lines, the exquisite taste of the ornaments; you fancy yourself transported to a fantastic pagoda. The glance is lost in the midst of this forest of great octagonal pillars, which from the point of view of proportion, lack half of their height. They are seven in a line, forming five naves, and holding Moorish arches of a bold curve. The capitals in stucco are of different forms, composed of branches, of leaves and garlands, mixed with fir-cones, reminiscences of the old Byzantine style. Varied ornaments, arabesques, lovely rose windows along with arches, and prominent above the central nave a frieze in slight relief, formed of lines crosswise and intermingling, and even still of a remarkable precision and purity. No dome, not even a ceiling; a roof of wood, of miserable aspect, descending from the height of the central nave to the two lateral extremities, gives to the whole edifice an appearance of ruin and abandonment.” The restorers, with customary clumsiness, have coated the whole temple in plaster, like the cloisters of San Juan de los Reyes, with a result almost facetious, taking into consideration the name of the building. It is now white with a sorry vengeance. The ceiling is said to have been made from beams of the cedars of Lebanon, and the soil the synagogue is built upon to have been brought from Mount Zion. The Moorish and Byzantine style mingle most artistically, with the accumulated delicate and artistic effects of both and the enchanting azulejos, here of an admirable beauty of colour and design; but arabesque, tiles and horse-shoe arches are sadly out of harmony with the Gothic altars of the chancel. One finely sculptured, is supposed to be by Berruguete or one of his pupils. Elsewhere it would show to better advantage than here. Curious detail, the wells may still be seen where the Jews and Jewesses performed their ablutions.
SANTA MARIA LA BLANCA
SANTA MARIA LA BLANCA
For grace and a certain note of distinction and wealth in its beauty, Santa Maria la Blanca cannot compare with El Transito, which in the days of its splendour, must have been a gem of the most delicate perfection. But as a religious temple, as the expression of solemn worship rooted in the strange and mysterious East, the former is by far the more imposing, the more earnest and harmonious. Prayer in the Transito seems a matter of graceful and artistic dilletantism; here it appears a great racial cry of the soul.
COMING out from the station, instead of taking the road up to the town, you may cross the fields, and thus into the famous Huerta del Rey, where old Arabian splendours and romance once were castled in the legendary palace of Galiana. Now alas! beauty and legend in disgraceful abandonment. All this rich land of the Vega is the property of the ex-Empress of the French, Doña Eugenia de Guzman and Condesa de Teba. To bear a glorious name (beside which the title of French Empress is but a trumpery decoration) and inherit land so crowded with historic interests, inherit above all the ruins of a palace of fairyland, and treat her inheritance as the Empress Eugenie has done, is adequately to explain the reason of Spain’s irretrievable decadence and slow death. The palace of legend is let out in miserable tenements to muleteers and peasants, who little heed the damage done to wrought Arabian wall and ceiling by their smoky lamps, wood fires in unventilated chambers, by beasts and meal-bags housed in a princess’s boudoir, in a dismantled reception chamber. The Empress Eugenie may receive a few pesetas quarterly for this desecration, and we lose a few hours of inestimable musing, while the entire world is the poorer by a dainty monument the less. Even thirty years ago the palace of Galiana was still a constructable dream. The lovely staircase was half preserved, the lace-work was less and less obliterated, the arches still undegraded. But Mlle. de Montijo, seated afar on a foreign throne, was too busy with intrigues destined to ruin France less permanently than her neglect of property she never visits has ruined an historic poem.
Calderon, in his drama, Cado uno por se, speaks of this palace, and its heroine has been immortalised by Moratin in verses forever quoted: