To remind myself of Toledo’s unique posture, I walked one day out of the city, across the bridge over the Tajo and up onto that road that swings to the south, and when I had climbed to a high point I stopped to look back. How magnificent Toledo was, with its two salient bulwarks: to the right, the blunt, four-square Alcázar, a gigantic fortress with no artistic grace whatever, and in the center the glory of Toledo, the Gothic cathedral, whose spire and extended walls can best be appreciated from where I stood.
On the city side of the river, dwellings and monuments crowded together like animals in a storm, but on the country side the land stood practically empty. The Tajo was a line demarcating civilization from nothingness, and until Toledo was captured no invading general could claim that he had subdued Spain. This was the sequence of occupation with the approximate dates when Toledo fell into new hands:
Prehistoric Iberians
Early Historic Celtiberians
192 B.C. Romans
A.D. 411 Wandering Germanic Tribes
A.D. 453 Visigoths
A.D. 712 Muslims
A.D. 1085 Spaniards
At Mérida we have witnessed the impact of Roman rule; in the next chapter we shall see the Muslims at Córdoba; and in all parts we can observe Spaniards, but it is only in Toledo that we can glimpse that nebulous period of three centuries when tribes from northern Europe dominated the peninsula.
The first Germanic tribes that spilled over into Spain after the debacle of the Roman Empire were mere adventurers and brought little except fire and disruption. Vandals, Alans, Suevi, they left no mark on either the culture or the population of Spain and were so disorganized that it was relatively easy for the superior Visigoths (the name means Noble Goths and refers to the West Goths) to supersede them. The Visigoths played an important role in the civilization of Spain. They brought a vigorous if heretical Christianity, and when on May 8, 589, King Reccared finally abjured his heresy and pledged allegiance to the Catholic Church of Rome, he installed Spain’s most prized possession.
The Visigoths also introduced a codified law, a sensible tax system, a centralized government and an element of strength in the Spanish character. Since these Goths ruled Spain for nearly three hundred years and stayed on after their final defeat, they must also have made a strong contribution to Spanish blood, and it is they who account for the large number of blue-eyed Spaniards. On the other hand, they left almost no literature, little art and no substantial architecture. I recall few mass movements of people that left behind so little visual proof that they had occupied a country.
Toledo was probably an imposing city when it served as their capital, but the only echo of its grandeur is found in the Santa Cruz Museum, a few steps east of the Zocodover, where a few Visigothic remains are on display. In a corner room downstairs stands a typical example, a tombstone from the sixth century, carved in a soft limestone which should have been easy to work; but its letters are so puerile, its design so trivial and its effect so unsatisfying that one can see that it was carved by a man who had no sense of proportion or art. It is one of the few ancient stones I know that must be called ugly; yet in the next room stand beautifully carved Roman stones of about the same period, and these were surely available to the Visigoths as examples.
As one moves from room to room the conviction grows that the Visigoths were ungracious men; the capitals they used to top their columns are crude and the columns are poorly carved, as if a shaggy bear had done the job with his claws.
And yet, in the far room on the second floor, when I had about given up on the Visigoths, I came upon a piece of stone, number 196, which was positively superb, and having seen it, I had a new appreciation of the Visigoths. I commend it as one of the best things in Spain.
It is about eight inches high and was once square, about thirty inches on the side, but now one of the corners has been damaged, which does little harm; indeed, it lends a feeling of history. The four sides of the stone, a rather soft, whitish limestone, are sloped inward and decorated with rude square crosses of the kind known as formée. Broad at the ends and tapering to a point where the vertical and the lateral bars met, the four triangular parts give the impression of a huge stone Iron Cross, as if this early work of the Goths had served as the pattern for present-day Germans, which it probably did. The crosses are accompanied by rows of massive and ungainly fleurs-de-lis plus other odds and ends, the whole decoration producing a feeling of combined awkwardness and significance. The stone is not inspired, but it is devout; it is not beautiful, but it does evoke a sense of primitive worship.
On top it has been hollowed to form a basin, and through one side, the cutting having been performed crudely, a drainpipe issues, for this is a baptismal font, and here the Goths committed themselves and Spain to the Christian religion. I never tired of looking at this stone; it seemed to me to have the rude force attained by our best modern sculpture, and I suppose if Henry Moore or Richard Stankiewicz were called upon to produce a baptismal font for a contemporary church it would look something like this. Of all the Visigothic stones I have seen in Spain, this one speaks most clearly and purely of that shadowy age when these northern barbarians fumbled and grumbled their way to victory and defeat.
Legend says that the Visigoths lost Spain because a voyeur king spied on a naked princess. Roderick, fated to be the last king of Toledo, had assumed the throne in 709. A married man, he conceived a great passion for the daughter of his friend and counselor, Count Julian, who governed Ceuta in Africa. King Roderick used to secrete himself in the bushes near a cave, still shown to tourists, on the other side of the Tajo near where I had stopped to see the city, and from this hidden spot he watched Florinda bathe. One day, while doing so, his passion overcame him and he leaped from his hiding place and raped the girl. Count Julian, seeking a revenge which would repair his daughter’s honor, was ridiculed by the king much as Rigoletto, the father of Gilda, was ridiculed by his count. Rigoletto missed his revenge; Count Julian did not. He fled Toledo, went south to Gibraltar, crossed over to Ceuta, and there invited the Muslims to help him teach Roderick a lesson. He led the Moors into Spain, where they defeated Roderick, and then he brought them to Toledo and showed them how to cross the Tajo and penetrate the defenses. Of Roderick, when the battle ended, there remained only a kingly scarf and a glove; his fate was never known, but the rule of the Goths was ended and they left behind only that litany of strange and un-Spanish names used by their kings: Reccared, Witeric, Wamba, Witiza, Quindasvinto. The long dominance of the Muslims had begun.
The heart of Toledo is the Gothic cathedral, begun in 1227 and finished more than two hundred and fifty years later. It is so beautiful that one could never exhaust its variety, so evocative of the religious and civil history of Spain that it can never be fully understood. It is a masterpiece of concept and execution.
I care little for the exterior, what I have been able to see of it, for the façade is so uneven it looks as if Visigoths had planned it. The left spire is marred by three curious circles of projecting flanges such as boats use on their pier lines to prevent wharf rats from climbing aboard; it therefore looks as if it were prepared to repulse an assault of angels. The right spire was never finished, and what exists of its base was severely mutilated by a late addition. The various doors leading into the cathedral have been admired by some, but they are poor things compared to what we shall see in the north. But even if the exterior were a masterpiece it wouldn’t matter, because you can’t really see it. Houses and shops are jammed against it, and only from across the river can one see that part that soars above the surrounding roofs and gain an idea of what the building must have been before it was so sadly encroached upon.
But inside, it is quite a different matter. One does not enter through the main façade but through a cloister that stands off to one side. Whenever I step into the cathedral itself, I go to the first closed door on my right, lean back against it and allow my eye to wander the full length of the left aisle to remind mysel
f of how enormous this church is. One morning I stepped it off, about a yard to a step, and it measured 136 paces, well beyond the length of a football field.
From my vantage point at the door I can see three things: the immense sweep of the aisle; the massive structure in the center of the cathedral, which houses the choir and the altar; and at the far end the Capilla de Santiago, which terminates the aisle. This chapel is something very special.
Seen from where I stand, the ground-level part of the chapel is composed of an iron grille which provides a lovely tracery and a subtle movement which invites the eye to look past the great bulk of the altar and around into the ambulatory. Above the grille, stained-glass windows lend color and variation to the scene. Aloft, the vaulting crisscrosses in various angles and planes, creating a polyphonic counterpoint whose intricacies never end. This distant conjunction of elements is like a perpetuum mobile placed at the end of a long line of stone trees whose trunks are the majestic pillars of the cathedral, and although there will be much for me to see in this subtle building, nothing will excel this simple yet complicated view down the aisle to the distant chapel. With this view one gains an insight into what a cathedral is supposed to be.
Let us walk from my door down the length of the church to the Capilla de Santiago. A quarter of the way down on the left stands a small golden chapel, put there to break the long sweep; it is placed exactly right, for it lends a touch of color without creating confusion: this cathedral is surprisingly free of clutter or the kind of garbage that often mars the minor churches of Spain. Now on the right we see the heavy walls of the choir and altar. Light strikes us as we cross the transept, a small cathedral in itself, and at the end we face the chapel whose components I have described.
It contains two works of note. High on the wall Santiago rides a brightly colored merry-go-round horse caparisoned in gold and shells. This is the same Santiago we saw as a pilgrim in Mérida, but in this evocation he is Santiago Matamoros (Moor-slayer), brandishing the enormous sword with which he slays Muslims, one of whom we see beneath the horse’s hooves getting his head slashed off. We will meet this ferocious Matamoros riding over much of Spain but never in a more stylish presentation.
The joy of first communion, at which time the young Spaniard joins her ancient Church, is a memory that abides through a lifetime.
On the pavement of the chapel stand a pair of splendid marble tombs, each supported by four kneeling knights of the Order of Santiago, and from looking at them one can appreciate how grand and powerful that order was. The tombs form the end of a story both tragic and amusing, for they contain the bodies of the Conde Álvaro de Luna and his wife. The conde was born in 1388 as the illegitimate son of a rural family. Having no family prospects, he maneuvered himself into position as the confidant of Isabel the Catholic’s father King Juan II, whom we have already met as the grandson of John of Gaunt, and so charmed him that he, Alvaro, became the effective ruler of Spain and the most notorious legal thief in history. His appetite for land and money was so voracious that after a few years he had amassed a million and a half coins of Spanish gold, eighty million lesser coins of Castilla and Aragón and seven trunks of Italian gold coins. He was Master of Santiago, which made him one of the most powerful lay forces in religion, and Condestable de Castilla, which empowered him to control the countryside. By one clever trick or another he acquired outright ownership of one hundred and twenty different towns. In the days when Colonel Pizarro was a boy in Trujillo, for example, Don Álvaro owned the city. His end was sardonic. Always loyal to the king, he engineered for Juan a most favorable second marriage to Isabel of Portugal (who would become the mother of Isabel the Catholic), but no sooner had she become Queen of Spain than she decided that the Conde de Luna must go. ‘He is stealing the nation,’ she told her husband as she organized a cabal of nobles who arrested the conde on some irrelevant charge, gave him a drumhead court-martial and sped him to the execution block. He was buried in the Capilla de Santiago, and that is where the humor comes in, for his family erected over his grave a life-sized portrait statue so articulated that when Mass was being said at the main altar some twenty yards away, a servant who followed the motions of the priest could manipulate a series of underground chains which made the statue stand, sit or genuflect at the proper points of the service, creaking loudly as it did so. So far as we know, this was the world’s first mechanical man and it became so notorious that more people watched it than the priest. This continued for some thirty years until one day Queen Isabel said sternly, ‘Get that thing out of here!’ What became of the praying statue no one remembers.
Toledo’s cathedral has a score of similar focal points, each laden with historical and spiritual significance; I wonder if there is another church in the world whose interior is so rich and at the same time so beautiful. I propose to speak of only four of the treasures: the choir, the main altar, a preposterous thing called the Transparente and the sacristy, which may be the most rewarding of all because of two paintings it contains.
In the center of the cathedral, facing the main altar, has been set down a very large masonry cube whose outer walls of stone are tastefully carved. It is the inside which is noteworthy, a symphony of dark beige alabaster and oil-stained wood, accented here and there by fine statues in marble, bronze and a lighter alabaster. To appreciate the quality of this noble structure, large enough to hold a chorus of up to eighty priests who chant during celebration of Mass, you must visualize the five layers of art which fit together, one on top of the other, to form the stalls in which the singing priests sit. At the lowest level, of course, are the carved misericords, those half-seats which can be quietly propped up when the service is long and leaned against so that the singer seems to be standing up while he is actually sitting down. ‘Cheater-seaters,’ I heard an American girl explain to a friend. Since misericords were used by the human fundament, custom allowed them to be carved to represent devils, fiends, vices and other low forms of life, so that in some cathedrals the misericords present scenes of sexual malpractice and abomination. The second layer is formed by the backs of the choir stalls, where a series of fifty-four carved wooden panels depict scenes from the Conquest of Granada. The third tier consists of misericords for an upper row of choir stalls and above them the great treasure of the choir, a series of wooden panels depicting standing figures from the Bible, and these are magnificently carved. And at the top, above the two ranks of choir stalls, runs a fine series of standing figures carved in pale alabaster that shines so as to make the faces of these noble figures seem alive. Any one of these five components would have made this choir notable; taken together they form one of the chief treasures of Spanish art.
I should like to comment briefly on only three of the components. The battle scenes by Rodrigo the German are an extraordinary production insofar as magnitude is concerned, for each of the panels is large and contains dozens and sometimes scores of separate figures. Since they were carved shortly after the Conquest of Granada the observation of armies and weaponry is of historic value. I am not so sure about the art. There is a decided monotony of design; in panel after panel a set of identical towers appears off-center left or right, against which an army moves with a confrontation of sorts between heroic Christians and abject Moors, all the warriors presenting a sameness of figure and face. This is one war in which the Muslims, who had defeated the Spaniards for some seven hundred years, fail to win a battle. On the other hand, these repetitious panels do contain much delightful observation on the wildlife of the countryside, and some of this work is of merit. Taken as a whole, the panels are delightful, and what they lack in art they compensate for in their ability to convince the viewer that he is seeing the Conquest of Granada, not as it happened, but as Fernando and Isabel desired it to be remembered.
The topmost parade of alabaster warriors used to please me very much, for it presented the heroic figures of Bible story in the dress of German knights of the fifteenth century, and I especially liked old Roboam
(where does he appear in the Bible and under what name, I used to wonder; later I found that he was a link in the genealogy of Christ as given in Matthew), who stands tenth in on the right-hand side, next to King Solomon. He strides ingratiatingly, with a military sash pulled about his body, reminding me of Lohengrin. But in later years as I have grown to know the figures better I have concluded that they are fairly ordinary, possibly because the wooden figures below them now seem so wonderful.
This endless line of Biblical figures, carved in the darkest wood, is probably the most important Renaissance work in Spain, and was completed between 1539 and 1543 by two men with contrasting styles, the figures on the right as you enter the choir being by the Frenchman Felipe Vigarní de Borgoña and those on the left by the Spaniard Alonso de Berruguete. At first acquaintance the work of the former is easier to appreciate, especially panels like the one near the middle showing Jacob wrestling with the angel, in which the intertwining of figures is done with invention and grace. Vigarní’s share of the work contains another half-dozen panels of high merit, particularly the one in the corner showing a man with an ox.
But as I grew to know the panels my taste inclined more and more to the remarkable portraits carved by Berruguete. They are sometimes heavy but always inspired; they are decidedly awkward but always moving; they are particularly tortured, like the late work of El Greco, but never tedious. A good panel with which to start an appreciation of Berruguete is the one to the left of the alabaster relief in the central wall, for this shows St. Peter and is not successful: the chair is grotesquely done, the keys and book are out of balance and the savage distortion of the figure produces no artistic gain. In fact, the whole idea misses. The four evangelists who appear next to Peter are ordinary, but they seem not to know what to do with the books they carry, and even John the Baptist, who comes next, emphasizes a tortured distortion rather than an artistic form.