As the Puerta Alta is so high above the church pavement, and ingress
would in daily use have proved difficult, the great door of the
Pellejeria was cut in the northeastern arm of the transept at the end of
the furriers' street, and down a series of moss-grown, cobblestone
planes the Burgalese could gain entrance to their church from this side.
The great framework of architecture which encases it is so astonishingly
different from the work above and around it that one can scarcely
believe it possible that they belong to one and the same building. It is
a tremendous piece of Plateresque carving, as exquisite as it is out of
place, erected through the munificence of the Archbishop Don Juan
Rodriguez de Fonseca in 1514 by the architect Francisco de Colonia. It
might have stood in Florence, and most of it might have been set against
a Tuscan church at the height of the Renaissance. There is everywhere an
overabundance of luxurious detail and rich carving. Between the
entablatures and columns stand favorite saints. The Virgin and Child are
adored by a very well-fed, fat-jowled bishop and musical angels. In one
of the panels the sword is about to descend on the neck of the kneeling
Saint John. In another, some unfortunate person has been squeezed into a
hot cauldron too small for his naked body, while bellows are applied to
the fagots underneath it and hot tar is poured on his head. While the
whole work is thoroughly Renaissance, there is here and there a curious
Gothic feeling to it, from which the carvers, surrounded and inspired by
so much of the earlier art, seem to have been unable to free themselves.
This appears in the figure ornamentation in the archivolts around the
circular-headed opening, the angel heads that cut it as it were into
cusps and the treatment and feeling of some of the figures in the larger
panels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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