George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
_Some account of Gothic Architecture in Spain_, published in 1865, was
the outcome of the journeys in 1861, ’62 and ’63 and (I suppose) of
two more summers spent at home in research and actual composition and
publication. At any rate I find no record of autumn travel in ’64 and
’65.
It is hardly fair, in truth, for Señor Lampérez to say that he saw only
a small part of Spain. His journeys covered, geographically speaking,
much more than two-fifths of the Peninsula, and archaeologically
speaking, all the best of the Romanesque and Gothic, both Gallegan,
Castilian, and Catalan. What he missed was the pre-Romanesque, as it
is found in the Asturias, and the true Moorish, _i.e._ the Asiatic and
non-Christian. If he neglected the Mudejar work and the Renaissance
period, it was deliberately, because when he looked at them he misliked
them. The real difference between his field of labour and that of Señor
Lampérez consists not so much in the latter’s possession of Estremadura
and la Mancha, Seville and the south-east coast, as in his fuller
knowledge and more minute experience of the northern provinces. The
Castiles and Leon, Galicia and Navarre, and the ancient domain of the
kings of Aragon, have been examined league by league and published both
fully and frequently, since 1865. The peculiar styles which give their
importance to the regions of the Biscay shore and the Sierra Morena,
the Latin-Byzantine of Asturias and the Mohammedan of Andalusia, are
special phenomena and must always be treated apart; they may therefore
at need be omitted, without grave loss, from the general consideration
of mediaeval building in Spain; and if these are struck out, for
instance from the lists of Señor Lampérez, there will remain, as the
significant monuments and the important regions, precisely those which
Street had already treated. Cuenca and Soria, Poblet and Ripoll, Tuy
and Orense, Toro, Jaca, the Seo de Urgel, were all unvisited and
other churches yet; but the list is not long nor are the places vastly
important.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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