Some Account of Gothic Architecture in SpainStreet, George Edmund
History
Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic -- Spain; Church architecture -- Spain
This is the type of house to be seen probably in every street in the
city; but here and there are still left other houses of distinctly
Moorish architecture, and of extreme magnificence in their adornment,
Looking to the frail material of all these enrichments, the wonder is,
not that so few houses remain, but rather that anything at all exists;
and even in their present forlorn state there is something very
interesting in these houses and rooms and decorations, so utterly
unlike anything to which a northern eye is ever accustomed at home. The
examples of this class which I saw seemed to be all of the same
date--either of the fourteenth or fifteenth century--and though full of
variety in their detail, extremely similar in their general effect. A
room in the Casa de Mesa is the finest I saw, and I suppose that even in
the South of Spain there are few better examples of its class. Its
dimensions are 20 ft. 3 in. in width, by about 55 ft. in length and 34
ft. in height. The walls are lined at the base with very good encaustic
tiles, rising nearly 4 ft. from the floor; above this line they are
plain up to the cornice, save where the elaborately-decorated entrance
archway--an uncusped arch, set in a frame, as it were, of the most
fantastic and luxuriant foliage, arcading, and tracery--occupies a
considerable part of one of the side walls. A very deep cornice of but
slight projection, with a band of enrichment below it, surrounds the
room, and this is interrupted by the doorway at the side, and by a small
two-light window at one end. This window of two lights, with a cusped
round-arched head to each light and some delicate tracery above, is
framed in a broad border of tracery work, copied from the latest Gothic
panelling, so that the whole design is a complete mixture of Gothic and
Moorish detail. The ceiling is in its old state and of the usual
_artesinado_ description. Its section is that of a lofty-pointed arch,
truncated at the top, so as to give one panel in width flat, the rest
being all on the curve. The roof is hipped at both ends and panelled
throughout, each panel being filled in with a most ingenious star-like
pattern, of the kind which one so commonly sees in Moorish work. The
patterns are formed by ribs (square in section) of dark wood, with a
white line along the centre of the soffeit of each. The sides of the
ribs are painted red, and the recessed panels have lines of white beads
painted at their edges, and in the centre an arabesque on a dark blue
ground. The colours are so arranged as to mark out as distinctly as
possible the squares and patterns into which it is divided, and the
sinking of some panels below the others allows the same pattern to be
used for borders and grounds with very varied effect. The reds are
rather crimson in tone, and the blues very dark. The plaster enrichments
on the walls seemed, as far as I could make out, to have been originally
left white, with the square edges of the plaster painted red; but I
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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