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
The original clerestory still, in great part, remains; it is simple, but
good and vigorous in style, and with but one special peculiarity in its
detail. The windows are for the most part of two lights, with a
quatrefoiled circle in the head; and the peculiarity referred to here is
the omission to carry the chamfer round the extrados of the arched heads
to the lights or the circle; the effect produced is peculiar, the
tracery not looking as if it were properly constructed, but as if the
wheel had been loosely placed within the arch without having any proper
connection with it. I have noticed the same arrangement in a church at
Valladolid, and it must, I think, be regarded either as a freak of the
workmen, or more probably as the exhibition of some degree of ignorance
of the ordinary mode of executing the mouldings in window traceries.
But here, with this one exception, as in almost all the details
throughout the original work of this cathedral, there is little, if
anything, to show that we are not in France, and looking at some of its
best and purest thirteenth-century Gothic. There is no trace of Moorish
or other foreign influence, the whole work being pure, simple, and good.
In the aisles two only of the original windows still remain, and these
show that they were lighted originally by a series of well-shaped
lancets, with engaged jamb-shafts inside. The vaults are all slightly
domical in section; the diagonal ribs generally semi-circular, as also
are the wall-ribs. The masonry of the cells is arranged in lines
parallel to the ridge, but considerably distorted near the springing.
The transepts, which, as has been said, are similar in their design to
the nave, are of considerable size, and the view across them is in fact
the best internal view in the church. One early chapel alone
remains,--on the east side of the north transept,--and its groined roof
is remarkable. It is a square in plan, with its vault divided into eight
groining cells, forming two bays on each side, and with two lancet
windows at the east end, each under a division of the vault. No one who
has studied the groining of the churches in Poitou and Anjou--so decided
in their local peculiarities--can doubt, on comparison of them with this
chapel, that it was the work of men who had studied in the same school,
and it is remarkable that we find it reproduced in the lantern of the
great church of the Convent of Las Huelgas, near Burgos, of which I
shall presently have to speak. In both cases the vaulting is very
domical, and the joints of the stone filling-in of the cells are
_vertical_. This chapel suggests, too, the question whether the first
idea was not here, as well as at Las Huelgas, to have a series of
chapels on the east side of the transepts, though I should decide this
in the negative, inasmuch as there is no mark of a chapel in the next
bay to the north, and there was probably from the first a complete
chevet to the choir.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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