There Is Nothing To Break The Effect Of The Three
Great Naves, Divided By Immense Square-Clustered Columns, And Surmounted
By The Vast Dome That Rises With All The Easy Majesty Of A Mountain More
Than Three Hundred Feet From The Decent Black And White Pavement.
I know
of nothing so simple and so imposing as this royal chapel, built purely
for the glory of God and with no thought of mercy or consolation for
human infirmity.
The frescos of Luca Giordano show the attempt of a
later and degenerate age to enliven with form and color the sombre
dignity of this faultless pile. But there is something in the blue and
vapory pictures which shows that even the unabashed Luca was not free
from the impressive influence of the Escorial.
A flight of veined marble steps leads to the beautiful retable of the
high altar. The screen, over ninety feet high, cost the Milanese Trezzo
seven years of labor. The pictures illustrative of the life of our Lord
are by Tibaldi and Zuccaro. The gilt bronze tabernacle of Trezzo and
Herrera, which has been likened with the doors of the Baptistery of
Florence as worthy to figure in the architecture of heaven, no longer
exists. It furnished a half hour's amusement to the soldiers of France.
On either side of the high altar are the oratories of the royal family,
and above them are the kneeling effigies of Charles, with his wife,
daughter, and sisters, and Philip with his successive harem of wives.
One of the few luxuries this fierce bigot allowed himself was that of a
new widowhood every few years. There are forty other altars with
pictures good and bad. The best are by the wonderful deaf-mute,
Navarrete, of Logrono, and by Sanchez Coello, the favorite of Philip.
To the right of the high altar in the transept you will find, if your
tastes, unlike Miss Riderhood's, run in a bony direction, the most
remarkable Reliquary in the world. With the exception perhaps of Cuvier,
Philip could see more in a bone than any man who ever lived. In his long
life of osseous enthusiasm he collected seven thousand four hundred and
twenty-one genuine relics, - whole skeletons, odd shins, teeth,
toe-nails, and skulls of martyrs, - sometimes by a miracle of special
grace getting duplicate skeletons of the same saint. The prime jewels of
this royal collection are the grilled bones of San Lorenzo himself,
bearing dim traces of his sacred gridiron.
The sacristan will show you also the retable of the miraculous wafer,
which bled when trampled on by Protestant heels at Gorcum in 1525. This
has always been one of the chief treasures of the Spanish crown. The
devil-haunted idiot Charles II. made a sort of idol of it, building it
this superb altar, consecrated "in this miracle of earth to the miracle
of heaven." When the atheist Frenchmen sacked the Escorial and stripped
it of silver and gold, the pious monks thought most of hiding this
wonderful wafer, and when the storm passed by, the booby Ferdinand VII.
restored it with much burning of candles, swinging of censers, and
chiming of bells.
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