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.
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