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. Worthless as it is, it has done one good work in the
world. It inspired the altar-picture of Claudio Coello, the last best
work of the last of the great school of Spanish painters. He finished it
just before he died of shame and grief at seeing Giordano, the nimble
Neapolitan, emptying his buckets of paint on the ceiling of the grand
staircase, where St. Lawrence and an army of martyrs go sailing with a
fair wind into glory.
The great days of art in the Escorial are gone. Once in every nook and
corner it concealed treasures of beauty that the world had nearly
forgotten. The Perla of Raphael hung in the dark sacristy. The Cena of
Titian dropped to pieces in the refectory. The Gloria, which had sunk
into eclipse on the death of Charles V., was hidden here among
unappreciative monks. But on the secularization of the monasteries,
these superb canvases went to swell the riches of the Royal Museum.
There are still enough left here, however, to vindicate the ancient fame
of the collection. They are perhaps more impressive in their beauty and
loneliness than if they were pranking among their kin in the glorious
galleries and perfect light of that enchanted palace of Charles III. The
inexhaustible old man of Cadora has the Prayer on Mount Olivet, an Ecce
Homo, an Adoration of the Magi. Velazquez one of his rare scriptural
pieces, Jacob and his Children. Tintoretto is rather injured at the
Museo by the number and importance of his pictures left in this monkish
twilight; among them is a lovely Esther, and a masterly Presentation of
Christ to the People. Plenty of Giordanos and Bassanos and one or two
by El Greco, with his weird plague-stricken faces, all chalk and
charcoal. A sense of duty will take you into the crypt where the dead
kings are sleeping in brass. This mausoleum, ordered by the great
Charles, was slow in finishing. All of his line had a hand in it down to
Philip IV., who completed it and gathered in the poor relics of royal
mortality from many graves. The key of the vault is the stone where the
priest stands when he elevates the Host in the temple above. The vault
is a graceful octagon about forty feet high, with nearly the same
diameter; the flickering light of your torches shows twenty-six
sarcophagi, some occupied and some empty, filling the niches of the
polished marble. On the right sleep the sovereigns, on the left their
consorts. There is a coffin for Dona Isabel de Bourbon among the kings,
and one for her amiable and lady-like husband among the queens. They
were not lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they shall be
divided. The quaint old church-mouse who showed me the crypt called my
attention to the coffin where Maria Louisa, wife of Charles IV., - the
lady who so gallantly bestrides her war-horse, in the uniform of a
colonel, in Goya's picture, - coming down those slippery steps with the
sure footing of feverish insanity, during a severe illness, scratched
Luisa with the point of her scissors and marked the sarcophagus for
her own. All there was good of her is interred with her bones. Her
frailties live on in scandalized history.
Twice, it is said, the coffin of the emperor has been opened by curious
hands, - by Philip IV., who found the corpse of his great ancestor
intact, and observed to the courtier at his elbow, "An honest body, Don
Luis!" and again by the Ministers of State and Fomento in the spring of
1870, who started back aghast when the coffin-lid was lifted and
disclosed the grim face of the Burgess of Ghent, just as Titian painted
him, - the keen, bold face of a world-stealer.
I do not know if Philip's funeral urn was ever opened. He stayed above
ground too long as it was, and it is probable that people have never
cared to look upon his face again.
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