We Visited This Plated Fragment Of The Old Moorish Capital When We
Descended From Our Hotel With A New Guide To See The Great, The
Stupendous Cathedral, Where The Catholic Kings Lie Triumphantly Entombed
In The Heart Of Their Conquest.
It is altogether unlike the other
Spanish cathedrals of my knowledge; for though the cathedral of
Valladolid is of Renaissance architecture in its austere simplicity, it
is somehow even less like that of Granada than the Gothic fanes of
Burgos or Toledo or Seville.
All the detail at Granada is classicistic,
but the whole is often of Gothic effect, especially in the mass of those
clustered Corinthian columns that lift its domes aloof on their
prodigious bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York
Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of altars, the colors
of painted wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one
bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader's
fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that
gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and the
music of stringed instruments and the shrill voices of choir-boys
pierced the spaces here and there, but no more filled them than the
immemorable plastic and pictorial facts: than a certain very lively
bishop kneeling on his tomb and looking like George Washington; or than
a St. Jerome in the Desert, outwrinkling age, with his lion curled
cozily up in his mantle; or than the colossal busts of Adam and Eve and
the praying figures of Ferdinand and Isabel, richly gilded in the
exquisite temple forming the high altar; or than the St. James on
horseback, with his horse's hoof planted on the throat of a Moor; or
than the Blessed Virgins in jeweled crowns and stomachers and brocaded
skirts; or than that unsparing decapitation of John the Baptist bloodily
falling forward with his severed gullet thrusting at the spectator.
Nothing has ever been too terrible in life for Spanish art to represent;
it is as ruthlessly veracious as Russian literature; and of all the
painters and sculptors who have portrayed the story of Christianity as a
tale of torture and slaughter, the Spaniards seem to have studied it
closest from the fact; perhaps because for centuries the Inquisition
lavished the fact upon them.
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