BOOK VIII.SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.
CHAPTER I.INTRODUCTORY.
CHRONOLOGY.
CHRONOLOGY.
CHRONOLOGY.
Spainis one of those countries regarding the architecture of which it is almost as difficult to write anything consecutive as regarding that of Scotland. This does not arise from the paucity of examples nor from their not having been examined and described, but from the same cause as was insisted upon in speaking of Scotch art, that the style was not indigenous, but borrowed from other nations, and consequently practised far more capriciously than if it had been elaborated by the Spaniards themselves.
In the very early ages of their architectural history we do find the inhabitants of the Peninsula making rude attempts to provide themselves with churches. These, however, were so unsuited for their purposes that so soon as returning prosperity put the Spaniards in aposition to erect larger edifices, they at once fell into the arms of the French architects, who had advanced far beyond them in the adaptation of classical materials to Christian purposes. When tired of the French styles, they enlisted the Germans to assist them in supplying their wants, and Italy also contributed her influence, though less directly than the other two. In the mean time the Moors were more steadily elaborating their very ornate but rather flimsy style of art in the southern part of the Peninsula, and occasionally contributed workmen and ideas whose influence may be traced almost to the foot of the Pyrenees. When all this passed away with the Middle Ages, they borrowed the Renaissance style of the Italians, but used its Doric and Corinthian details more literally and with less adaptation, than any other nation. With these classical materials they erected churches which were larger and more gorgeous than those of the previous styles, and admired them with the same unreasoning devotion they had bestowed on their predecessors.
So far as we at present know, this peculiarity is unique in the history of architecture. Some nations are content to worship in barns, or to dispense with temples altogether. It is not, therefore, surprising that they should have no architecture, or should throw it aside as the Scotch did the moment they could shake off its trammels. But the Spaniards loved art. They delighted in the display of architectural magnificence, and indulged in pomp and ceremonial observances beyond any other people on the Continent.
The singularity is, that though endowed with the love of architecture, and an intense desire to possess its products, nature seems to have denied to the Spaniard the inventive faculty necessary to enable him to supply himself with the productions so indispensable to his intellectual nature. We can perfectly understand how, among so Teutonic a people as the Scotch, architecture should be found planted in an uncongenial soil and perish with the first blast of winter; but what seems unique is that, planted where both the soil and climate seem so thoroughly congenial as they do in Spain, it should still remain exotic and refuse to be acclimatised.
If we knew who the Spaniards were we might be able to explain these phenomena, but we know so little of the ethnography of Spain that at present this source of information is not available. The term “Iberian” hardly conveys a distinct idea to the mind. The first impulse is to say they must have been Turanian; but, if so, where are their tombs? Few tumuli or rude-stone monuments exist in Spain, and fewer traces of sepulchral rites or ancestral worship, and these have been so imperfectly described that it is difficult to reason regarding them, but unless they do exist we are safe in asserting that no Turanian people lived in historic times in Spain. From history we know that the Phœnicians occupied the coast-line at least all roundthe southern part of the Peninsula, and their settlements probably penetrated some way into the interior. The facility with which the Moors conquered and colonised the country, is in itself sufficient to prove that a people of cognate race had occupied the land long before they came there; but this hardly helps us, for neither the Phœnicians nor any of the Semitic races were ever builders, and we look in vain in Spain or at Carthage, or at Tyre or Sidon, for anything to tell us what their architecture may have been. The Goths who invaded Spain in the beginning of the 5th century must have been of Teutonic race, Aryanspur sang, for they have not left a building or a tradition of one, and they therefore can hardly have influenced the style of their successors in the Peninsula. Even the Moors were scarcely an architectural people in the proper sense of the term. Their mosques were, so far as we know them, made up of fragments of classical temples arranged without art or design. Their palaces were ornamented with plaster work of the most admired complexity of design, coloured with the most exquisite harmony; but all this was the work of the ornamentalist, hardly of the architect. It was perfectly suited to the wants of an elegant and refined Oriental race, but most ill adapted to the wants of a hardy race of mountaineers struggling for freedom against the invaders of their birthright. The Celtic element must have been the one wanting in this “olla podrida” of nations to fuse the whole together, and to give the arts that impulse which in Spain was always wanting. All the other elements they seem to have possessed, but the absence of this single one prevented them from attaining that unity which would enable us to follow their story with the same interest which we feel in tracing the development of the arts in France or England. Notwithstanding this, however, it must be confessed that the result in Spain is frequently grand, and even gorgeous, though never quite satisfactory.
The periods of Gothic architecture in Spain coincide in age very nearly with those in this country; far more nearly than with France or Italy, or any other nation. Before the era of the Cid (1066-1099), which was coincident with that of William the Conqueror, there existed a style similar in importance and character to our Saxon style. This the Spaniards call “obras de los Godos,” and the term may be practically correct, but it would confuse our nomenclature to call it the “Gothic” of Spain. “Asturian” or “Catalonian” might nearly describe it, but for the present some such indefinite description as “Early Spanish” must suffice.
In the latter half of the 11th century it was overwhelmed, as in this country, by a wholesale importation of French designs. These continued to be employed, as if no Pyrenees existed for about acentury, with the round arch in all the decorative features, but with an occasional tendency to employ the pointed arch in construction.
By degrees this round-arched style grew into an early pointed Spanish, which, like our own lancet, is more national and more characteristic than any other phase of the art, and, like it, seems to have been more cherished and for a longer time. In the beginning of the 13th century a new set of French patterns were introduced; but while French cathedrals with geometric tracery were being erected at Toledo, Burgos, and Leon, in the provinces they continued to adhere to the simpler and more solid forms of the earlier style.
During the 14th century the French style reigned supreme, with only a slight touch of local feeling and a slight infusion of Moorish details in parts, till in the 15th it broke away from its prototype into a style half German, half Spanish, with all the masonic cleverness so fatal to the style in Southern Germany, and more than German exuberance of detail, and complexity of vaulting expedients. With these the style continued to be used for churches as late as in England, and long after the classical styles had become universal in Italy and fashionable in France.
The Gothic style was not entirely disused in Spain till after the middle of the 16th century, but there its history ends, no attempt at a Gothic revival having yet been perpetrated among that inartistic race. It may come, however; but they would adopt Mexican or Chinese with equal readiness, if either of these styles would provide them with places of worship as gorgeous and as suited to their purposes as those they now possess.[130]