I FOUND a pleasant drive of two and a half hours, through vineyards and olive-grounds, from Tudela to Tarazona. In front all the way was the noble Sierra de Moncayo, which, according to one of my Spanish fellow-travellers, is the highest mountain in Spain, from which view however I humbly, and somewhat to his annoyance, dissented. But whether he were right or not, it is still of very grand height, and the more impressive in that it rises by itself in the midst of a comparatively flat country. Behind us was an admirable view of Tudela, backed by the brown and arid hills which skirt the Ebro; beyond them, in the far distance, the Pyrenees; whilst in the immediate foreground we had a rich green mass of olives and vines spread in a glorious expanse over the country.

The villages on the road have nothing to boast of if I except a pilgrimage church at Cascante, approached by a long covered gallery from below, and a brick tower at Monteacadeo, of the Zaragozan type. We passed, too, a newly-established convent for monks, who are already beginning to build, in spite of the ruin with which they have so lately been visited. But long before the end of our journey was reached, the towers and steeples of Tarazona rose attractively in front over the low hill which conceals the complete view of the city until you are almost close upon it.

Attractive as this general view undoubtedly is, this old city does not lose when it is examined more closely and carefully. It is not only in itself picturesque, but its situation on either side of the stream which a few miles below falls into the Ebro is eminently fine, and has been made the most of by the happy and probably unconscious skill of the men who have reared on the cliff above the water a tall pile of buildings on buildings, carried on grand arches, corbelled here and buttressed there, and with a sky-line charming in itself, and rendered doubly beautiful by the sudden break in its outline caused by the lofty brick steeple of la Magdalena—one of the finest of its class—which rears itself, with admirable hardihood, on the very edge of the cliff. The streets and Plazas, too, of the old city are all picturesquely irregular, full of colour and evidences of national peculiarities, and climb the steep sides of the hills from the river-side to the high ground at the northern end of the city, which is crowned by the church of San Miguel. I call such skill as this “unconscious,” because it is so much a characteristic of old works of this kind that their authors never exhibit any of that pert conceit which so distinctly marks the efforts of so many of us nowadays. Old architects fortunately lived in days when society was moderate in its demands, and had not ceased to care for that which is true and natural: sad for us that we live when every man wishes only to excel his neighbour, and that without regard to what is true or useful; so that, instead of obtaining those happy results which always reward the artist who does exactly what is needed in the most natural and unartificial manner, we, by our attempts to show our own cleverness, constantly end in substituting a petty personal conceit, where otherwise we might have had an enduring and artistic success.

The cathedral stands very much alone, and away from the busier part of the city, at the upper end of a grass-grown and irregular Plaza, on the opposite side of the river from the Alcazar, and indeed from the bulk of the houses. This Plaza, when I first saw it, on a Sunday afternoon, was thoroughly beautiful and characteristic as a picture of Spanish life. There was a fountain in the centre, around which hundreds of peasants were congregated in lively groups, talking at the top of their voices, and all gay with whitest shirt-sleeves, bright-coloured sashes, and velvet breeches, slashed daintily at the knees, to show the whiteness of the linen drawers; and when I went on into the church, I found in the Lady Chapel another group of them kneeling before the altar, and following one of their own class in a litany to the Blessed Virgin, the effect of which was striking even to one unable to join in the burthen of the prayer.

The cathedral here is said to have been restored by Alonso the First of Aragon, in the year 1110; but an old Breviary, cited by ArgaÏz, fixes the foundation of the present cathedral in 1235,[386] and with this date the earliest part of the existing church agrees very closely. The plan[387] is very good, consisting of a nave of six bays, with aisles and chapels between their buttresses, transepts, a lofty Cimborio over the Crossing, and a choir of two bays, ended with a five-sided apse. The chapels in the chevet have mostly been altered, though the first on the north side appears to be original, and proves that the outline of the plan of the chevet could never have been very good. This chapel is four-sided in plan, but much wider at one end than the other, and we must, I fear, give but scant credit to the architect who planned it. The Lady Chapel is a late and poor addition of a very inferior kind, and completely modernized—as indeed is the greater part of the church—on the exterior. On the south side of the cathedral there are old sacristies and a large cloister, of which more presently. The west end seemed to me to have been intended for two steeples, but one only has been completed, and this is on the north side of the north aisle.

The remaining portions of the thirteenth-century church have been so much altered that the general effect of the early work is almost entirely destroyed. The columns and arches generally are original; the former have carved capitals; many of the latter are slightly horseshoe in shape, and have labels enriched with the dog-tooth ornament. The choir and transepts retain a good simple arcaded triforium, carried on detached shafts, and this returns across the gable-walls of the latter; it is of the simplest early pointed character; so too are the choir windows, which before their alteration appear to have been lancets, with engaged shafts in their jambs, whilst in the eastern wall of the transepts are windows of two lancet lights, with a circle above within an enclosing arch. Most of the arches of the nave are adorned with carved flowers on the chamfers, the effect of which is not good; indeed I half doubted whether they were not plaster additions, though they seemed to be just too good for this. The choir has two (and only two) flying buttresses; and as they are evidently of early date, with pinnacles of the very simplest pyramidal outline, they were probably erected to counteract a settlement which showed itself immediately after the erection of the church, for there is no evidence of any others having existed. The walls of the apse had originally a richly carved cornice, filled with heads and foliage. The groining of the aisles is generally simple and early in date, and quadripartite in plan: that of the whole of the rest of the choir and nave is of the richest description, and of the latest kind of Gothic.

[larger view]
[largest view]
TARAZONA Ground Plan of Cathedral Plate XXII. W. West, Lithr. Published by John Murray, Albemarle St. 1865.

Here, as is so frequently the case all over the world, the builders of one period used an entirely different material from that used by those of earlier times;[388] so that you may tell with tolerable accuracy the date of the work by the material of which it is built. Here the early church was entirely built of stone, but in all the later additions brick is the prevailing material; and at first sight it is in these later additions that we seem to find almost all the most characteristic work in the church. Many of these additions, as for instance the Churrigueresque alterations of the clerestory, are thoroughly bad and contemptible; but some of them, though they damage the unity of effect of the building, and have taken the place of work which one would much rather have seen still intact, are nevertheless striking in themselves. Such is the singular and picturesque Cimborio erected by Canon Juan MuÑoz[389] in the sixteenth century; it is certainly most picturesque, but such a curious and complex combination of pinnacles and turrets built of brick, and largely inlaid with green, blue, and white tiles, is perhaps nowhere else to be seen. It is octagonal in plan, and of three stages in height, the angles of the octagons in the several stages being all counterchanged. Enormous coats of arms decorate the fronts of the buttresses. The whole work is of the very latest possible Gothic, utterly against all rules both in design and decoration, and yet, notwithstanding all this, it is unquestionably striking in its effect. The mixture of glazed tiles with brickwork has here been carried to a very great extent, and the result does not, I think, encourage any one to hope for much from this kind of development. This work is not to be compared to that at the east end of Zaragoza Cathedral, where a plain piece of wall is carefully covered all over with a rich coloured diaper of brickwork and tiles, which are all harmonious and uniform in character, and—which is equally important—in texture, and it has, on the contrary, great similarity to some attempts to combine bricks and tiles which we see made in the present day, and seems to show that these attempts are not to be carelessly encouraged. For even when such work is first executed, and the brickwork is fresh and neat, I think we always feel that the smooth hard surface of the tile offers rather too great a contrast to the rougher texture of the bricks; and whilst the former is likely to remain almost unchanged for ever, the latter is certain gradually to grow rougher and ruder in its aspect, until, in the end, we shall have walls showing everywhere picturesque marks of age, and yet with their decorations as fresh as if they had but just been introduced. Nothing can well be worse than this; for if the appearance of age is to be venerated at all, it must be somewhat uniformly evident; and it no more answers to permit the decorations on an old and rugged wall to be always new and fresh-looking, than it does to allow a juvenile wig to be put on the venerable head of an old man!

The brick steeple of the cathedral is an inferior example of the same kind as that of la Magdalena, which I shall have presently to describe; its upper half is modern, and the lowest stage of stone. The west front is all modernized, and the north transept is conspicuous for a large porch of base design, erected probably in the sixteenth century, and exhibiting a curious though very unsuccessful attempt to copy—or perhaps I ought to say caricature—early work.

The whole of the clerestory walls have been raised with a stage of brickwork above the windows, which was added probably in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

The cloister, built in the beginning of the sixteenth century, by D. Guillen Ramon de Moncada, is a remarkable example of very rich brickwork. It deserves illustration as being of an extremely uncommon style, and withal very effective. All the arches and jambs of the openings are of moulded brick, and there are brick enclosing arches, and a very simple brick cornice outside; but the delicate traceries which give so much character to the work are all cut in thin slabs of stone let into the brickwork. Of course such a work was not intended for glazing, and was an ingenious arrangement for rendering the cloister cool and unaffected by the sun, even when at its hottest. The forms of the openings here are certainly not good, and look much more like domestic than ecclesiastical work; but in spite of this one cannot but be thankful for novelty, whenever it is, as here, legitimately obtained. The bricks are of a very pale red tint, 12½ inches long, 6¼ inches wide, and from 1½ to 1¾ thick, and the mortar-joint, as usual, is very thick—generally about ¾ of an inch. The cloister is groined, and probably in brick, but is now plastered or whitewashed unsparingly, and its effect is in great degree ruined.

Cloister, Tarazona.
Cloister, Tarazona.

The sacristies are rather peculiar in their arrangement: they are all groined, and one of them has a small recess in one angle with a chair in it facing a crucifix, of which I could not learn the use. Another of this group of buildings contains a fountain under a small dome, the plashing of whose waters seemed to make it a very popular rendezvous of the people, and made itself heard everywhere throughout the sacristies and their passages.

The stalls in the Coro are of very late Gothic, the bishop’s stall, with one on either side of it in the centre of the west end, having lofty canopies. The Coro is more than usually separated from the Capilla mayor, and there can be little doubt that it does not occupy its original position. The men who built so long a nave would never have done so simply to render its length useless by so perverse an arrangement of the choir. Here, in fact, the Coro occupies the same kind of position to which one so often sees it reduced in parish churches in Spain, where it is usually either in a western gallery, or at any rate at the extreme western end of the nave, behind everybody’s backs, and apparently out of their minds!

A chapel on the north side of the nave, dedicated to Santiago, has a richly cusped arch opening from it to the aisle, and its vault springs from large corbels, carved with figures of the four evangelists, rudely but richly sculptured. It is mainly worthy of notice now on account of the beauty of a panel-painting still preserved over the altar: this is painted on a gold background, richly diapered, and the nimbi and borders to the vestments all elaborately raised in gold in high relief. The frame is richly carved with figures of saints, and gilt. The predella has on either side of the centre St. John and the Blessed Virgin, and four other holy women; in the centre a sculpture of our Lord and four saints which serves as a pedestal for a well-posed figure of Santiago; and on either side of the saint are two pictures with subjects illustrating his life. It is, on the whole, a very fine example of the combination of painting and sculpture, of which the Spaniards in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were so fond. The paintings are less realistic than German work of the same age, and, if not so delicately lovely as early Italian works, are yet of great interest and merit.

No 47. TARAZONA. CAMPANILE OF LA MAGDALENA.
No 47.
TARAZONA.
CAMPANILE OF LA MAGDALENA.

Returning from the cathedral to the town, and before one crosses to the opposite side of the river, a noble view of the buildings on the cliff above it is obtained from the bridge. The grandest of these is an enormous bishop’s palace, once I believe the Alcazar; and close to it is the church of la Magdelena. The interior of this is entirely modernized, but the east end outside is a valuable example of untouched Romanesque. The eastern apse is divided into three by engaged shafts, stopping with capitals at the eaves-cornice, which is carried on a very simple corbel-table. To the west of this church is the steeple to which I have already alluded as giving so much of its character to Tarazona. It is a very lofty brick tower, without buttresses, with a solid simple base battering out boldly and effectively, and diapered in its upper stages with the patterns formed by projecting bricks, of which the builders of the brick buildings throughout this district were so fond. At a very slight expense a great effect of enrichment is obtained; the dark shadows of the bricks under the bright Spanish sunlight define all the lines clearly; and the uniformity of colour and the absence of buttresses make the general effect simple and quiet, notwithstanding the intricacy of the detail. The upper stage of this steeple is, as I need hardly say, a comparatively modern addition, but it no doubt adds to its effect by adding so much to the height, and in colour and design it harmonizes fairly with the earlier work below.

The church of La Concepcion, not far from this, is a very late Gothic building, with a western gallery whose occupants are quite concealed by stone traceries of the same kind as those in the cloisters of the cathedral. The sanctuary walls here are lined with glazed tiles, and the floor is laid with blue, green, and white tiles, the colour of each of which being half white and half blue or green allows of the whole floor being covered with a diaper of chequer-work, which is very effective and very easily arranged.

At the farther end of the city, and on the top of the long hill on which it is built, is a church dedicated to San Miguel. This has a simple nave with a seven-sided apse. The groining is all of very late date, the ribs curling down at their intersection as pendants, the under sides of which are cut off to receive bosses which were probably large and of wood. This groining is probably not earlier than the end of the sixteenth century, though the church itself is of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, having two doors of one of these dates: that on the north side has, in most respects, the air of being a work of the thirteenth, but its sculpture seems to prove that it cannot be earlier than the fourteenth century. It has the Judgment of Solomon carved on one of the capitals, angels in the label, and a figure of St. Michael above. The south doorway is executed in brick and stone, and is of the same date as the other. A brick belfry on the north side is enriched in the same fashion as that of la Magdalena, and, like it, batters out considerably at the base, but it is altogether inferior both in size and design.

From Tarazona I made a delightful excursion to the Abbey of Veruela. It is a two hours’ ride, and the path takes one over a hill which conceals the Sierra de Moncayo from sight in most parts of Tarazona. The scenery on the road was beautiful. The town itself is always very striking; and as we ascended, the views of the distant hills and mountains beyond the Ebro were finer and finer. After riding for an hour and a half, a grand view of the whole height of Moncayo is obtained; below it to the right is a little village guarded by a picturesque castle keep, and on beyond and to the left a long line of roof, and towers, and walls girt around with trees, which seems to promise much to reward examination: and this is the old abbey of Veruela. At last the avenue is reached, which leads to the abbey gateway, in front of which stands a tall but mutilated cross, which forms the centre from which five paths—each planted with an avenue of trees—diverge.

The history of this abbey is interesting. It was the first Cistercian house in Spain, and was founded by a certain Don Pedro de Atares, and his mother Teresa de Cajal, who commenced it in A.D. 1146, completed it in 1151, and obtained its formal incorporation in the Cistercian order on the 1st of September of the same year. There was a foundation for twelve monks, who were the first of their order to cross the Pyrenees, and who established themselves definitively here on the 10th August, 1171, under the direction of Bernard, Abbat of Scala Dei.[390]

I suppose the desolate situation of Veruela led to its being carefully fortified, though, indeed, at the date of its foundation, most religious houses were enclosed within fortified walls, and the severe rule of the early Cistercians will account fully for the remote and solitary situation chosen by the brethren who planted this house where we see it: at any rate, whatever the cause, it is now completely surrounded by walls, from which round towers project at intervals. The walls and towers are all perfectly plain, and surmounted with the pointed battlement so often seen in early Spanish buildings. A walled courtyard protects the entrance to the main gateway, and it is in front of this that the avenues mentioned just now all unite.

No. 48. ABBEY OF VERUELA ENTRANCE GATEWAY
No. 48.
ABBEY OF VERUELA
ENTRANCE GATEWAY

The view here is very peculiar. In front are the low walls of the outer court, with a raised archway in the centre; behind these the higher walls and towers, with a lofty and very plain central gateway, finished with an octagonal stage and low crocketed spire of late date, but pierced at the base with very simple thirteenth-century archways, leading into the inner court. Beyond this, again, is seen the upper part of the walls and the steeple of the Abbey Church, backed by a bold line of hills. Passing through this gateway, a long narrow court leads to the west front of the church; and to the right of this court is a long range of buildings, all of which I think are of comparatively modern erection, though the brickwork in a patio entered by one of the openings is picturesque and good.

The west front of the church has a very noble round-arched doorway, boldly recessed, and with many shafts in the jambs. Above this is a small stone inscribed with the monograms X. P. and A. O.; and then, higher, a delicate line of arcading carried on slender shafts. All this work is set forward in advance of the general face of the wall. The nave and aisles were each lighted with a plain circular window, and the arcading up the eaves of the western gable still remaining shows that its pitch was always very flat. A steeple was built by an Abbat—Lope Marco—in the sixteenth century, against the western bay of the north aisle, and before its erection there was, I suppose, no tower attached to the abbey.

In plan[391] the church consists of a nave and aisles six bays in length, transepts with eastern apses, and a choir with an aisle round it, and five small apsidal chapels. To the south of the nave is a large cloister with a Chapter-house on its eastern side, and other ranges of buildings on the west and south. To the east, too, are large erections now occupied as a private residence, and of which consequently I saw nothing properly, but without much regret, as they did not seem to show any traces of antiquity, and had probably been all rebuilt in those halcyon days in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, when Spaniards had more money than they well knew how to spend.

If we compare this church with one of the earliest French convents of the same order—as, for instance, Clairvaux—we shall find a very remarkable similarity in most of the arrangements. In both, the church is approached through a long narrow court, to which it is set in a slightly oblique line. In both, the extreme simplicity, the absence of sculptures, the absence of a steeple, are observed in compliance with the fundamental rules of the Order. Both have their cloisters similarly placed, with similar Chapter-houses, and lavatories projecting from their southern alleys. The sacristies and the great libraries are in the same position—though here the latter has been converted into an enormous hall—and there are here groups of buildings all round the cloister, which were probably appropriated much in the same way as were those at Clairvaux. Both, too, were enclosed in a very similar way with walls and towers, though at Clairvaux the enclosure was far larger than at Veruela.

It is clear, therefore, that the French monks who were brought here to found this first Spanish Cistercian house, came with the plan approved by their Order, and it is probable with something more than the mere ground-plan, for the whole of the work is such as might at the same date have been erected in France.

The whole exterior of the church is very fine, though severely simple. The west front has already been described. The exterior of the chevet is more striking. The roofs of the chapels which surround it finish below the corbel-table of the aisle, which has a steepish roof finishing below the clerestory; and the latter is divided into five bays by plain pilasters. All the eaves have corbel-tables, and the windows throughout are round-headed. The chapels on the eastern side of the transepts are of the same height as the aisle round the choir, and higher than the chapels of the chevet. The design of the interior, though very simple, is extremely massive and dignified. The main arches are all pointed, the groining generally quadripartite (save in the small apses, which are roofed with semi-domes), and the piers large and well planned. Many of the old altars remain; and among them the high altar in the choir, and those in the chapels of the chevet. The former is arcaded along its whole front, but has been altered somewhat in length at no very distant period. Near it is a double piscina, formed by a couple of shafts with capitals hollowed out with multifoil cusping.

The chapel altars are all like each other, and unlike the high altar, which is solid, whilst they are stone tables, each supported upon five detached shafts. They stand forward from the walls in the centre of the apses, and have rudely carved and planned piscinÆ, and credence niches on the right-hand side as you face them.

The stones are marked in all directions by the masons, some of them with a mere line across from angle to angle, but mostly with marks of the usual quaint description. A number of examples of them are given on the engraving of the ground-plan.

No. 49. VERUELA ABBEY CHURCH. INTERIOR.
No. 49.
VERUELA ABBEY CHURCH.
INTERIOR.

Some part of the floor is laid with blue and white tiles, arranged in chevrons with good effect, and other parts with tombstones of Abbats, whose effigies are carved on them in low relief. They are flatter than the somewhat similar stones in some of the German churches (as e.g. at S. Elizabeth, Marburg) but are still a great deal too uneven on the surface to be suitable for a pavement.

Chapel Altar, Veruela.
Chapel Altar, Veruela.

The capitals are all very rudely sculptured, and the whole of the work has the air of extreme severity, almost of rudeness, which might be anticipated from the circumstances of its erection. A chapel was built in the sixteenth century to the north of the north transept by Ferdinand of Aragon, Bishop of Zaragoza, and nephew of Ferdinand the Catholic. It has nothing remarkable in its design. Later than this a large chapel was added to the east of the sacristy; and from what still remains of the fittings of the Coro in the nave, they seem to have been still later in date.

A fine late Romanesque door leads from the south aisle into the cloister, the whole of which is a good work of the early part of the fourteenth century, with well-traceried windows of four lights. The groining piers are clusters of shafts, and the buttresses on the outside are finished with crocketed gables and a bold cornice carved with foliage. The traceries are now all filled in with very thin panels of alabaster, which do not obscure the light much, whilst they effectually keep out the sun; but this precaution against sunshine does not seem to have been much needed, if the men were right who raised a second stage upon the old cloister, the Renaissance arcades of which are all left perfectly open. On the southern alley of the cloister there is a very pretty hexagonal projecting chamber, in which no doubt—if we may judge by the analogy of Clairvaux—was once the lavatory. The cloister has been built in front of, and without at all disturbing, the original Chapter-house, on its east side. The new groining shafts stand detached in front of the old arcade to the Chapter-house, and the combination of the two is managed very cleverly and picturesquely. This old arcade consists of the usual arrangement of a central doorway, with two openings on either side, all carried on clusters of detached shafts with capitals of foliage. The Chapter-house itself is divided into nine groining bays by four detached shafts; it is very low and small, and its three eastern windows are blocked up, but nevertheless its effect is admirable. One of its columns has been spoilt by the elaborate cutting in of the names of a party of Englishmen who ascended the Sierra de Moncayo to see the eclipse of the sun in 1860, and who recorded their not very hazardous or important achievement in this most barbarous fashion.

Entrance to Chapter-House, Veruela.
Entrance to Chapter-House, Veruela.

It is a fact quite worth notice here, that none of the old windows are blocked up: the truth is that the churches from which this was derived were, in common with all Romanesque churches, taken straight from Italy, where the requirements of the climate were very similar to those of Spain. Yet it was only very gradually that the northern architects discovered their unfitness for a northern climate, and increased their dimensions. Here they give just enough and not too much light; but at a later day, when the northern churches were all window from end to end, the same fault was committed; and when their architects were employed to build in other climates, they followed their own traditions without reference to altered circumstances, as we see at Milan, at Leon, and elsewhere frequently.

The church at Veruela seems now to be but little frequented, the high altar alone being ever used. The stalls of the Coro are gone, and a shattered fragment of the old organ-case standing out from the wall serves only as a forlorn mark to show where it once stood. The buildings generally are sadly decayed and ruinous, and I have seldom seen a noble building less cared for or respected. It is sad to see this result of the suppression of religious orders, and one may be permitted to doubt whether it can be for the interest of religion that this noble foundation should now be nothing more than the private residence of a Spanish gentleman, instead of—as it was intended it should be by its pious founder—a perpetual refuge from the cares of the world of those in every age who aim to lead the holiest and most devoted lives.

I left Veruela with regret that I was unable to obtain more accurate notes of such portions of the monastic buildings as probably still remain overlaid with the poor additions of a too wealthy convent during the last three centuries. It is, however, easily accessible, and the plan which I give of the church will no doubt soon induce others to complete my examination wherever it has been defective.

On the ride back to Tarazona, we made a short dÉtour to look at what seemed to be an important church and village. Neither could well have been less so! The church was without anything worth remark save a band of tiles, set chevron fashion, in the cornice, and not harmonizing at all well with the walls. The village was wretched in the extreme.

At Tarazona I was much struck by the extremely good character of the common crockery in use in the inn and elsewhere. It is all painted by hand, never printed; and the result is that, even when simple diapers only are used, there is far greater life, variety, and vigour in the drawing than there ever is in our machine-made work. The colour seems generally to be used in such a way as that when burnt it varies charmingly in tint and texture. Every plate is different in pattern; and I fear that, uncivilized as we might think these good Spaniards in some things, they would be justly shocked were they to see the wretchedly inferior patterns with which, after many years of talking about art, we are still satisfied to decorate our earthenware. These people excel, too, just as much in form as in ornament. Their jugs are always quaint and good in outline, and made with the simplest regard to what is useful.

[larger view]
[largest view]
VERUELA ABBEY: Ground Plan of the Church Plate XXIII. W. West, Lithr. Published by John Murray, Albemarle St. 1865.