G R A N A D A THE CITY OF THE MOOR (continued 2)

Passing the Cathedral sacristy with its handsome door by Siloe, we pause before the Puerta del Colegio. Behind the sculptured Ecce Homo, it is said Maeda carved a Lucifer of extraordinary beauty. He applied to Siloe for permission to give a proof of his skill, and was told by the testy architect to sculpture the Devil himself if he wanted to. Maeda was wag enough to take him at his word.

The chapel of Santa Ana covers the vault intended for the archbishops, and contains a good sixteenth-century altar-piece, and a St. Jean de Matha (a Frenchman, not a Spaniard) by Bocanegra. The six chapels that follow present no features of interest. The fourth chapel on the left side of the Cathedral is named La Virgen de la Antigua, after a Gothic image greatly venerated by Ferdinand the Catholic, and regarded with great reverence by the devout of Granada. Here are two portraits by Juan de Sevilla of Ferdinand and Isabella at prayer; the king is clad in armour. The paintings are in the Venetian style. Of the retablo by Cornejo, the less said the better. Cano’s realistic heads of Saints John and Paul reflect the fondness of the pietists of his day for the morbid—they are in the Chapel of the Virgen del Carmen. The first chapel, or baptistry, was erected by Adam and Aguado, at the expense of Archbishop Galvan, who is buried here near another occupant of the episcopal throne, Don Bienvenido Monzón. The fine reliefs of Saints Jerome and Isidore are by Mora. We have now reached the entrance doors, on each side of which hangs a good painting. The three pictures over the doors represent mystic allegories.

The most interesting feature of the chapter room, or Sala Capitular, is the noble porch, with its figures of Justice and Prudence, which, with the group of the Trinity, may be safely attributed to Maeda.

Before leaving the Cathedral, the sacristy should be visited. It contains Cano’s Assumption and two small statues by him; a Crucifix by Montañez; a Holy Family, by Juan de Sevilla; and a Mary Immaculate by Bocanegra. The treasury contains some wonderfully embroidered vestments, and good, but not extraordinary, examples of the silversmith’s craft. The signet ring of Sixtus III., and the monstrance presented by Isabella, have of course, an historical interest.

A casket is also shown to visitors, who are assured it is that in which were placed the jewels pawned by Isabella to provide funds for Columbus’s first voyage. If this is true, Pandora’s box was as nothing compared to this one! The Queen’s Missal, the work of Francisco Flores, is beautifully illuminated. It is placed on the high altar on the anniversary of the Reconquest. Those interested in arms will handle with curiosity the sword of Ferdinand the Catholic; the hilt has a spherical pommel and drooping quillons with branches towards the blade, which is grooved for about two-thirds of its length. Other relics of the Catholic sovereigns are their sceptre, Isabella’s crown, the royal standards used at the Reconquest, and a chasuble said to have been embroidered by the Queen.

By the door next to the Capilla de San Miguel we pass into the Sagrario (sacristy) occupying the site of the old mosque, which it replaced in 1705. It was designed by Don Francisco Hurtado and Jose de Bada, and it is well that the responsibility for so meretricious a piece of architecture should be divided. It may be dismissed as Churrigueresque. It is not, fortunately, devoid of interest. In one of the chapels is buried “the magnificent cavalier, Fernando del Pulgar, Lord of El Salar,” as the inscription records. This valiant knight and true, during the last campaign against Granada, rode into the city with fifteen horsemen, and set a lighted taper on the floor of the mosque, and, as others say, nailed a paper bearing the Ave Maria on the door. This exploit earned for him and his descendants the extremely valuable privilege of wearing their hats in the Cathedral. De Pulgar’s bones have fared better than those of the good Archbishop de Talavera, which were scattered when the old mosque was demolished. The Sagrario possesses several good paintings, including a San José by Cano, of whose works the Cathedral buildings, as may have been noticed, contain a fine selection. By the door next to the Capilla de Pulgar, and a darkish passage, the Chapel Royal may be entered.

The oldest purely Christian building in Granada is the convent and chapel of San Jeronimo, a foundation transferred here from Santa Fé immediately after the Reconquest. The convent is now a cavalry barracks, and is not to be inspected by the curious. The church, built by Diego de Siloe, is in the form of a Latin cross—stern, plain, dignified. The walls are adorned with frescoes representing scenes from the Passion, portraits of the Fathers of the Church, and angels playing on the harp and singing. They were executed in 1723 by an obscure painter called Juan de Medina. Eight chapels open on the aisles and nave, one containing a fine retablo, with the Entombment as subject. The principal chapel exhibits Siloe’s skill at its best. He is said to have realised in its construction “his lofty ideal of effecting a truly Spanish Renaissance; an ideal which bore little fruit, since some of his followers confined themselves to the strictest classicism, others to the development of the plateresque.” Very much in the spirit of the Renaissance is the decoration of the chapel with the statues of the worthies of the classic world, Cæsar, Pompey, Hannibal, Homer, and others, side by side with Old Testament characters. Strange, this admiration for a pagan civilisation co-existent with violent religious fanaticism against all contemporary non-Catholics!

The whole church was practically dedicated to the memory of Spain’s greatest soldier, the Great Captain, Gonzalo de Cordova, who was buried here, but whose ashes have been transferred to Madrid. The hero and his duchess are shown, sculptured, kneeling in prayer on either side of the high altar, over which rises a magnificent retablo, divided into several compartments filled with reliefs and statues. The horizontal sections are in the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and composite Orders respectively. The lowest central compartment is occupied by the Tabernacle, the subjects of the three compartments immediately above being the Immaculate Conception, St. Jerome, and the Crucifixion. Over all is shown the figure of the Eternal Father. This splendid work, the best of its kind in Spain, seems to have been executed by a variety of artists, among them Juan de Aragon, Pedro de Orea, and Pedro de Raxis. The beautiful shell-like vaulting above is adorned with figures of the Apostles, of Saints Barbara, Katharine, Magdalen, and Lucy, and the warrior-saints, George, Eustace, Martin, Sebastian, and Francis. The sword given by the Pope to the Great Captain, formerly one of the treasures of the chapel, was carried off by Sebastiani during the Peninsular War.

There are a great many beautiful things in this old church which seem to escape the ordinary traveller’s notice. The seats in the choir were designed by Siloe. The frescoes, representing the Triumph of the Church, of the Virgin, and of the Eucharist, the Assumption, &c., are very well done. The restoration of the fabric has often been denounced, but it is difficult to see how it could have been better carried out.

In the neighbourhood of the Great Captain’s chapel is a monument to a hero and a great Spaniard of a very different type. Juan de Robles devoted himself to the sick and the suffering with a zeal which earned for him confinement in a madman’s cage. His virtues were recognised after his death, and procured him canonisation as St. John of God in 1669. A tribute to his memory which he would have no doubt appreciated better is the large hospital founded two years after his death, that is, in 1552. The saint’s ashes, in a silver coffin, repose in the hospital chapel, a gorgeous structure, characterised by costliness and bad taste. The trail of the serpent of Spanish architecture—Churriguera—is over all. All that is interesting in it is the portrait of the saint, a copy of one in Madrid.

The name of the Great Captain is associated with the Cartuja, or suppressed Carthusian monastery, the site of which was his gift. The monastery, begun in 1516, was pulled down in 1842. A small portion of the buildings, however, remains, together with the church. The single nave is disfigured by over-elaborate ornamentation in the plateresque style. The doors of the choir are richly and tastefully inlaid with ebony and mother of pearl, cedar and tortoise-shell, and were the work of a friar, Manuel Vazquez, who died in 1765. The sanctuary, in the baroque style, is enriched with precious marbles, some richly veined with agates. On some of the slabs the hand of Nature has traced the semblances of human and animal forms. In the adjoining sacristy, various marbles have been combined so as to produce an effect dazzling and gorgeous in the extreme. The hall is certainly one of the most remarkable in Spain. Scarcely less marvellous are the exquisitely inlaid doors and presses. The generally bad style of the church is also redeemed by a statue of St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusian Order, ascribed to Alonso Cano, and some pictures by Bocanegra, Giaquinto, and Cotán. The last named, a friar, was responsible for the pictures in the cloister, representing the martyrdom of Carthusian monks in London by the tyrant Henry VIII. and the brigands who acted as his officers.

The Cartuja was formerly much richer in works of art, but, like San Jeronimo, it was ransacked by the French under Sebastiani, who exhibited, as on all occasions, the discrimination of a dilettante coupled with the rapacity of a bandit.

In front of the church of Santos Pedro y Pablo is a very handsome mansion built in 1539 for Hernando de Zafra, secretary of the Catholic sovereigns. The portal is in three stages: the first contains the entrance, a square doorway, between Doric columns; the second bears the escutcheons of the family, above them being sculptured griffins and lions; the third, a balcony between pilasters, carved in delicate relief. In a line with this is another balcony, bearing the curious inscription, Esperandola del Cielo—“Looking for it from Heaven.” These words are explained by a tragic legend. De Zafra is said to have suspected his daughter of a clandestine attachment. To satisfy his doubts, he burst into her room one day, and found her page assisting the lover to escape by the window. Baulked of his prey, the father turned, with death in his face, upon the boy. “Mercy!” shrieked the page. “Look for it in Heaven!” answered the Don, as he hurled his daughter’s accomplice from the balcony into the street below. So runs the legend. De Zafra does not appear, according to the records, to have left any children; but his daughter may not have survived the terrible consequences of her amour. “After all,” remarks Valladar, “nothing was easier in the sixteenth century than to throw a page out of the window without attracting the attention of the police or magistrates.”

Granada is by no means as rich in ancient churches and houses as Seville. The house of the Great Captain now forms part of the convent of Carmelite nuns. On the façade a tablet sets forth that “In this house lived, and on December 2, 1515, died, the Great Captain Don Gonzalo Fernandez de Aguilar y de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa, Terranova, and Santangelo, the Christian hero, and conqueror of the Moors, French, and Turks.”

The early sixteenth-century Casa de los Tiros—the property, like the Generalife, of the Marques de Campotejar—seems to occupy the site, if it did not actually form part, of a Moorish fortified dwelling. Some think it was an advanced work of the fortifications known as the Torres Bermejas. The interior certainly shows Arabic influence. The staircase was probably built by Moors, and there are rich azulejos and a splendid artesanado hall. This is adorned with busts of various Spanish celebrities, with the graven heads of Moors and Christians, and with reliefs of Lucretia, Judith, Semiramis, and Penthesilea.

In this house is preserved an Arabic sword with a magnificent hilt and scabbard, said to have belonged to Boabdil. The scabbard, at all events, is unquestionably of workmanship posterior to the Reconquest; and it is well to be a little on one’s guard in the matter of the numerous relics ascribed to the last Moorish king.

Of old Granada, in truth, not much more remains than the buildings we have already named. We may glance at the tower of San Juan de los Reyes, so badly restored that its peculiar Moorish architecture, more markedly Eastern than that of any other Grenadine monument, has been almost entirely effaced. And in the old Casa de Ayuntamiento there are some historical curiosities, notably the original draft of the charter granted to Granada by the Catholic sovereigns, and the handsome official shield of the city. Many sites, such as the Plaza de Bibarrambla, commemorated in the songs and stories of old Spain, have been completely modernised. But there is a monument—a simple column surmounted by an iron cross—more deeply interesting than any reared by the Moors. The inscription on the pedestal records that on this spot, on May 26, 1831, Doña Mariana Pineda was publicly garroted at the age of thirty-two years. She died a martyr for liberty and a victim of the strange absolutist frenzy which did much to ruin Spain in Ferdinand VII.’s reign. Doña Mariana’s house had been a centre for liberal gatherings, and when raided by the police was found to contain a tricolour flag. She met her death with a courage worthy of her cause. Five years later, when the nation had recovered its sanity, her ashes were carried in state to the Ayuntamiento. The magistrate who had condemned her was in his turn executed. On the same site many Spanish patriots were shot by the French—their labour and their lives being given to replace Ferdinand VII. on the throne. The square, formerly called the Campillo, is now named after Mariana Pineda. You may see there her statue in marble, sculptured by Marna and Morales.

The hill called the Sacro Monte is a curious memorial of human credulity. In 1594 one Francisco Hernandez reported to the Archbishop Don Pedro Vaca de Castro that he had discovered the relics of several local martyrs in the caves here. A church of no architectural merit was raised on the spot, and became a place of pilgrimage—the evidence that the martyrs referred to had ever existed being meanwhile wanting. Within the church are preserved some leaden books, inscribed in Arabic characters, and supposed to contain the acts, of the saints. These works were the subject of a furious controversy in the seventeenth century. The caves are interesting on account of their natural peculiarities, and were quite probably catacombs used by the early Christians of Illiberis. Some rocks may be noticed, in parts worn away by the repeated kisses of devotees. There is a superstition that the person who kisses the stone the first time will marry within the year, and that a second kiss will ensure to those already married an early dissolution of the conjugal tie.

On the opposite side of the city, also in the outskirts, is a little Mohammedan oratory, now disfigured and restored beyond recognition. It is called the Ermita de San Sebastian, and was the place where Boabdil gave up the keys of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabel.

When we walk through the streets of the modern Granada, with its tawdry churches and commonplace private houses, it does not seem that the city has gained much by its change of masters. But its decline was not at least very marked till many years after the Reconquest. The French invasion, and still more the ruin of the silk industry, completely undermined the prosperity of the place. During the last century it lost its rank as the seat of a Captain General. But a new day is dawning for the proudest city of the Moor, as for all Spain. Granada is content no longer to brood over its splendid past; indeed, its citizens seem to prize but lightly the monuments of those days. There is a general appearance of wealth and elegance about the promenaders on the broad, well-lighted paseos; and, thanks to the newly introduced manufacturing industry of beetroot sugar, the Vega has already resumed the flourishing smiling aspect it wore when a Mohammedan amir called it his and the cry of the muezzin was heard from a hundred minarets.