Authors: James Michener
Now to fit the puzzle together. It is apparent, I hope, that we
are speaking about two rather large holes separated by a
considerable distance, the first low down at the back of the main
altar, the second across the ambulatory very high up and on the
outside wall. Well, Narciso Tomé and his four sons solved this
by posting along the edges of the outside cut a stunning array of
Biblical figures who seem to pour into the cathedral from the
heavens. They twist and tumble, clutch at one another and raise
their hands in prayer, fall and slide, gesticulate and grimace,
forming a veritable cascade of heavenly figures from which we
slowly pick out the significant fact: at the outer edge of the
opening sits Jesus Himself, on a bank of clouds and surrounded
by the angels of paradise.
This upper half of the Transparente is the lesser of the two parts
and the more restrained, for the whole back of the reredos has
been converted to a tower of marble which reaches from floor to
ceiling. When it was finished a problem arose: ‘How to join the
two halves?’ and here Tomé and his sons showed ingenuity. The
painter provided a mural which crosses the top of the cathedral
and ties the two halves together. It is a daring and successful
device, in which painted and sculptured forms unite to make one
vast procession, but to try to pick out the various parts from below
makes one dizzy. We can, however, enjoy the massive structure
that backs the high altar, for it is composed of four identifiable
parts: at the bottom a beautiful enthroned Mother and Child;
quite high up so that most visitors miss it, a Last Supper with
thirteen full-sized polychromed marble celebrants; at the very
top, so that her head almost touches the muraled ceiling, the
Virgin Mary ascending into heaven; and in the center, masking
the opening to the tabernacle, a whirlwind of angels and clouds,
one of the most successful depictions of wild movement ever to
have been achieved in marble.
That’s the Transparente, save for some score of separate
standing figures and a forest of highly ornamented pillars that
lend a pattern to the whole. It is blatantly a work of the early
eighteenth century and could have been created, I suppose, only
by a man who had four sons who could paint, carve, cast bronze
and work upside down while suspended from ropes which passed
through the ceiling.
Art of a different quality is to be found at our last stop, the
sacristy, a long hall which one enters through an avenue of sixteen
El Grecos, depicting the twelve disciples, Jesus, Mary, Santo
Domingo and an extra portrait of St. Peter. Any one of these,
appearing by itself in a foreign museum, would become a famous
work; it is interesting to study the second portrait of Peter, one
of the finest of its size El Greco ever did, for it shows Peter weeping
and reminds one that the artist must have had a special fondness
for him. He always painted him with such love.
Our purpose in visiting the sacristy, however, is to see two
paintings more important than the portraits. They are among the
finest examples of Spanish art, and with their help we shall
discover something about the soul of Spain.
The first is the more conspicuous and more easily grasped. At
the far end of the long hall, framed as an altarpiece, stands the
‘Spoliation of Christ’ by El Greco, depicting the mysterious figure
of Jesus draped in flaming red as he is taunted by the rabble while
in the foreground a carpenter in a yellow smock prepares the
cross. Gaunt, ethereal faces stare out from the crowd; a woman
in ochre robe and purple dress, her back to the viewer, raises her
hand dramatically as a Roman guard, posed by some man brought
in from the streets of Toledo, stands in polished armor. Flags and
spears and plumed helmets fill the top of the picture. One sees
the passion and terror of sixteenth-century Spain. It is a stunning
picture and El Greco must have liked it, for a nearby museum
has a smaller copy, but it lacks the vitality of this great
presentation.
A few yards away, set so far back in a niche that the unobservant
might miss it, is a slightly smaller picture by Goya. ‘The Arresting
of Jesus on the Mount of Olives,’ a vigorous night scene, earthy
and with no sense of mystery. Christ is shown as a faltering man
robed in a curious pinkish white, while the soldiers who surround
him are counterparts of those depicted in Goya’s series of etchings
‘The Disasters of War.’ They are not Romans, but rather peasants
from the central plateau of Iberia, and their leering faces can be
seen even today in the villages outside Madrid. The picture is a
haunting thing, a country scene of torment in which Jesus appears
to be actually suffering the indignities being thrown at him by
the mob, and those hurried visitors who miss this fine work miss
something very good and very Spanish.
In neither of these powerful pictures do I find anything of Jesus
the religious figure nor of the Holy Land as I knew it in Israel and
Jordan; I doubt that in the strictest sense they ought to be called
religious pictures. But in each I find an infinite amount of Spain
in its basic manifestations, the mystical of El Greco and the
practical of Goya. The former, with its tortured figures and
demonic faces, recalls the agonies which Spain has always inflicted
upon itself, the self-condemnation, the religious fervor, the leaping
of inspired minds directly to the throne of heaven, the
impassioned singing and violence. These things I can see in the
El Greco, where flaming red dominates and leads the eye to colors
no other artist would dare place in juxtaposition, just as no
sensible man laying out the history of a nation would dare give
one country the contradictory experiences that Spain has known.
In the Goya, on the other hand, I see the earthiness of Spain, the
robust animal-like characteristic of the soil and the men who
work it. These ugly, extremely human and likable faces remind
me of the Spaniards who cursed as they pulled the oars at the
Battle of Lepanto, who cursed as they mounted a guerrilla
resistance against Napoleon, who suffered through the sad
mismanagement of their country and who have survived whatever
defeats and humiliations have been visited upon them. It is not
by accident that in this canvas, which shows one of the most
solemn moments of Biblical history, when the first physical step
toward the Crucifixion was being taken, a goodly number of the
participants are laughing. As one reads this book he must not
forget that at the most solemn moments of Spanish history
someone is laughing, sardonically perhaps, but laughing.
I never leave the cathedral at Toledo without paying my respects
to two contrasting figures, now shadowy but once of earth-moving
power, who ruled from this building and whose confrontation
continues throughout Spanish history, for they are so dramatic
that they seem to have been created by a playwright rather than
by the chances of history. They are the two fiery cardinals,
Mendoza and Cisneros, who had large roles in governing Spain,
Mendoza from 1482 till 1495, Cisneros from 1495 till 1517. Pedro
González de Mendoza (1428-1495) was the fourth (some say fifth)
son of a noble family and his presence in the church was an
accident: he was really a confirmed layman pushed by his relatives
into a position from which he could exercise power. In clerical
robes he led the armies of Fernando and Isabel and helped them
gain the crown. He was first into Granada at the end of the
conquest, served as civil governor of Castilla in the footsteps of
Don Álvaro de Luna, and was one of the few at court who
understood what Columbus was talking about. Taking his
religious vows lightly, he sought Rome’s forgiveness for having
sired illegitimate children, but being prudent as well as lecherous
he made his appeals in group lots. He was cast in heroic mold
and maintained his own court and armed guard, and he left
behind him in Toledo so many monuments that he seems as alive
today as he did in that period when he was helping usher Spain
into its period of maximum greatness. His tomb stands at the left
of the main altar and is a fantastically pompous affair of pillars,
arches, statues, niches plus a gaudy marble casket in which he lies
in regal splendor befitting his nickname, ‘third King of Spain.’
When I studied Mendoza in books I never cared much for him,
but it was not until I saw his tomb that I understood why.
To me the best thing he did was to sponsor as his successor
Gonzalo Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517), who had begun his
life as a poor boy in a town near Madrid and who when entering
orders changed his name to Francisco in honor of his patron. Of
a shy retiring nature, he hid himself in a convent, where his piety
commended itself to Queen Isabel, who made him her confessor.
The better she knew him the more she respected him, and one
day she handed him a letter from the Pope appointing him
Archbishop of Toledo, but he refused the honor, an impasse which
she solved by appointing him anyway. Soon Fernando, desiring
some strong administrators at the head of the Spanish Church,
connived to have him made cardinal, and one of the first things
this quiet, bookish man did was to conscript an army of twenty
thousand soldiers to invade Oran and Tripoli to teach the Muslims
a lesson. There is a touching account of how, on the eve of a great
battle in which he would lead the troops, he reflected upon the
irony of a fate which had made him, a seeker after retreat and
silence, the general of an invading army.
Much more was in store for him. When Fernando died in 1516,
Cisneros found that he had been appointed in the king’s will to
serve as regent of Castilla until Fernando’s grandson, Carlos I of
Spain and V of the Holy Roman Empire, should reach Spain,
which he had not yet seen. That year Cisneros was eighty, and
without hesitation he launched upon one of the miraculous years
of Spanish history. He challenged the power of Adrian of Utrecht,
the tutor of young Carlos, and frustrated his plans to make Spain
an appendage of Austria. He battled the nobles and recovered
from them powers which he felt Carlos ought to exercise when
he became king. He put down the intrigues of the courtiers who
wanted to pass the throne of Aragón along to Carlos’ younger
brother, Fernando of Austria, who had been brought up in Spain.
Under his own supervision he built several buildings that are
notable still. He strengthened farming and initiated steps which
would have ensured Spain great agricultural wealth had they been
pursued. He armed the nation’s ships against the pirates of the
Mediterranean and the freebooters of the Atlantic, thus
establishing himself as the father of the navy which seventy-two
years later culminated in the Armada. He spent much time
furthering the development of the new university which he had
founded at Alcalá de Henares. He watched over the publication
of one of the world’s premier examples of scholarship, the
His last act as regent was to leave Toledo and move in wearying
stages to one monastery after another so as to be ready to consult
with Carlos as the youth entered Spain for the first time, but the
trip was so arduous that Cisneros fell ill. Fable claims that he died
from anguish after reading a letter, which Carlos had sent ahead,
rebuking him for assumption of powers and dismissing him from
all offices. But historians believe that Cisneros had died before
the letter arrived.
The cathedral at Toledo contains a strange memorial to
Cisneros, and it contrasts favorably, I think, with the flamboyant
tomb of Mendoza. At the southwest corner of the cathedral stands
the Capilla Mozárabe. When the Moors overran Toledo they
offered the conquered two alternatives: convert to Islam or remain
Christians and pay certain special taxes. The Mozárabes (would-be
Arabs) were those who followed the second course. They remained
Christians and through the centuries developed their own peculiar
style of celebrating the Mass. In 1085, when Alfonso VI conquered
the city, his wife and his religious advisor, both of them French,
prevailed upon him to enforce throughout his realm the newly
proposed Cluniac reforms, which required the adoption of the
Roman type of Mass. The Mozárabe was thus frowned upon,
which was right because it was through the various consolidations
of power and uniformity proposed by the Cluniac reforms that
the Catholic Church attained the cohesion it needed for the tasks
ahead, and a single form of the Mass, understandable in all lands,
was one of the greatest unifying forces. On the other hand, it was
sardonic that the Mozárabes, having been allowed to practice
their form of Mass by the Arabs, should now be in danger of losing
it to Catholics. Stubbornly they held onto their version for four
hundred years, from 1085 to 1485 and beyond, in spite of real
pressure from Rome; finally Cardinal Cisneros decreed that if any
people were so devoted to their form of worship their wishes
should be respected, and at the southwest corner of the cathedral
he authorized a chapel to be built for perpetual observance of the
Mozárabe rite. It is this chapel, ugly on the outside, lovely inside,
that disfigures the right side of the façade, but the spirit that
animated Cisneros to this generous act is considered his finest
memorial. Today only one hundred and fifty families still follow
the Mozárabe rite, and they remember Cisneros with affection.