Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

relapses into their former faith. During the sixteenth century

3,000,000 superficially converted Moslems left Spain. `061153 Cardinal

Richelieu called the edict of 1502 "the most barbarous in

history"; `061154 but the friar Bleda thought it "the most glorious

event in Spain since the time of the Apostles. Now," he added,

"religious unity is secured, and an era of prosperity is certainly

about to dawn." `061155

Spain lost an incalculable treasure by the exodus of Jewish and

Moslem merchants, craftsmen, scholars, physicians, and scientists, and

the nations that received them benefited economically and

intellectually. Knowing henceforth only one religion, the Spanish

people submitted completely to their clergy, and surrendered all right

to think except within the limits of the traditional faith. For good

or ill, Spain chose to remain medieval, while Europe, by the

commercial, typographical, intellectual, and Protestant revolutions,

rushed into modernity.

VII. SPANISH ART

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Spanish architecture, persistently Gothic, powerfully expressed this

enduring medieval mood. The people did not grudge the maravedis that

helped royal and noble conscience money, or religious policy, to build

immense cathedrals, and to lavish costly ornaments and awesome

sculpture and painting upon their favorite saints and the passionately

worshiped Mother of God. Barcelona's cathedral rose slowly between

1298 and 1448: amid the chaos of minor streets it lifts its towering

columns, an undistinguished portal, a majestic nave, while its

many-fountained cloisters still give refuge from the strife of the

day. Valencia, Toledo, Burgos, Lerida, Tarragona, Saragossa, Leon,

extended or embellished their pre-existing temples, while new ones

rose at Huesca and Pamplona- whose cloisters of white marble,

elegantly carved, are as fair as the Alhambra's patios. In 1401 the

cathedral chapter at Seville resolved to erect a church "so great

and so beautiful that those who in coming ages shall look upon it will

think us lunatics for attempting it." `061156 The architects removed

the decayed mosque that stood on the chosen site, but kept its

foundations, its ground plan, and its noble Giralda minaret. All

through the fifteenth century stone rose upon stone until

Seville

had raised the largest Gothic edifice in the world, *06030 so that,

said Theophile Gautier, "Notre Dame de Paris might walk erect in the

nave." `061157 However, Notre Dame is perfect; Seville Cathedral is

vast. Sixty-seven sculptors and thirty-eight painters from Murillo

to Goya toiled to adorn this mammoth cave of the gods.

About 1410 the architect Guillermo Boffi proposed to the cathedral

chapter of Gerona to remove the columns and arches that divided the

interior into nave and aisles, and to unite the walls by a single

vault seventy-three feet wide. It was done, and the nave of Gerona

Cathedral has now the broadest Gothic vault in Christendom. It was a

triumph for engineering, a defeat for art. Shrines not so stupendous

rose in the fifteenth century at Perpignan, Manresa, Astorga, and

Valladolid. Segovia crowned itself with a fortresslike cathedral in

1472; Siguenza finished its famous cloisters in 1507; Salamanca

began its new fane in 1513. In almost every major city of Spain,

barring Madrid, a cathedral rises in overwhelming majesty of

external mass, with interiors darkly deprecating the sun and

terrifying the soul into piety, yet brilliant with the high colors

of Spanish painting, and painted statuary, and the gleam of jewelry,

silver, and gold. These are the homes of the Spanish spirit, fearfully

subdued and fiercely proud.

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Nevertheless the kings, nobles, and cities found funds for costly

palaces. Peter the Cruel, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Charles V

remodeled the Alcazar that a Moorish architect had designed at Seville

in 1181; most of the reconstruction was done by Moors from Granada, so

that the edifice is a weak sister of the Alhambra. In like Saracenic

style Don Pedro Enriquez built for the dukes of Alcala at Seville

(1500 f.) a lordly palace, the Casa de Pilatos, supposedly duplicating

the house from whose portico Pilate was believed to have surrendered

Christ to crucifixion. Valencia's Audiencia, or Hall of Audience

(1500), provided for the local Cortes a Salon Dorado whose splendor

challenged the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palace of the Doges

at Venice.

Sculpture was still a servant of architecture and the faith,

crowding Spanish churches with Virgins in marble, metal, stone, or

wood; here piety was petrified into forms of religious intensity or

ascetic severity, enhanced with color, and made more awe-inspiring

by the profound gloom of the naves. Retables- carved and painted

screens raised behind the altar table- were a special pride of Spanish

art; great sums, usually bequeathed in terror of death, were spent

to gather and maintain the most skillful workers- designers,

carvers, doradores who gilded or damascened the surfaces,

estofadores who painted the garments and ornaments, encarnadores

who colored the parts representing flesh; all labored together or by

turns on the propitiatory shrine. Behind the central altar of

Seville Cathedral a retable of forty-five compartments (1483-1519)

pictured beloved legends in painted or gilded statuary of late

Gothic style; while another in the Chapel of St. James in Toledo

Cathedral displayed in gilt larchwood and stern realism the career

of Spain's most honored saint.

Princes and prelates might be represented in sculpture, but only

on their tombs, which were placed in churches or monasteries conceived

as the antechambers of paradise. So Dona Mencia Enriquez, Duchess of

Albuquerque, was buried in a finely chiseled sepulcher now in the

Hispanic Society Museum in New York; and Pablo Ortiz carved for the

cathedral of Toledo sumptuous sarcophagi for Don Alvaro de Luna and

his wife. In the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores, near Burgos,

Gil de Siloe designed in Italian style a superb mausoleum for the

parents and brothers of the Queen. Isabella was so pleased with

these famous Sepulcros de los Reyes that when her favorite page,

Juan de Padilla (so recklessly brave that she called him mi loco,

"my fool") was shot through the head at the siege of Granada, she

commissioned De Siloe to carve a tomb of royal quality to harbor his

corpse; and Gil again rivaled the best Italian sculpture of his time.

No art is more distinctive than the Spanish, yet none has more

devoutly submitted to foreign influence. First, of course, to the

Moorish influence, long domiciled in the Peninsula, but having its

roots in Mesopotamia and Persia, and bringing into the Iberian style a

delicacy of workmanship, and a passion for ornament, hardly equaled in

any other Christian land. In the minor arts, where decoration was most

in place, Spain imitated, and never surpassed, her Saracenic

preceptors. Pottery was left almost entirely to the Mudejares, whose

lustered ware was rivaled only by the Chinese, and whose colored

tiles- above all, the blue azulejos - glorified the floors, altars,

fountains, walls, and roofs of Christian Spain. The same Moorish skill

made Spanish textiles- velvets, silks, and lace- the finest in

Christendom. It appears again in Spanish leather, in the arabesques of

the metal screens, in the religious monstrances, in the wood carving

of the retables, choir stalls, and vaults. Later influences seeped

in from Byzantine painting, then from France, Burgundy, the

Netherlands, Germany. From the Dutch and the Germans, Spanish

sculpture and painting derived their startling realism- emaciated

Virgins graphically old enough to be the mother of the Crucified,

despite Michelangelo's dictum about virginity embalming youth. In

the sixteenth century all these influences receded before the

continent-wide triumph of the Italian style.

Spanish painting followed a similar evolution, but developed

tardily, perhaps because the Moors gave here no help or lead. The

Catalan frescoes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are

inferior in design to the Altamira cave paintings of prehistoric

Spain. Yet by 1300 painting had become a craze in the Peninsula; a

thousand artists painted immense murals, huge altarpieces; some of

these, from as early as 1345, have survived much longer than they

deserved. In 1428 Jan van Eyck visited Spain, importing a powerful

Flemish influence. Three years later the King of Aragon sent Luis

Dalmau to study in Bruges; returning, Luis painted an

all-too-Flemish Virgin of the Councilors. Thereafter Spanish

painters, though still preferring tempera, more and more mixed their

colors in oil.

The age of the Primitives in Spanish painting culminated in

Bartolome Bermejo (d. 1498). As early as 1447 he made a name for

himself with the Santo Domingo that hangs in the Prado. The Santa

Engracia bought by the Gardner Museum of Boston, and the gleaming

St. Michael of Lady Ludlow's collection are almost worthy of

Raphael, who came a generation later. But best of all is the Pieta

(1490) in the Barcelona Cathedral: a bald, bespectacled Jerome; a dark

and Spanish Mary holding her limp, haggard, lifeless Son; in the

background the towers of Jerusalem under a lowering sky; and on the

right a ruthless portrait of the donor, Canon Despla, uncombed and

unshaved, resembling a bandit penitent but condemned, and suggesting

Bermejo's "dour conception of humanity." `061158 Here Italian grace is

transformed into Spanish force, and realism celebrates its triumph

in Spanish art.

The Flemish influence continued in Fernando Gallegos, and it

produced a startling masterpiece in A Knight of the Order of

Calatrava, by Miguel Sithium, a Fleming in the service of Isabella;

this is one of the finest portraits in the National Gallery in

Washington. But then again the Italian influence rose when Pedro

Berruguete returned to Spain after a long experience in Italy. There

he studied with Piero della Francesca and Melozzo da Forli, and

absorbed their quiet Umbrian style. When Federigo of Urbino sought

painters to adorn his palace he chose Justus von Ghent and "Pietro

Spagnolo." After the Duke's death (1582) Pedro brought the Umbrian art

to Spain, and painted famous altarpieces at Toledo and Avila. The

pictures ascribed to him in the Louvre, the Brera, the Prado, and

the Cleveland Museum hardly support his present reclame as the

Velasquez of the Catholic sovereigns, but in drawing and composition

they seem superior to anything produced in Spain before him.

Slowly the foreign stimuli were blending with the native genius to

prepare for the maturer works of Alonso Coello and El Greco under

Philip II, and the triumphs of Velasquez, Zurbaran, and Murillo in the

Golden Age of Spain's seventeenth century. Genius is an individual

endowment of force and will, but it is also a social heredity of

discipline and skills formed in time and absorbed in growth. Genius is

born and made.

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VIII. SPANISH LITERATURE

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In letters the Italian ascendancy had to wait while Spain

exchanged influences with medieval France. It was probably from Moslem

and Christian Spain that the troubadours of Provence had taken their

poetic forms and conceits; nevertheless John I of Aragon sent an

embassy to Charles VI of France (1388), asking for troubadours from

Toulouse to come to Barcelona and organize there a branch of their

fraternity, the Gay Saber or Joyful Wisdom. It was done. At

Barcelona and Tortosa poetic contests were held in Provencal

fashion, and the composition and recitation of verses became a passion

among the literate minority in Aragon and Castile. Lyrics of love or

faith or war were sung by wandering juglares to a simple

accompaniment of strings.

In the next generation John II of Castile supported Italian models

of poetry. Through Naples and Sicily, where Spaniards ruled, and

through the University of Bologna, where Spanish youths like the

Borgias studied, Italian moods and meters of verse swept into the

Peninsula, and Dante and Petrarch found eager emulators in the

Castilian tongue. Periodically the lyrics of the Spanish poets were

collected in cancioneros, books of ballads chivalric in sentiment,

Petrarchan in style. The Marques de Santillana- statesman, scholar,

patron, poet- imported the sonnet form from Italy, and compiled so

soon a history of Spanish literature. Juan de Mena candidly imitated

Dante in an epic poem, The Labyrinth, which did almost as much to

establish Castilian as a literary language as The Divine Comedy

had done for the Tuscan speech. Meanwhile Don Juan Manuel

anticipated Boccaccio by writing dramatic tales, from one of which

Shakespeare drew the quite incredible legend of Petruchio's taming

of a shrew.

Romance continued to entrance all classes of readers. Amadis da

Gaula was translated into Spanish (c. 1500) by Garcia Ordonez, who

assured his readers that he had vastly improved upon the Portuguese

original; and as this is lost we cannot gainsay him. Amadis,

illegitimate son of an imaginary British princess, is exposed by her

mother on the sea. He is rescued by a Scottish knight, and becomes a

page to the queen of Scotland. Lisuarte, King of England, leaves his

ten-year-old daughter Oriana at the Scottish court while he suppresses

a usurper in his realm. The queen assigns the twelve-year-old Amadis

as a page to Oriana, saying, "This is a child who shall serve you."

-

And she answered that it pleased her. And the child kept this word

in his heart, in such wise that it never afterwards left it... and

he was never, in all the days of his life, wearied with serving her.

And this their love lasted as long as they lasted; but Amadis, who

knew not at all how she loved him, held himself to be very bold in

that he had placed his thoughts on her, considering both her greatness

and her beauty, and never so much as dared to speak a word

concerning it. And she too, though she loved him in her heart, took

heed that she should not speak with him more than with another; but

her eyes took great solace in showing to her heart what thing in the

world she most loved. `061159

-

It is a comfort to know that their love was triumphantly

consummated, after tribulations as numerous before marriage in fiction

as after it in life. There are many moments of tenderness, and some of

nobility, in the long story; and Cervantes, vowing to destroy all such

romances, spared this one as the best.

Romance provided one source of the drama, which slowly evolved out

of the mystery and morality plays, the popular farces, and the court

masques. The oldest date in the history of the Spanish drama is

1492, when the dramatic dialogues of Juan del Encina were put upon the

stage. Fernando de Rojas, a Converso, took a further step toward

drama in La Celestina (1499), a story told throughout in dialogue,

and divided into twenty-two acts; it was too long to be staged, but

its vivid characterizations and sprightly dialogue prepared for the

classic comedies of Spain.

Scholarship was both hampered and fostered by the Church. While

the Inquisition policed thought, leading ecclesiastics did much for

learning and education. Italians like Pietro Martire d'Anghiera,

coming to Spain in 1487, brought the news of the humanist movement,

and Spaniards educated in Italy returned with the enthusiastic

infection. At the Queen's request Peter Martyr opened at her court, as

Alcuin had done for Charlemagne seven centuries before, a school of

classical languages and literatures; Princess Juana studied Latin

dutifully on the way to insanity. Peter himself wrote the first

history of the discoveries in America, under the title De rebus

oceanis et novo orbe (1504 f.); the last two words shared with

Vespucci's earlier (1502?) use of the term to name the "New World."

===========================================================

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Cardinal Ximenes, whose faith was as firm and sharp as steel, joined

actively in the classical movement. In 1499 he founded the College

of San Ildefonso, and in 1508 the University of Alcala. There, in

1502, nine linguists under his supervision began one of the major

achievements of Renaissance scholarship, the Biblia Polyglotta

Compluti, or Complutensian Polyglot Bible, *06031 the first

complete edition of the Christian Scriptures in the original

languages. To the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the

Greek of the New the editors added, in parallel or subjoined

columns, the Septuagint Greek translation, the Latin "Vulgate" version

by Jerome, and a Syraic paraphrase of the Pentateuch. Leo X opened

up for Ximenes' staff the manuscripts of the Vatican Library; and

three baptized Jews contributed their Hebraic learning. The work of

editing was completed in 1517, but the six volumes were not printed

till 1522. Ximenes, anticipating death, urged on his savants. "Lose no

time in the prosecution of our glorious task, lest, in the

casualties of life, you lose your patron, or I have to lament the loss

of those whose services are of greater price in my eyes than the

wealth and honors of the world." `061160 A few months before he died

the final volume was presented to him with the compliments of his

friends. Of all the acts of his administration, he told them, there

was none better entitled than this to their congratulations. He

projected an edition of Aristotle on the same scale, with a new

Latin translation, but the brevity of his long life defeated him.

IX. SOVEREIGN DEATH

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Isabella had preceded her energetic minister in the culminating

adventure. With all her severity she was a woman of deep

sensitivity, who bore bereavements more heavily than wars. In 1496 she

buried her mother. Of her ten children five were stillborn or died

in infancy, and two others died in early youth. In 1497 she lost her

only son, her sole hope for an orderly succession, and in 1498 her

best-beloved daughter, the Queen of Portugal, who might have united

the Peninsula in peace. Amid these blows she suffered the daily

tragedy of seeing her daughter Juana, now heiress-apparent to the

throne, slowly going insane.

Juana had married Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy and son of

the Emperor Maximilian I (1496). By him she bore two future

emperors, Charles V and Ferdinand I. Whether because of a fickle

temperament, or because Juana was already incompetent, Philip

neglected her, and carried on a liaison with a lady of her court at

Brussels. Juana had the charmer's hair cut off, whereupon Philip swore

he would never cohabit with his wife again. Hearing of all this,

Isabella fell ill. On October 12, 1504, she wrote her will,

directing that she should receive the plainest funeral, that the money

so saved should be given to the poor, and that she should be buried in

a Franciscan monastery within the Alhambra; "but," she added,

"should the King my Lord prefer his sepulcher in some other place,

then my will is that my body should be transported and laid by his

side, that the union which we have enjoyed in this world, and, through

the mercy of God, may hope again for our souls in heaven, may be

represented by our bodies in the earth." `061161 She died November 24,

1504, and was buried as she had directed; but after Ferdinand's

death her remains were placed beside his in the cathedral of

Granada. "The world," wrote Peter Martyr, "has lost its noblest

ornament.... I know none of her sex, in ancient or modern times, who

in my judgment is at all worthy to be named with this incomparable

woman." `061162 (Margaret of Sweden had been too remote from Peter's

ken, and Elizabeth of England was still to be.)

Isabella's will had named Ferdinand as regent in Castile for a

Philip absorbed in the Netherlands and a Juana moving ever more deeply

into a consoling lunacy. Hoping to keep the Spanish throne from

falling to the Hapsburgs in the person of Philip's son Charles, the

fifty-three-year-old Ferdinand hurriedly married (1505) Germaine de

Foix, the seventeen-year-old niece of Louis XII; but the marriage

increased the distaste of the Castilian nobles for their Aragonese

master, and its only offspring died in infancy. Philip now claimed the

crown of Castile, arrived in Spain, and was welcomed by the nobility

(1506), while Ferdinand retired to his role as King of Aragon. Three

months later Philip died, and Ferdinand resumed the regency of Castile

in the name of his mad daughter. Juana la Loca remained technically

Queen; she lived till 1555, but never, after 1507, left her royal

palace at Tordesillas; she refused to wash or be dressed; and day

after day she gazed through a window at the cemetery that held the

remains of the unfaithful husband whom she had never ceased to love.

Ferdinand ruled more absolutely as regent than before as king. Freed

from the tempering influence of Isabella, the hard and vindictive

elements in his character came to sharp dominance. He had already

recovered Roussillon and Cerdagne (1493), and Gonzalo de Cordoba had

conquered Naples for him in 1503. This violated an agreement signed by

Philip with Louis XII at Lyons for the division of the Kingdom of

Naples between Spain and France; Ferdinand assured the world that

Philip had exceeded his instructions. He sailed to Naples, and took

personal possession of the Neapolitan throne (1506). He suspected that

Gonzalo wanted this seat for himself; when he returned to Spain (1507)

he brought the Gran Capitan with him, and consigned him to a

retirement that most of Spain considered an unmerited humiliation.

Ferdinand had mastered everything but time. Gradually the wells of

will and energy in him sank. His hours of rest grew longer, fatigue

came sooner; he neglected the government; he became impatient and

restless, morbidly suspicious of his most loyal servitors. Dropsy

and asthma weakened him; he could hardly breathe in cities. In January

1516, he fled south to Andalusia, where he hoped to spend the winter

in the open country. He fell ill on the way, and was at last persuaded

to prepare for death. He named Ximenes regent for Castile, and his own

illegitimate son, the Archbishop of Saragossa, regent for Aragon. He

died January 23, 1516, in the sixty-fourth year of his life, the

forty-second of his reign.

No wonder Machiavelli admired him: here was a king who acted The

Prince before its author thought of writing it. Ferdinand made

religion a tool of national and military policy, filled his

documents with pious phrases, but never allowed considerations of

morality to overcome motives of expediency or gain. No one could doubt

his ability, his competent supervision of the government, his

discerning choice of ministers and generals, his invariable success in

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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