Innovation at the Toledo Cathedral
by Elizabeth Lev, appearing in Volume 48
At one point, even the most venerable artistic style was once considered new. Nowhere is that axiom more evident than in the Primatial Cathedral of Toledo, Spain. Nearing her 700th birthday, this Grand Dame of churches has seen kings and cardinals come and go, yet despite several reversals of fortune, it has never shied away from the new, all the while remaining the embodiment of tradition. From its foundation in 1226 to the present, Santa María de la Asunción has embraced new styles of art and architecture while still respecting her roots, identity, and heritage.
Christians in Spain spent most of the eleventh century reclaiming their land after 400 years of Muslim rule. By 1225, the Catholic kingdoms began to coalesce, and Toledo became the capital of a freshly unified nation. But while battles and bloodshed had forged the country, the new Christian Spain would need to cultivate tolerance, forgiveness, and love. Toledo would lead the way as capital, eventually to be called “the city of three cultures,” welcoming mosques and synagogues within its walls, protected by the mantle of the great cathedral to Our Lady of the Assumption.
It was an auspicious beginning when in 1226 King Fernando III, Spain’s sole sainted monarch, laid the foundation stone for the cathedral. The immense structure, which would eventually cover 6,500 square meters, was designed by a foreigner, a Frenchman named Martin, who employed the new style of pointed vaults and flying buttresses adapted from Notre Dame in Paris, built just forty years earlier. This airy innovative design, dubbed “Gothic” (an implicitly disparaging term used by writers during the Italian Renaissance) was embraced in Spain, where it was called “estilo moderno” or “the modern style.” The novel techniques allowed for increased light inside the church to evoke transcendence while also reflecting the natural world through the tree-like piers soaring upwards to interlace like a bower. Among the first of its kind in Spain (the Cathedrals of Burgos and León were begun ten years earlier) the episcopal seat in the Christian capital ensured a warm Spanish welcome for the new Gothic style.
The archbishops of Toledo treated patronage as part of their duties to the Church. They tended their flock, and they beautified the cathedral. The stained-glass windows reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the city; they were produced over 150 years by glaziers from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Spain. Each window carried the coat of arms of the archbishop who commissioned it—usually capped with the cardinals’ red galero, as Toledo (until recently) was traditionally a cardinalatial see.
Our Lady of the Assumption not only launched Gothic art in Spain but also began its swan song in the astonishing retablo decorating the high altar. Composed from 1498-1504, it employed a symphony of twenty-seven artists from all over Europe. Spaniards Sebastián de Almonacid and Peti Juan, Diego Copín and Christian of Holland, and Bigarny of Burgundy carved, painted, modeled, and gilded the fifty-foot-high altarpiece, decorated with twenty scenes from the life of Christ. The jewel tones of the figures recall stained glass, while the glittering tracery evokes the flamboyant Gothic. The overall design, however, heralded the Renaissance by gradually increasing the size of the upper scenes, taking into account the perspective of the viewer below. Unrivaled anywhere in Europe, the grand retablo assured the Cathedral of Toledo a permanent home in art history books.
Despite its rejection of the Gothic, the Renaissance found a congenial welcome in the Toledo cathedral. The 1495 tomb of Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, confessor of Isabella the Catholic and promoter of Christopher Columbus, boasted the latest Italian effects in stone carving. Florentine sculptor Antonio Sansovino ushered in a new taste for marble sculpture, rounded Roman arches, and architectural funerary monuments in churches, ultimately inspiring Alonso de Berruguete, who would come to be known as the “Spanish Michelangelo.”
At the same time Mendoza’s tomb was under construction, another team of European artists was tackling the wooden choir, a stunning enclosure comprising 120 walnut wood carvings by Barruguete, Rodrigo the German, and Phillip of Burgundy. The massive undertaking was completed in 1560 by Berruguete, whose carved prophets frown, fret, and forewarn with remarkable expressiveness.
The cathedral continued to grow in artistic stature even as the city diminished in importance. In 1561, King Phillip II moved the Spanish capital to Madrid, drawing aspiring artists and artisans away to the new court. The discerning eye of the archbishop, however, spotted an innovative outlier, and Domeico Theotokopoulis (popularly known as El Greco) found a place on the world stage. Rejected by Rome, spurned by King Phillip, the daring painter created his greatest masterpieces in Toledo, including the Disrobing of Christ in the sacristy. As the archbishop and his priests vested in their magnificent robes for Mass, El Greco’s massive, crowded canvas towering above them would recall Christ’s divestment before his crucifixion. The Greek painter saturated the canvas with symbolism: the scarlet robe evokes Jesus stripped of glory and cloaked in mortality while also recalling his blood shed during the Passion—his death and resurrection that the priest re-presents on the altar. El Greco used his brush like a sabre: slashes of darkness bring out the violence, the mockery, and ignorance of the mob pressing in on the Lord. El Greco, a Catholic convert, startled and engaged his viewers, heralding the exciting new era and ideas of Counter-Reformation art.
Retablos, tombs, glass, and choir had all been subjected to elaborate decoration. Where would (or could) the daring decoration move next? Upwards, following the spirit of the Baroque. In 1721, the Tomé family produced the cathedral’s most breathtaking work, El Transparente. This dazzling orchestration of painting, sculpture, and architecture joins forces with the brilliant Spanish sun to offer visitors a glimpse of heaven. To realize the vision of twenty-seven-year-old Narciso Tomé, an autodidact architect, workers would have to break through the 500-year-old apse. Many feared the church would collapse, but Cardinal Astorga y Céspedes believed in the young artist, and the work commenced.
A celebration of the Eucharist, the Transparency above the altar shows the heavens opening to illuminate the Blessed Sacrament. The eye is drawn first to the Christ Child stretched along his mother’s lap, as angels soar upward and dive down. A little further up, statues represent the apostles seated at the Last Supper. Then the vault explodes into a glorious fresco illuminated by natural light. Even the most sceptical tourist happening upon it in the apse reels at the wondrous effect of Baroque drama.
Considering these wonders of the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque eras, the question springs to mind, where are today’s artistic geniuses? They are certainly out there, but with no stage for their genius, how are we to find them? Perhaps it is not a lack of artists, but a lack of patronage that keeps beauty at bay. The cardinals who laid the cornerstone of a church in a new style, hired workers from all over Europe, and encouraged El Greco and Tomé, were daring men. Rooted in tradition, living in the present and looking towards the future, they make fine models of patronage.
The present archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Cerro Chaves, is living up to his predecessors’ example in a new and surprising manner. This year, the Cathedral of Toledo transformed the former apartments of Queen Isabella into a museum of contemporary sacred art, allowing visitors to the church to encounter the “Faces of Christ,” a collection of 240 works lovingly and carefully commissioned by a Catholic convert, art historian Steen Heidemann, over twenty years. The collection grew from Heidemann’s search for Jesus. The life of Christ, Christ in the Eucharist, and consecration to Christ are the subjects explored in works by artists from locations as diverse as Don Hovsep Achkarian from Armenia to Thobias Minzi of Tanzania. Though diverse in origin and style, they reflect the same universality that has distinguished seven centuries of embellishing the cathedral.
The works include several of Catholicism’s superstar artists, sadly unknown to most. Raúl Berzosa’s extraordinary altarpieces revive the Baroque flair of Luca Giordano (who painted the vault of the sacristy) while Hélène Legrand, the doyenne of contemporary sacred art, mesmerizes viewers with her powerful Michelangelo-esque bodies set into contemplative mystical settings. While very little art is produced for churches in our era, James Langley’s Stations of the Cross—the Via Dolorosa— makes a strong argument for why images are important to prayer. Heidemann’s collection mixes styles, media, and techniques, but maintains one constant: all the art is figurative. The centuries of art and innovation in the Cathedral of Toledo has always focused on the incarnation, celebrating the Word-made-flesh in stone, glass, wood, marble, plaster, or light. At the same time, the millions of pilgrims, prelates, parishioners and even (often unwittingly) the tourists, have come seeking the same thing: an encounter with a living God, whose message of hope and salvation is renewed through the ages in liturgy, Scripture, art, and architecture.