The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Salamanca

by Roger Fry

SALAMANCA

BY ROGER FRY

PEOPLE, i. e. people without motors, do not, I believe, go very frequently to Salamanca. Even commercial travellers, so one of them told me, funked it because of the quite peculiar cussedness of its railway communications. Still every other day a goods train condescends to trail behind it a few decrepit carriages from Medina del Campo which is the general junction for Spain west of Madrid. It attaches such importance to this feat that it starts to time whatever may have happened to the Madrid-Paris express. On the day I tried the connexion the express engine had broken down so hopelessly on the inclines of the Guadarrama pass that it only arrived in time for a very hurried scramble into the goods train. But having once started punctually the train gives up any further effort and only just manages an average of ten miles an hour across the absolutely bare waste of slightly undulating plain which stretches over this part of Castile. One small cluster of Mediterranean pines raises its long bare trunks out of the baked yellow earth at the station of Caspio and for the rest nothing; nothing to break the evenness of the surface and no apparent reason why there should be stations or villages and nothing to show how any one supports life there. A sort of cart track of indefinite outline and great width wanders vaguely across the plain and now and then the train overtakes—it does overtake, but not with éclat—the ubiquitous Spanish donkey trotting steadily along beneath a load as big as itself, its two saddle baskets on either side and a huge peasant behind on its haunches. Where they can be going and why, seems in this wilderness utterly unimaginable. And so it goes on hour after hour for four hours; it is only forty miles even then, but it seems much longer. The long monotony of those hours have their effect and their recompense when behind a final undulation of the brown soil there suddenly appears the vision of Salamanca, a whole row of towers and domes for as yet the houses are hidden. It is like a more grandiose Oxford—curiously like in the proportion of dome to tower—only all dark umber-coloured stone rising against the

SPANISH SCENE. BY ROGER FRY

glare of the horizon over the dark umber ridge of the land. The train creeps down a valley and one is in Salamanca or rather near it, for no Spanish train ever goes to the town indicated in the guide, but near enough for the ramshackle Hotel Omnibuses just to get to where the train stops in the outlying desert.

Salamanca is perhaps the most miraculous of these Castilian cities, its raison d'être seems entirely problematical. What natural and economic forces made this particular spot, where the barren, treeless plain slopes down to the bed of the Tormes, the centre of learning for Spain, the intermediary for all Europe of Arabic science and Western thought and a great, and in some ways sumptuous city? What products of the earth, got by what toil of man, where the earth seems completely barren and man completely idle, provided the money to build so extensively and so elaborately? For Salamanca is a city where Plateresque and Baroque fancy have impressed their wildest dreams on the rich surface of the stone.

Salamanca begins bravely enough at the top of its slope with the Calle de Zamora which sets out wide and regular in its lines toward the great central Plaza Mayor, but before it gets there it gives up in despair, divides into many small, winding, intricate lanes which finally trickle feebly under the colonnade of the square. The particular one I usually go down is all barbers' shops on one side, always empty and gaping for customers, and on the other a big blank wall of lovely stone and a dull Renaissance church door. This is the establishment of the Hijas de Jesus (Daughters of Jesus) of which every town seems to possess one. These particular Hijas seem to me to have a poor time of it. Their church is the only one in Salamanca that ever is open at any convenient hours and is always nearly full, but the Hijas don't go into it. They sit up somewhere behind a grille and drone out in their childish treble interminable bad hymn tunes—it must be a sort of perpetual Sunday afternoon of the old-fashioned kind in there.—Sunday indeed is the one day when they do appear in the streets walking with guttering candles behind a procession of the Host and listening to music as bad as their own, but played by a military band. I suppose the balance of things in Salamanca is trimmed by the Hijos de Trabajo (Sons of Labour) whose institute I saw, but never one of the actual sons to my knowledge, nor any one else recognizably related to "Labour."

The Plaza Mayor is, to quote Baedeker, "the finest city square in Spain." It is a Spanish version of the Place Stanislas at Nancy, but instead of the pale grey French stone cut into refined and calculated elegance, it is all of the warm golden colour of Salamanca stone, and its proportions are not so nicely adjusted and, though the same elevation is maintained all round the square, the Spanish architects could not achieve symmetry, and façades are broken where its streets happen to enter. It is of a kind of heavy Rococo style which in reality is hardly changed from Churriguerra's seventeenth century Town Hall at one side. But then Churriguerra's Baroque is already half way to Rococo.

The main street recovers its composure soon after the Plaza Mayor and runs straight to the Cathedral. This is Hontanon's second masterpiece, and like the cathedral of Segovia is splendidly planned for its situation; rising from the sloping edge of the hill with a tremendous face (I speak of the side elevation) of orange masonry before at an incredible height the ornate window of the transept breaks it. The system of rectangular boxes which his Renaissance training caused him to give to the general shape is here less frittered away with crochets and pinnacles than it is at Segovia and as regards the outside it is certainly superior.

Wherever, as in the West Front or round the North Door, the use of sculpture is indicated, it is of course of an incredible intricacy and multiplicity, with elaborate arabesques of animals chasing one another along cornices and in the hollows of mouldings. The carving is wonderfully sharp and precise and of great technical brilliancy—the Spaniards of the sixteenth century must have got up earlier than they do now to have carved such vast areas of stone with so incredibly minute and rich a sculptured surface. In effect it is the creation of a surface that is aimed at. The sculptures could hardly be meant to be looked at as sculpture, as, for instance, most of the French Gothic sculpture can be, even though it fits also into a general decorative scheme. In these Plateresque churches both scale and quantity defeat the searching eye. The scale because each individual form is so minute—the quantity because a whole façade may be covered with them.

The real meaning of this sculpture then is the creation of a richly varied surface, however little conscious of this the artist may have been.

The fact is the Spaniards could never get quit of their Moorish antecedents and perhaps no people have ever had so exquisite a sensibility for surface as the Arabs—so marvellous a sense of how to play one kind of surface against another. But then until the fourteenth century when their art went to pieces they preserved their fine tact—they knew how to keep their rich surfaces precious—how to give them value by the opposition of large unbroken and massive surfaces. Think of the Mesopotamian pottery of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. The animal form that fills the centre of the bowl or plate is drawn with large blunt outlines and then the interstices may be filled with the minutest intricacies—these will count, none the less, as just another surface, and the eye grasps at once the interplay of the two.

Then again the Arabs knew how to make the relief of a rich surface incredibly delicate, using only the shallowest relief, i. e., the weakest contrasts of light and shade, or, if it was painting, only the finest strokes or the fainter colours.

And finally they knew that it was worse than wasted labour to use forms of real objects, animals or men, merely to create a surface. They knew, as the Byzantines had already discovered, that that can be done even better by merely geometric or meaningless shapes, by mere dots and dashes and rounds and crosses.

Now the Spaniards when they came to work on their own, had in their minds the Mudéjar traditions, but not the Mudéjar artist's tact. They used Gothic and Renaissance forms to produce the rich surfaces of the Arab geometrics. Now this produces a certain want of ease. One feels that one might, perhaps one ought, to look at each of these animals biting the tail of the next, at all these nude, putti, and floral interweavings and it requires an effort to say to oneself that they have no meaning except as so much variegation of surface, that they are no more than the rustications on classic coins.

Then again in their desire to astonish the Plateresque designers cut their stone far too deeply so that the contrast of carved and plain surfaces is too violent.

But Hontanon merits the tourists' gratitude as much for what he so piously left as for what he built. For he left the little Old Cathedral standing under the shadow of his new and towering structure. It is a simple and well-planned twelfth century building with scarcely a moulding or ornament except on its richly cut, fantastically designed capitals.

Out of the cloister there lead many chapels filled with twelfth and early thirteenth century tombs. The sculptor's tradition here has something peculiar and fascinating—an almost clumsy massiveness in the forms which heightens the archaic dignity of the gesture and expression of these recumbent kings and princes. Nowhere else did I get so high an opinion of Spanish plastique of this period—and then it was quite distinct from the French, lacking its elegance of finish, but with a sombre dramatic power which is very impressive.

But Salamanca means most of all the University. One enters through a great Plateresque gateway not unlike a glorified version of the gateway of St Johns at Cambridge. Inside is a large two-storeyed cloister very plain except for the complicated honey-combing of a rich Artesonado ceiling in the upper storey. On the ground floor are the entrances to the class rooms, one of them the vast dark thirteenth century cellar in which Fray Luis de Leon lectured. It was to him that Salamanca owed its greatest European reputation and his lecture room has been piously preserved with its original benches and desks. These are hardly more than tree trunks with one side flattened and are by now inscribed with the initials and dates of whole centuries of students.

I have at least one defect as a traveller, I am curiously insensitive to the sentimental association of objects. Caesar's razor-strop would leave me cold and I would not cross a street to see all Napoleon's knick-knacks; but somehow I felt a sentimental thrill at the sight of this class room. Perhaps it is that in the whole of human history no adventure seems to me so thrilling as this of the desperate voyage after truth in the face of grudging nature and hostile man.

How risky this adventure was we may judge from the story of Fray Luis de Leon himself. The charge of heresy was always so easy to bring and so hard to refute that so striking a figure could hardly fail to be the object of attack. Consequently he found himself one day transferred from his professional chair at Salamanca to the Inquisition prison at Valladolid. There he spent five years of meditation before the Inquisitors were able to detect his innocence.

A pleasant story is told of his return. He had been wont every day to resume his previous lecture, beginning with the words: "We were saying yesterday." When after five years' absence he found himself once more in the chair in that same cavernous class room, without troubling to allude to the interruption he began: "We were saying yesterday . . ."

I was with the usual party of casual tourists that is herded round such places by the porter. They were nondescript Spanish bourgeois—for the Spaniards take a pride in seeing their own country—and wandered round with the usual expression of boredom which they were carefully repressing from consciousness, but among them was a young man who had the unmistakable look of understanding what he saw. I was intrigued and guessed at his nationality and business. French I decided, that look being less unusual on French faces than on any others, but presently he spoke to the porter in such fluent Spanish that I decided against it knowing how unwillingly the French learn any language but their own. He must, I decided, be a Spanish intellectal and I was the more intrigued. It would be so interesting to know the characteristics of that variety of the species. I saw at once that he had recognized me as clearly as I had him and faint telegraphic messages passed between us as we were jostled with the herd from lecture room to chapel, and from chapel to library, but I was far too much ashamed of my Spanish to make a move, besides I foresaw that we should meet again. And naturally we did so one evening at a café, and inevitably drifted into conversation, for I had been wrong about his Spanish—of course he was a Frenchman and an Ecole-normalien at that, and therefore could learn anything. He was learned as only a Frenchman can be about Spanish architecture. I mean that his knowledge was both wide in range and precise in detail and yet it had not submerged his sensibility. His researches had led him to a state of extreme scepticism about almost all the accepted dates of early Spanish architecture. He would have none of Wamba's Visigothic walls at Toledo: Mudéjar might be of almost any date; and in general he took from me the few pegs on which I had provisionally hung my vague map of the developments of early Spanish art. I passed a delightful evening unlearning the little I thought I knew, and we parted, for he was off to Plasencia early the next morning and wanted me to go with him, but I had already become enamoured of Ciudad Rodrigo on the strength of vague reports, and it was impossible to combine the two.

One might suppose that in Salamanca at least, if only in Salamanca out of all Spain, learning would predominate and for once the Church might take a subordinate place, but that would be to reckon without the Jesuits. If the University was to be for free learning they would counter it with their own special brand and so arose the Jesuit College which, as Baedeker drily remarks, "covers an area of 23,900 square yards." And there it is, a great barrack-like affair and so much the vastest building in the town that everywhere it dominates the view. By its side the discreet little University building might be a mere annexe. Baedeker tells one no more about the Jesuits. He will not take you in to the really rather magnificent Baroque chapel and he gives you no hint that inside the main door there is one of the loveliest cloisters in Spain. For Baedeker it is of the wrong period, being quite late Baroque, almost eighteenth century I daresay, but how lovely with the clean relief of its great disengaged pilasters whose arches each frame a circular opening and below that a rectangular. Something in the ingenuity of the invention and the clear logic of the proportions brings to mind the delicious fantasy of Wren's fountain quadrangle at Hampton Court, only instead of lawn and fountain one great heavily moulded wellhead sits in the middle of the paved rectangle.

But the Jesuits are not the only religious to settle in Salamanca—there is another large college of the "Irish nobles" (de los nobiles Irlandeses). Except for the austere beauty of its one cloister the Jesuits' is a grim place, but the Irish nobles have done themselves well. They sit on a hill a little apart from the town and their court is an inviting spacious grassy place enclosed on all sides by a two-storeyed cloister of simple, but very delicate, late Gothic design. Their chapel is of the same date and its architect adopted Hontanon's genial idea of a Gothic interior with dome. I guess it to be a little later than the Cathedral, for the Renaissance forms are more clearly marked and even the mouldings of the arches approximate to Classic forms. Indeed this Church and the very similar, though larger, one of S. Esteban provoke one to wonder why the peculiar and ingenious compromise which Hontanon had hit upon, did not develop to its ultimate logical conclusion. Why, having got so far, no one ever built a classic building with pointed arches. Why they did not try the possibility of keeping the great structural facilities for vaulting of the pointed arch. Perhaps it was a right aesthetic instinct which made them go back to the circular arch which is no doubt a more agreeable shape and one that it is easier to harmonize with upright and horizontal lines, but I wish it had been tried once. These two churches come so near to that idea and both are such spacious and impressive interiors in spite of their bastard style that one longs to see what they would be without their ungainly admixture of late Gothic detail.

Behind the Cathedral a network of steep narrow lanes begins (one is the Calle del Silencio—nearly as good a name as the "Calle di Vida y Muerte"—the street of life and death). Through these one can thread a way to where the remains of the city wall front the Tormes. It is delightful down here, a few groups of poplars cluster on islets, and sheltering the mill houses and the Roman bridge stretches arch after arch interminably across the clear shallow waters and the wide expanses of shingle to the parched brown and yellow uplands which rise gently from the further bank. It is well to cross the bridge at evening, partly because the setting sun casts long shadows on the shingle and lights the orange stonework of the Cathedral tower; partly because from all the country round there straggle in thousands and thousands of sheep and goats, driven down to the water side to drink and there to spend the night in the dry river bed. The air is loud with the chorus of their innumerable bleatings. Herds of swine too come down and a stray pig will gallopade wildly about with the swineherds after him with long whips, his shrill squeals answering their gruff objurgations. A pleasant and lively place enough if a gusty wind doesn't bring clouds of dust in with the sheep from the bare uplands.

One may stroll up the river bank and recross by the blatant new bridge and so along to the Vega where a little Romanesque cloister lies securely imbedded in a great modern hospital or asylum amid market gardens and vague terrains, and so skirt the edge of the town, where sickly acacia trees are aligned in dust to make a new park, and where little new suburban houses wander aimlessly, the side streets leading nowhere as they do at Ealing or Acton, only here it is so much more definitely nowhere, since one knows that if one went on there would be forty miles of bare land before you got to Medina del Campo, and if you didn't hit that, for God knows how many more.