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Updated: May 10, 2025
The nave is the most important member of the church, and the most impressive view is obtained by the visitor standing beneath the croisée. To the east of him, the nave terminates in a semicircular chapel, the farther end of which boasts of an immense retablo; to the west, the choir, with its stalls and organs, interrupts likewise the continuity of the nave.
We found it rich in a most wonderful retablo carved in wood and painted. Besides the excellent pictures at the high altar, there are two portrait brasses which were meant to be recumbent, but which are stood up against the wall, perhaps to their surprise, without loss of impressiveness.
The retablo is of indifferent workmanship; the choir stalls, on the other hand, are among the most exquisitely wrought simple, sober, and natural to be seen in Spain, especially those of the lower row. The chapels are as usual in Spanish cathedrals, as different in style as they are in size; none of those in Zamora can be considered as artistic jewels.
The retablo of the high altar has been attributed to Foment, who constructed those of Saragosse and Huesca. The attribution is, however, most doubtful, as shown by the completely different styles employed by the artist of each.
Two of the best pieces of sculptural work in the cathedral are the retablo of the high altar, and the relief imbedded in the wall of the trascoro both of them carved in wood by Juan de Juni, one of the best Castilian sculptors of the sixteenth century.
Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious speculation as he himself once dreamed of doing when he met those images in bas-relief which certain peasants were carrying to set up in the retablo of their village church imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation upon eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the dark night of the soul, to watch from its summit the rising of that sun which never sets, and, like the eagle that was St.
It is a very clean-looking, cold-looking white monument of the Catholic faith, with a retablo attributed to Berruguete, and much plateresque Gothic detail mingled with Byzantine ornament, and Moorish arabesquing and the famous stucco honeycombing which we were destined at Seville and Granada to find almost sickeningly sweet.
If the restored retablo over the high altar is disappointing in its sophistication, we have only to pass into the Feretory to discover certain marvellous fragments of the original reredos which are so beautiful that they take away our breath that broken statue of the Madonna and Child, for instance, perhaps the loveliest piece of fourteenth century sculpture to be found in England.
The northern aisle has no chapels let into its exterior wall, but a long row of sepulchres and sepulchral reliefs to replace them. Some of them are severe and beautiful. The choir has finely carved stalls, and the Gothic retablo is the only one of its kind in Galicia, and one of the best in Spain.
In some of the decorative details, however, this retablo shows evident signs of plateresque decadence, and the birth of the florid grotesque style, which is but the natural reaction against the severity of early sixteenth-century art. Burgos is the old capital of Castile.
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