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Updated: May 10, 2025
The picture postal has these monuments in its keeping and can show them better than my pen, which falters also from the tremendous retablo of the chapel dense with the agonies of martyrdom and serene with the piety of the Catholic Kings kneeling placidly amid the horrors.
The central niche of the retablo, immediately above the altar-table, is generally occupied by a massive beaten silver effigy, the artistic value of which is unluckily partially concealed beneath a heap of valuable cloths and jewels. But where the silversmith's art is purest and most lavishly pronounced is in the sagrarios.
Seen from without, it is of perfect Romanesque construction, excepting the upper row of rose windows, which are ogival in their traceries; inside, it contains a mural painting of an exceedingly primitive design, and a retablo in low reliefs enchased in ogival arches; it is of Italian workmanship.
Three arches and four pillars, sumptuously decorated, uphold each of the clerestory walls, which are pierced at the top by a handsome triforium running completely around the church. The retablo of the high altar is richly decorated, perhaps too richly; the reja, which closes off the sacred area, is of fine seventeenth-century workmanship.
The gray colorlessness of the architecture somberly prevails in memory over the frescoes of the painters invited to relieve it in the roof and the retablo, and thought turns from the red-and-yellow jasper of altar and pulpit, and the bronze-gilt effigies of kneeling kings and queens to that niche near the oratory where the little terrible man who imagined and realized it all used to steal in from his palace, and worship next the small chamber where at last he died.
The retablo a fine Gothic specimen stands boldly forth against the light coming from the apse in the rear, while on the opposite side of the transept handsome, deep brown choir stalls peep out from behind a magnificent iron reja. So beautiful is the view of the choir's ensemble that the spectator almost forgives it for breaking in upon the grandeur of the nave.
The retablo of painted wood was erected toward the end of the fifteenth century, as well as many of the chapels, which are built into the walls of the building, and are as different in style as the saints to whom they are dedicated.
There is no ambulatory behind the high altar, which stands in the lady-chapel; the apse is rounded. This peculiarity reminds one dimly of what the primitive plan of the Oviedo cathedral must have resembled. By far the most meritorious piece of work in the cathedral is the sixteenth-century retablo of the high altar, which alone is worth a visit to Astorga.
The retablo of the high altar is one of the largest to be seen anywhere; but the Renaissance elegance of the lower body is completely drowned by the grotesque decoration of the upper half, which was constructed at a later date. The choir stalls are fine specimens of that style in which the artist preferred an intricate composition to simple beauty.
It is built, as I have already said, upon an octagonal plan. The altar, which formerly stood beneath the cupola, has been removed. On the 24th of June every year the magnificent retablo in massive silver, which is preserved among the treasures in the Opera del Duomo, is displayed in the Baptistery.
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