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The Romanesque church, which occupies the centre of the quadrangle, was built about A.D. 1250, but, having been burnt out by the Turks, it was restored in 1400, the walls being uninjured, and it has never been since damaged; and the frescoes in the chapel, which are older than those in the church, are dated 1420.
The audience was scattered around on cushions, on the floor, on chairs, and even on the one narrow window sill. Queening it from her pillows Judith looked quite Romanesque, with Jane perched on a cretonne pedestal above the divan's level, waving her riding crop regally.
Didron has likened them, in their use of animal form, to the art of the Mexicans; but to me they seem more like delightful German Romanesque workmanship, leaning more towards that of certain spirited Lombard grotesques, or even that of Arles and certain parts of France, than to the Aztec to which Didron has reference.
It may not be denied that, together with nearly all the Cathedrals of Provence, this interior has suffered from the addition of inharmonious styles. The most serious of these is its Gothic choir of the XV century, which a certain Cardinal Louis Allemand applied to the narrower Romanesque naves.
On the wide broken ledge just beneath her pinnacle was the concrete evidence of an architectural orgy to be seen nowhere else on earth: wooden mansions with the pure outlines of the Renaissance; a Gothic palace with bow-windows, also of wood; a big brown-stone house in the style of New York; piles of shingles and stones; here and there a touch of Romanesque, later French, and Italian; the majority of those plutocratic and perishable masses, of no style in particular, unless it were that of Mansard combined with the criminalities of him who invented the bow-window and the irrelevant tower.
Though some of the capitals at the east end look almost romanesque, the really late date is shown by the cusped fringing of the chancel arch, a feature very common at Batalha, which was begun at the end of the fourteenth century, and by the window tracery, where in the two-light windows the head is filled by a flat pierced slab.
There are four shafts on each side with a ring-moulding rather less than half-way up, which at once distinguishes them from any romanesque predecessors; the capitals are round with a projecting moulding half-way up and another one at the top with a curious projection or claw to unite the round cap and the square moulded abacus.
Such is the cathedral of Tuy, a unique example of Galician Romanesque in certain details, an edifice that really ought to be better known than it is. The prettiest bay in Galicia is that of Vigo, which reaches inland to Redondela a village seated, as it were, on a Swiss lake, with two immense viaducts passing over its head where the train speeds to Tuy and Santiago.
Without Giovanni's intervention, the achievement of Niccola might possibly have been as unproductive of immediate results as the Tuscan Romanesque, that mediaeval effort after the Renaissance, was in architecture.
In Languedoc, the greater number of monuments of this ancient architecture have been destroyed; and those of their outgrowth, the later Romanesque, were so repeatedly mutilated that the Cathedrals of this province present even a greater confusion of originalities, restorations, and additions than those of Provence. To a multitude of dates must be added corresponding differences in style.
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