Iberia (24 page)
Authors: James Michener
infuriated with the obstinacy of Toledo’s Jews who refused to
heed the words of Ferrer that they swarmed out of church, ran
through the streets gathering a mob and burst into the Moorish
building which I have been describing. It was then operating as
a synagogue, from which the mob hauled all Jews they could find,
dragged them to the promenade overlooking the river, cut their
throats and threw them onto the rocks below. In one tremendous
spasm the Jews of Toledo were practically eliminated, and no
sooner were they gone than their synagogue was consecrated a
church, and so it remains to this day.
had enough of Toledo, but a few years later the quota was again
about normal. Jewish traders flourished, and although their
original synagogue had been lost to them, since a building once
consecrated could not revert to a prior use, they were encouraged
to worship in another building nearby, which still stands as Spain’s
finest example of a synagogue. Thus matters stood until 1492,
when Queen Isabel, acting under guidance and pressure from
Cardinal Cisneros, decreed that all Jews in her kingdom must
either convert to Christianity or go into exile. It is strange, in this
day, to read on the interior wall of the cathedral a huge sign which
commemorates the expulsion:
In the year 1492, on the second day of the month of January,
Granada with all its kingdom was captured by the monarchs Don
Fernando and Doña Isabel, the Most Reverend Don Pedro
González de Mendoza, Cardinal of Spain, being archbishop. This
same year, at the end of the month of July, all the Jews were
expelled from all the kingdoms of Castilla, of Aragón and of Sicily.
The following year 93 at the end of the month of January, this
holy church was completed, Don Francisco Fernández de Cuenca,
archdeacon of Calatrava, being in charge of the decoration,
painting and tracery of the vaults.
I had not intended saying anything about ‘The Burial of Count
Orgaz,’ the chief work of El Greco, for this has been so well and
so repeatedly described that there seemed little I might add, but
I passed the church of Santo Tomé so often on my way to the
synagogue of Santa María la Blanca or to the damasquinado shop
of Señor Simón that I thought it silly not to revisit the magisterial
painting; however, I did not do so until one afternoon when a
party of English tourists asked me the way to St. Ptomaine’s and
I accompanied them to the church, where I took a seat with them
and decided simply to look at the painting as if I had never seen
it before. Santo Tomé’s makes it easy to see its stupendous El
Greco: a section of the church is set aside for this purpose, with
eight comfortable Renaissance armchairs facing the picture, plus
benches for ten and folding chairs for an additional thirty-five.
It was late afternoon and we were the only group in the church;
soon the English travelers left and I was alone in my Renaissance
chair with the marvelously fresh and well-lighted canvas before
me.
Like most universal masterpieces, this one has many fine
passages and others that are frankly bad. There are three glaring
defects: the picture breaks into two unrelated halves, an upper
and a lower; the yellow-robed angel that is supposed to unite
them is one of the sorriest figures El Greco ever drew and fails
completely in his mission (in Spain all angels must be male); and
the clouds of little bodiless angels consisting only of head and
wings are ridiculous and, unlike the similar putti of Raphael and
the other Italians who used the convention with charm,
accomplish nothing. The unresolved breaking into two halves is
caused by that much-vaunted line of heads which is one of the
glories of the work but which in its excellence creates a problem
that El Greco could not surmount. The faulty angel is poorly
designed, poorly placed and poorly executed, which is curious,
since El Greco used the same device with success in other
paintings. As for the clouds of bodiless angels, I am not one to
discuss El Greco’s success or failure with this device because to
me the convention has always seemed stupid, but I do know that
in this great work it clutters up the heavens with ugly or even
repulsive forms, whereas in certain Italian works it seems to add
a sense of mysterious unearthliness. What I object to most,
however, is that the putti are badly painted, and as one looks at
the canvas with a fresh eye unimpeded by what others have seen,
they merely add to the general clutter of a work that was poorly
organized to begin with.
On the other hand, as I slowly studied the canvas I found
hidden beauties which had escaped me on previous visits. In the
lower left-hand corner of the painting, the right-hand panel of
St. Stephen’s cloak contains a small inserted depiction of the
stoning of St. Stephen, which would have constituted one of the
world’s principal art treasures had it been painted as a full-scale
canvas of its own. The naked figures throwing rocks would have
anticipated Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ by three hundred years. In fact,
this little excerpt is so good that it alone would establish El Greco
as a major painter. I was similarly struck by the group of the
heavenly musicians in the cloud to the Virgin’s right, that is, at
the extreme left-hand margin of the painting. These three in their
powerfully sculpted robes are drawn and painted about as well
as figures could be when seen from below, and I wondered that
I had not noticed them before. Again, if they had formed the
subject matter for a full-sized canvas, they would now be famous.
The marvelous figure of St. Peter, robed in saffron, with two giant
keys dangling from the limp right hand, proves once more the
affinity El Greco felt for this particular saint; he never painted
Peter better than here, and in doing so, achieved one of his most
successful religious portraits. But when one looks at the painting
for a long time, three or four hours perhaps, one is struck mostly,
I think, by that host of paradise that fills the upper right-hand
corner. Here are the tormented figures from the streets of Toledo,
the half-idiots that El Greco loved to paint, the aimless ones, the
God-driven. They crowd in upon the scene, beseeching the Virgin
to receive the soul of the Conde de Orgaz and present it to Christ,
robed in white, who waits above. They are a remarkable assembly,
more compelling and more Spanish, I think, than the notables
lined up below, even though El Greco himself stands among the
latter. For me the painting repeats the dichotomy of Spain that
we saw earlier in the two paintings by El Greco and Goya: the
sober, secure and well-groomed nobles who now keep and have
always kept Spain under rigid control, and the wonderfully human
peasant types whose fiery passions have provided the torment
and vision of the land, but as I look at the latter crowding heaven
I ask, ‘If this is paradise, what must hell be like?’
The Conde de Orgaz, a citizen of Toledo and lord of the town
of Orgaz, some twenty miles south of the city, died in 1323, and
El Greco painted the legendary miracle of his burial in 1586. The
conde had assumed responsibility for enlarging and rebuilding
this church of St. Thomas the Apostle at the turn of the century,
thus assuring his ultimate burial in the church. In 1312 the conde
increased his fund of heavenly gratitude by obtaining from the
queen a grant of property in Toledo so that a community of
Augustinian friars, formerly located in unhealthful surroundings
on the banks of the Tajo, could move within the walls, and by
insisting that the new church should be dedicated to St. Stephen,
the same as the old one had been. ‘When the priests were
preparing to bury him,’ as the tablet below the picture explains,
‘an admirable and unusual thing, St. Stephen and St. Augustine
came down from heaven and buried him here with their own
hands. Since it would take long to explain what might have
motivated these saints, ask about it of the Augustinian friars, who
are not far from here, if you have the time. The way is short.’ The
plaque then continues with a fascinating bit of local history: ‘You
have heard the gratitude of heavenly beings; hear now the
inconstancy of mortal men. The same Orgaz bequeathed to the
curate and ministers of this church, as well as to the poor of the
parish, two sheep, sixteen hens, two wineskins full of wine, two
loads of firewood and eight hundred of the coins that we call
maravedis, which they were to receive annually from the residents
of Orgaz. Since these people refused for two years to pay the pious
tribute, in the belief that with the passage of time the matter would
be forgotten, they have been forced to pay it by order of the
Chancery of Valladolid in the year 1570, the case having been
prosecuted energetically by Andrés Núñez de Madrid, curate of
this church, and Pedro Ruiz Durón, the administrator.’ It was
undoubtedly this successful lawsuit that led to the commissioning
a few years later of the painting. I should add that the above
inscription is in Latin.
Two of the finest portraits in the standing file belong to this
curate Núñez (the golden-robed, iron-faced prelate holding a
book at extreme right) and to the administrator Ruiz (the ecstatic
figure clothed in white surplice standing nearest the spectator).
Among the worthies one finds the grave and bitter-faced old
Covarrubias brothers, El Greco’s son and others who may have
been well known in Toledo when the painting was done.
The line of standing figures has always bothered me, so I was
pleased to come upon the facts relating to its inception, because
I believe the sequence of events helps explain how great works of
art are sometimes evolved. There had been talk in Toledo of
applying to Rome for the sanctification of the Conde de Orgaz,
seeing that heaven itself had sent messengers to supervise his
burial, but the movement had got nowhere, so Father Núñez
proposed that at least the body of the conde be moved to a finer
tomb, but his archbishop said, ‘No, it is not proper that sinful
hands should move the body that saints themselves have buried.’
Father Núñez thereupon came up with a third proposal: ‘Mark
Orgaz’s humble grave with a painting which will retell the glories
of the conde,’ and to this the authorities agreed. So a contract,
which still exists, was drawn up between Father Núñez and El
Greco, perhaps with Administrator Ruiz looking on, in which the
artist outlines his understanding of what he is being required to
do:
On the canvas will be painted a procession, showing how the
curate and other clergymen were performing the offices for the
burial of Don Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, lord of the town of Orgaz,
and St. Augustine and St. Stephen descended to bury the body of
this caballero, one holding him by the head and the other by the
feet, depositing him in the sepulcher, and presenting round about
many people looking on, and above all this will be depicted a sky
filled with a heavenly scene.
As in many cases of Renaissance masterpieces, it was the client
who determined much of the basic design, and El Greco saw to
it that the two men who were footing the bill, Núñez and Ruiz,
occupied prominent positions when the job was done.
Two sayings sum up all we require to know about this
monumental work. One of the Spanish critics responsible for
generating world interest in El Greco said of him and of this
painting in particular, ‘When he’s good there’s none better and
when he’s bad there’s none worse.’ One Englishman, as his group
left that day, said of the painting, ‘This is the best thing in Spain
and the cheapest.’ To spend an hour or two before this superbly
presented picture, lounging in a Renaissance chair, costs eight
cents.
the quiet Plaza de Carmelites, on whose wall appeared this notice:
GLORY TO THE CARMELITE MARTYRS
1936
IN JULY
BY THE MARXISTS
The names of seventeen friars were listed, and I was once more
brought face to face with the Civil War; no city knew worse
atrocities than Toledo. In the beginning days it looked as if the
Republic were going to win, and since Toledo had always been
conservative and the seat of Catholic power—for the Bishop of
Toledo is the primate of Spain—men who felt they had old scores
to settle with the Church killed wantonly, as this sign testified.
Later, when the war in Toledo had settled into a siege-type
operation, Republican hotheads imported from Madrid coursed
through the streets rounding up all conservatives, whom they
herded in large groups to that very precipice from which the Jews
had been flung in 1405, and there they slaughtered the prisoners
in obscene brutality, sometimes throwing their bodies over the
cliff as had been done 531 years before; history in Spain has an
ominous way of repeating itself. As might be expected, when the
Franco forces triumphed a savage retaliation was launched by the
victors, who applied one simple rule: if the man has fought on
the Republican side, kill him. And how was the best way to tell if
he had fought? Look at the right shoulder of his coat. If it is worn
it means that he has been using a gun, so shoot him.
How many conservatives the Republicans killed in Toledo
cannot be calculated, but it was in the thousands; how many
liberals the Franco forces slaughtered is not known, but the
number was at least as large.
In this vengeful killing and counter-killing occurred one act of
incandescent heroism which has come to summarize the Civil
War as seen from the Franco side, and the visitor to Toledo can
explore the history of this event. On a hill overlooking the Rio
Tajo stands an old square fortress on a site originally selected for
this purpose by the Romans and used by the Moors when they
held Toledo as their northern capital. Rebuilt many times,
destroyed repeatedly by mines and fire, it could never have been
beautiful, but after the defeat of Napoleon, who burned it, an
attempt was made to bring the various parts of its façade into
some kind of harmony, and the result, while far from artistic, did
have a certain heavy balance. It was a four-story building, very
large, with four squat and brutal towers topped by dark metal
spires of no quality whatever. It was called the Alcázar
(Ahl-kah-thar, with a heavy accent on the second syllable) and
more prominently even than the cathedral it dominated the
skyline of this old fortress city.