Art: Dogma Shaped in Stone

… a bulwark impregnable to the new doctrines, in which Throne and Religion can take shelter confident that not one single idea of those which are stirring up the world will penetrate within.

Spain’s great and brooding Escorial was built to be a royal court, reliquary, monastery, art gallery, basilica and a pantheon of kings all joined in one. But most of all it was—and is—the symbol of the change-resisting spirit of Spain, as Philip II defined it when he decreed its construction. Now celebrating its fourth centenary, the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial is the largest and most ambitious Renaissance building in Spain and still, in esthetic effect, an impregnable bulwark.

Built on the rise of the Guadarrama mountain range 31 miles from Madrid, El Escorial casts such a gloomy aspect that the Romantic Poet Théophile Gautier called it the “granite debauch of Spain’s Tiberius.” Even its floor plan reflects a grim occasion. The monastery is named in honor of a humble 3rd century deacon who was burned alive on a gridiron by his Roman torturers. San Lorenzo, it is said, calmly instructed the Romans: “This side’s done. You can turn me over now.” His coolness under trial won him a lasting place in Spanish devotion.

Thirteen centuries later, Philip II defeated French forces at the battle of San Quentin. By that victory he turned the tide to bring the Spanish Empire to its highest glory. Because it took place on Lorenzo’s feast day, Philip decided to put up a monument to the saint, the empire and God — built on the plan of a. gigantic gridiron.

On Straight Lines. The first stone was set just as the Council of Trent was ending, and for 21 years the walls rose to bear out in architecture the spirit of the Counter Reformation begun at the council. To the little town of El Escorial (meaning slag heaps, from the nearby iron furnaces) came bronzes from Milan, candelabra from Flanders, rare woods from the New World. Philip personally supervised the work from a stone seat overlooking the site two miles away. He raised laborers by national levies, and many saw in the macabre plan of the monastery a visible proof of his will to burn alive all heretics from the Catholic faith.

At last in 1586, El Escorial was consecrated on the eve of San Lorenzo’s feast day, with 200,000 oil lamps illuminating it so brightly that the glow could be seen in Toledo, 50-odd miles to the south. Its walls stretched 675 ft. by 530 ft., embracing 16 courtyards, 4,000 rooms, 86 staircases, 88 fountains and 100 miles of corridors. Philip had commanded his architects to create “simplicity in the construction, severity in the whole, nobility without arro gance, majesty without ostentation.” Except for the gables, almost every line in the facades is dead straight; the exterior is cold, unadorned and broken only by tiny windows; the dome of the basilica is enclosed as if within a fortress. Thus at a stroke, Philip ended the tradition of exuberantly ornamented Spanish architecture known as the plateresque, a hodgepodge of Gothic, Moorish and early Renaissance motifs.

Cold Wedding Cake. There is precious little exuberance in El Escorial. Within a lugubrious octagonal chamber of black marble and gilt directly below the high altar, the remains of almost all the kings and queens of Spain since Charles V are ranked in four tiers of sarcophagi. But before the monarchs reached this regal end, their bodies had to lie for ten years in an anteroom called the pudridero, a putrefying halt symbolic of purgatory. The chilly crypts also contain the tombs of the infantes and infantas, their white marble coffins stacked in circles like the layers of a wedding cake. Many are empty, awaiting future generations of royalty that may never be born.

Elsewhere, the interior is rich in decor. There are 1,600 oils and 540 frescoes by Van der Weyden, Dürer, Bosch, Titian, Tintoretto, Velásquez, Rubens, Veronese, Navarrete, Ribera and later baroque artists. Many were purchased from afar by Philip II, but he was a stern patron. Italian fresco painters were imported by the dozen and sent packing in equal numbers. One Spanish artist daubed a cat-and-dog fight into a 1575 oil of the Holy Family; for this informal touch, Philip ordered him to depict thereafter “neither cat nor dog nor any other indecorous figure, but only saints moving to devotion.” El Greco, commanded to do the Martyrdom of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion for the high altar, painted a visionary flux of vermilion and saffron in which the gory event, a mass beheading, was pushed into the background. Perhaps fortunately, he never again received a royal commission and retired to Toledo.

A Tiny Cell. The reign of Philip II brought Spain to her peak as a world power, but the imperial effort left the nation bankrupt. The Armada sank just four years after El Escorial was completed. In 1598 Philip II, suffering from gout, fever and running sores, endured a painful week’s journey by sedan chair from Madrid to his royal monastery. Lying in the ascetic 12-ft.-sq. cell he used as his bedchamber, which opened onto the high altar so that he could hear the Mass, the morose monarch died as the most reviled and revered king of Christendom. Behind him, he left a declining empire—and El Escorial, a dogma shaped in stone.