An Art Historian's Guide to Seville

By Nicole Entin

The palette of Andalusia is composed of earthy ochres and chalky whites, dappled with ultramarine blue details and the emerald green of the leaves on the orange trees. These were the colours I saw being brushed onto canvases by painters on the streets of Seville, as they depicted various views of the town from the Alcazar to the Cathedral. As well as a subject of art, Seville is an artwork itself, full of spectacular examples of religious and secular architecture in a variety of historical styles, as well as the birthplace of several of the greatest artists of the Spanish Golden Age. In short, it is a city full of potential for art historical study. This piece will view Seville through the eyes of an itinerant art historian, as both a guidebook to the architectural wonders of Andalusia and an analysis of how the architecture acts as a record of the region’s various epochs in its unique fusion of Byzantine, Islamic, and Christian styles.

When the bells unexpectedly strike the hour atop the Giralda tower of the Seville Cathedral, piercing the relative calm, the tourists jump in unison as the stone floor beneath them reverberates with sound. Seville is an equally surprising, and often disorienting, city. Founded by the Romans – or Hercules, as the legend goes – conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, merged into the Crown of Castile, and now the bustling capital of Andalusia, each of these dynasties imprinted their own culture onto the architectural DNA of the city. From the top of La Giralda, Seville spreads out beneath like a jumbled patchwork quilt of buildings piled atop each other. The manicured gardens of the Alcazar complex, the nineteenth-century bull ring, a single skyscraper piercing upward from the otherwise low historical buildings. The city is known equally for containing the world’s largest Gothic church, completed in the sixteenth century, and what is said to be the largest wooden structure in the world – the mushroom-like frame of Las Setas, completed in 2011 to the disdain of much of Seville’s local population. The thirteenth-century transition to Christian rule, however, created the most significant and visible alteration of the city’s landscape, as architectural projects under the patronage of the Crown of Castile built over the earlier mosques and fortresses, or incorporated and appropriated motifs of Islamic architecture into a Mudejar language of Andalusian national style.

La Giralda, Moorish and Renaissance Bell Tower, Seville, Spain.

The Seville Cathedral is one such example of religious conversion reflected in architectural conversion. Formerly a mosque built during the Almohad Caliphate, the courtyard in which ablutions were performed became the Patio de los Naranjos and its minaret became the Giralda tower, which incorporated Umayyad capitals and Almohad decorations into its design. The Seville Cathedral is a textbook example of the High Gothic style as developed in Spain. The four facades each feature intricately carved doors, the oldest being the Door of Baptism and the Door of the Nativity on the West Facade, dating back to the fifteenth century. The Door of Baptism created by the workshop of the Breton sculptor, Lorenzo Mercadante, features many characteristic elements of the Gothic style – including a carved tympanum depicting the baptism of the infant Jesus, a pointed archivolt decorated with non-figural tracery, fleur-de-lis motifs, and pilasters containing sculptures of various saints in Seville’s history.

Workshop of Lorenzo Mercadente, The Door of Baptism, Seville Cathedral, Seville, Spain

The church itself is composed of five naves, with towering rib vaults intricately carved with floral decorations symbolic to the Crown of Castile. The Cathedral embodies the long repercussions of the Spanish Golden Age, in which the blossoming of national culture was built upon colonial conquest. Constructed upon the wealth generated by the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, and architecturally emphasising the supremacy of the Christian religion in an era of pogroms and Inquisition trials, the Cathedral bridges the eras of the Reconquista of Spain and the Conquista of the New World, with one of the latter’s most significant figures – Christopher Columbus – supposedly laid to rest in the church.

Arturo Mélida, Tomb of Christopher Columbus, Seville Cathedral, Seville, Spain.

Around the corner of the Cathedral and behind the crimson walls of the Lion’s Gate, the magnificent complex of the Royal Alcazar of Seville is composed of several sections in different yet equally opulent architectural styles. Built atop the remains of the al-Mubarak palace of the Abbadid Caliphate, the Alcazar as it stands today is composed of a variety of spaces that represent the political and religious attitudes of several generations of Castilian kings. Earlier Gothic elements of the complex are visible in the vaulting above the rainwater tanks known as Los Baños de Doña María de Padilla, appropriated motifs from Islamic architecture can be seen in the Ambassadors’ Hall, and the Patio de las Doncellas contains both an Italian Renaissance-style loggia and pointed arches with ornamental muqarnas.

Los Baños de Doña María de Padilla, Gothic, Alcazar of Seville, Seville, Spain.

In her article entitled ‘The Alcazar of Seville and Mudejar Architecture’, D. Fairchild Ruggles draws attention to the various motivations of Castilian rulers behind the origins of the Mudejar architectural style. The Mudejar style largely originated under Alfonso XI, who had the Alcazar’s Hall of Justice, built as a tribute to his victory against the kingdom of Granada in the Battle of Salado (1340). The fourteenth-century iteration of the style, as a statement of conquest, emphasises the etymology of the Mudejar style’s name as an Arabic word meaning ‘domesticated’. The circular reversed arches and the decorative Arabic inscriptions coexisted with the heraldry of Castilian royalty, emphasising the latter’s domination over the former in the architectural style of the Hall of Justice. The expansion of the Alcazar under the successor of Alfonso XI, Pedro I, revived the Mudejar style once more with political motivations. Yet rather than creating an architectural style that expressed appropriation and possession of Islamic motifs, Pedro I’s use of the Mudejar style reflected his alliance with the Nasrid kingdom. In viewing the contexts of the Alcazar’s renovations in the Mudejar style, it is evident that the intersecting architectural styles of Seville were necessitated by the political motivations of the ruling class, as well as the region’s diverse history since the days of the Roman Empire.