s below.

[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid

CATHEDRAL OF BURGOS

The Golden Staircase]

The reja closing the chapel off from the apse is among the finest of the
Renaissance, the masterpiece of Cristobal Andino, wrought in the year
1523. Curiously enough, the supporters of the shield above might have
been modeled by Burne-Jones instead of the mediaeval smith.

The interior could not always have been as light and cheerful as at
present, for probably all the windows were more or less filled with
stained glass from the workshops of the many "vidrieros" for which
Burgos was so renowned that even other cathedral cities awarded her the
contracts for their glazing. The foreign masters of Burgos were
accustomed to see their arches and sculpture mellowed and illumined by
rainbow lights from above, and surely here too it was of primary
importance.

After the horrible powder explosion of 1813, when the French soldiers
blew up the old fortress, making the whole city tremble and totter, the
agonized servants of the church found the marble pavements strewn with
the glorious sixteenth-century crystals that had been shattered above.
They were religiously collected and, where possible, reinserted in new
fields.

Chapels stud the ground around the old edifice. The Cloisters, a couple
of chapels north of the chevet and small portions here and there, rose
with the transepts and the original thirteenth-century structure, but
all the others were erected by the piety or pride of later ages or have
been transformed by succeeding generations. Their vaulting illustrates
every period of French and German Gothic as well as Plateresque art,
while their names are taken from a favorite saint or biblical episode or
the illustrious founders. The fifteenth century was especially sedulous,
building chapels as a rich covering for the splendid Renaissance tombs
of its spiritual and temporal lords. They are carved with the admirable
skill and genius emanating once more from Italy. The Castilian Constable
and his spouse, Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena (in the Capilla de la
Visitacion), Bishop Antonia de Velasco, the eminent historian-archbishop
(in the Sacristia Nueva), are splendid marbles of the classic revival.
They must all have been portraits: for instance Bishop Gonzalvo de
Lerma, who sleeps peacefully in the Chapel of the Presentacion; his fat,
pursed lips and baggy eyelids are firmly closed, and his soft, double
chin reposes in two nea