THE TRASPARENTE
tremendous fervour. Italy has no examples of such orgiastic inter-
penetration of reality and fiction as can be seen in some few Spanish
and many more South German churches of the early i8th century.
The most outstanding example on Spanish soil is Narciso Tome's
Trasparente in Toledo Cathedral (pi. LXIX and fig. 70). The cathedral
is a 13th-century building in the style of classic French Gothic. Ithasa
high altar with a vastLate Gothicreredos. Catholic orthodoxy objected
to people walking along the ambulatory behind the Blessed Sacra-
ment. So an ingenious plan was worked out by which the Sacrament
could be seen and would be respected from the ambulatory as well.
It was pkced in a glass-fronted receptacle—hence the name Tras-
parente—and an altar scenery was built up around it of unheard-of
pomp. The work was completed in 1732. Attention was focused on
to the Sacrament by richly decorated columns. They are linked up
with large outer columns by cornices curved upwards. These curves
and the relief scenes in perspective on the panels below give the
illusion—in the same way as Bernini's colonnade in the Scale Regia
—as though the distance from front to back of the altar was far
deeper than it really is. Moreover, the glass-fronted opening is
surrounded by angels to cover all structural props. By the clouds of
angels our eyes are led up to where the last Supper is acted—at a
fantastic height—by figures of polychromatic marble. Higher up
still is the Virgin soaring up to Heaven. To enhance the effect of a
miraculous apparition, the whole scene is floodlit from behind
where we stand while we stare at it, lit that is in the way special
stage lighting is operated to-day. What the ingenious architect has
done is to take out the masonry between the ribs of half a Gothic
vault of the ambulatory—the engineering skill of the I3th century
allowed him to do so without weakening the construction—spread
groups of angels around the opening, and then erect above it a
dormer with a window, invisible from below, whith lets in a flood
pf golden light past the angels and the bay of the ambulatory in
which we stand, on to the altar with its figures and the Sacrament.
And when, to discover this source of magic light, we turn round,
away from the altar, we see in the dazzling light beyond the angels
Christ himself seated on clouds, and prophets and the Heavenly
Host surrounding Him.
Such spatial extremism, the pulling of a whole room into one vast
stupefying ornament, is, it has been said before, exceptional in
Spain. What Spain and Portugal excelled in was this same extremism