Wednesday, December 20, 2023

The Cathedral of Toledo, Spain (Part 2): The Cloister and Chapter House

We continue with pictures taken by a friend at the cathedral of Toledo in Spain, today covering the cloister and chapter house (properly, chapter room, since it is not a separate detached building.) The first set, pictures of the cathedral itself, was published last Friday. At the beginning of the month, I used some of his pictures of the Mozarabic chapel in an article about that rite.   

The bell-tower seen from within the cloister.
The walls of the cloister are decorated with 18th century frescos of episodes of the lives of important local Saints, such as Eugenius, archbishop of Toledo from 636 to 646, Leocadia, a virgin martyr of the persecution of Diocletian (ca. 304), and Casilda (950-1050), a Moorish princess who converted to Christianity, went to northern Spain, and lived to a great old age as a solitary.
Accoutrements for the annual Corpus Christi procession, which is done with particular solemnity in Toledo: the wagon for pulling the float which carries the great monstrance... 
and these large puppets, which are not carried in the procession, but set up on the balconies of various buildings along the route. (If anyone knows why exactly this is done, please leave an explanation in the combox.)
The tomb of Pedro Diaz de Tenorio, archbishop of Toledo from 1377 to 1399.
The chapter room was added to the south side of the building in 1504 by order of Cardinal Cisneros, who also built the Mozarabic chapel. Beneath the richly coffered ceiling is a series of frescos of the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and beneath them, portraits of all the archbishops of Toledo from St Eugenius to the present.   
This image only from Wikimedia Commons, by PMRMaeyaert, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The archbishop’s seat.

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