Diego de Siloé

Spanish architect and sculptor

• Born: c. 1495
• Birthplace: Burgos, Castile (now in Spain)
• Died: October 22, 1563
• Place of death: Granada, Spain

Siloé ranks as one of Spain’s greatest architects for his exquisite translations and combinations of Roman, Moorish, and High Renaissance Italian style into a Spanish idiom, most evident, despite his many other works, in the great Cathedral of Granada.

Early Life

While the artistic and intellectual achievements of fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance figures are often well documented, this is rarely true of their early lives. Of Diego de Siloé (DYAY-goh day see-loh-AY), it is known that he was born in Burgos, Castile. Founded in the eighth century, Burgos had served as an important commercial center, as the seat of the monarch for many years, and more important for Siloé, as a town famed for its architects and architecture, all markedly influenced by northern Gothic styles and very little by those of Mediterranean origins.

Burgos was also the home of the wealthy and cultivated Bartholome Ordóñez, who, breaking with local tradition, between 1490 and 1500 studied with the great Florentine and Neapolitan sculptors and artists, absorbing the best of his Italian masters and becoming familiar with Michelangelo’s work.

In Naples, Ordóñez befriended Diego, the son of Gil de Siloé. Apparently a migrant from Orléans, France, to Burgos, Gil had earned esteem in his adopted town as a specialist in late Gothic carving. Diego and Ordóñez collaborated to perfect their craftsmanship. Given his Catholic artistic convictions, Ordóñez, like Siloé, was a devotee of Michelangelo’s Florentine style and a spiritual disciple of Donatello. Each man’s influence on the other was beneficial. Siloé’s sculpture of Saint George Slaying the Dragon (c. 1514-1515) for the renowned Caraccioli Altar and his Virgin and Child , a relief for a chapel of the Naples Cathedral, amply demonstrate this stylistic affinity.

Life’s Work

Siloé returned to Burgos in 1519 and immediately was selected by the cathedral to design an alabaster monument to a bishop. With restrained, High Renaissance, three-dimensional realism, the monument’s face was made from the bishop’s death mask and was soon recognized as the most convincing of Spain’s integrated effigies, even exceeding similar works by Ordóñez. Only twenty-four years old, Siloé next designed a masterpiece in the Escalera Dorado’s iron balustrade, with painted and gilded bas-reliefs, varied grotesques, and delightful nudes. Between 1523 and 1526, he collaborated on the Constable Chapel at Burgos Cathedral. There his mastery of polychrome wood sculpture, the Presentation in particular, as well as his Pietà at Saint Anne’s Altar, represented the best of Renaissance elements, establishing him as Burgos’s undisputed master of his field.

Such creativity led in 1528 to his completion of an unfinished church in Granada, marking it with traditional heraldic devices evocative of proud Spanish lineages and with heroic figures, both ancient and biblical. For a Granadan bishop, he designed a monument of Almería marble, while in the late 1520’s, he carved for San Jeronimo the choir stalls and the prior’s seat. In that same church, the bust of the Virgin and Child beneath a bust of God is comparable to the finest Italian Renaissance work of its genre.

Collectively, such commissions expressed the maturing characteristics of Siloé’s youthful style: joyous and passionate yet restrained Catholicity, meticulous and imaginative execution, and lively and gently rhythmic lines. With remarkable chasteness and clarity, Siloé combined the vestiges of Spanish Gothic with mudéjar, a style developed during the Moors’ domination of Spain. These stylistic signatures and his eclecticism uniquely identified him with the best of High Renaissance art.

Siloé’s crowning efforts were invested from approximately 1528 until the late 1530’s in the design, erection, and embellishment of the great Cathedral of Granada. Siloé’s role in the cathedral’s origins for years divided architectural and art historians, blurring an accurate understanding of the cathedral’s architectural evolution and a full appreciation of Siloé’s contributions. Modern scholarship generally acknowledges that the credit for the cathedral belongs more to Siloé than to anyone else. He did employ the peripheral walls of the original foundations, but within that arc the foundations for the chevet (the apse or termination of the apse that upper portion of a church, which usually consists of several smaller, secondary apses radiating from the main apse) were of Siloé’s design. Moreover, the nave’s proportions are solely attributable to him.

Contrary to allegations that he enclosed the cathedral’s rotunda sanctuary by copying a fashion common in other Spanish churches, Siloé opened it not only to the transept but also to the ambulatory. Most such criticisms reflected efforts to place the cathedral’s development entirely within the Spanish architectural tradition, while in fact, Siloé’s experiences were broader. Because of his years of working in Italy, more of his inspiration and stylistic conceptions flowed from the Tuscan-Roman Italy of the High Renaissance than from northern Europe. Siloé, however, did not employ pure Italian Renaissance architecture in the vocabulary of the Cathedral of Granada. No Italian church featured a prototype of the rotunda of the Granada Cathedral. Granada’s dome roofed a high, cylindrical shaft of space, opened by tunnels as its base. The normal Latin cross that characterized Italian churches was replaced by Siloé’s siting the choir in the central aisle as well as by a cruciform arrangement of the nave around a central lantern. Unlike Italian architectural idioms, the Granadan dome did not dominate. Siloé’s conjunction of a domed rotunda with a basilican nave was unprecedented in late medieval, early Renaissance Europe.

Though Siloé’s design was always under the scrutiny of communal and Church officials and though it was without traditional models, whether from the Gothic, mudéjar, or Italian Renaissance, Siloé’s cathedral was very much a distinctive hybrid. It owes perhaps more to ancient Roman architecture and Vitruvius than to the modern Roman style, which he imitated in many other designs.

Siloé’s combination of the mausoleum with the cathedral’s ambulatory was also novel. Other Renaissance churches had been planned to include the mausoleum with ambulatory, but they were never constructed. Nor did earlier European models of the apse have such central openness as Siloé’s did. The cathedral’s huge rotunda rises from two stages of Corinthian columns with a Roman grandeur, but it is well proportioned to its space. Siloé made the chevet, the cathedral’s spiritual center, the cynosure of his design.

As Siloé designed the cathedral, he planned to have more than one hundred windows and whitewashed walls to create a luminous interior; the church was to be capped by a lantern of glass located over the nave’s central bay. Such a light-flooded interior comported fully with a general Renaissance ideal. Unfortunately, this effect was never achieved.

In 1559, Siloé carefully designed a floor plan in which each section of the pavement was to be distinguished from other units by different colors and patterns. This practice was as ancient as buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum and was even relatively common in classical households. It remained spectacularly effective. Black-and-white marble squares were to cover the sanctuary; black marble would floor the transept; and white marble was to cover the ambulatory pavement. Siloé probably also sought to accentuate the central aisle with a cross of black marble within the white flooring of the square nave, emphasizing the cruciform shape dramatically.

The cathedral’s upper structure was supported by multiple cruciform piers: Gothic vaults with well-proportioned Roman ribs rose from Roman piers. Construction of basilican churches during the Renaissance structures consisting of naves and aisles with a clerestory and a large, high transept from which an apse projected had presented previous architects with almost insurmountable problems. Siloé managed with his combination of ancient orders of columns with barrel vaults to resolve these problems with great ingenuity. No less ingenuity was demonstrated in his distinctive styling and decoration of the cathedral’s four portals. A finishing touch, a twin-towered façade that was to rise above the roof, was never completed. Nevertheless, the Cathedral of Granada stands as one of Renaissance Europe’s great processional churches.

Significance

The liberation of Spain following centuries of Moorish domination, along with the restoration of both secular and Christian authority, lent special inspiration to national religious celebration. This fact helps to explain the communal and religious support that drew Diego de Siloé and other artists, sculptors, and architects to Granada as well as to numerous other Spanish communities during the first sixty years of the sixteenth century. His association with Ordóñez in Italy and his collaboration with him and others in Spain as well as his many commissions filled a substantial catalog by the time he had reached his mid-twenties, establishing him as a master who seems to have been in constant demand.

Despite years of confusion and critical debate about his role in designing, building, and embellishing the Cathedral of Granada, modern scholarship appears to confirm that while he deserves less credit than once was accorded him on minor points, the great cathedral is nevertheless his premier achievement. Siloé ingeniously, joyously hybridized elements of Gothic, Moorish, and Renaissance architecture with the essentials of ancient Roman structures. Siloé’s extraordinary, versatile talent produced what has since been exalted as a unique architectural-artistic monument. Principal elements of its design and construction reached across to Spain’s overseas empire and cultural enclaves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Bibliography

Barral i Altet, Xavier, ed. Art and Architecture of Spain. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. This general survey places Siloé’s work and Renaissance Spanish architecture within its larger historical context. Includes chronology, maps, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, and index.

Benevolo, Leonardo. The Architecture of the Renaissance. 2 vols. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 2002. Comprehensive study of European architecture beginning in fifteenth century Florence and expanding to cover the entire continent through the early 1700’s. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Byne, Arthur, and Mildred Stapley. Spanish Architecture of the Sixteenth Century. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917. An informative work. Though somewhat technical, the writing is clear and sufficiently authoritative to inform general readers. It has good photographs, schematics, and plates, as well as notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Hamlin, Talbot. Architecture Through the Ages. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940. A well-written, richly illustrated survey for the general reader. Superb photographs, numerous schematic drawings, and an extensive, useful index.

Kubler, George, and Martin Soria. Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500 to 1800. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1959. This authoritative and ambitious work is superb for an understanding of Siloé’s achievements. The writing is scholarly and somewhat uncompromising, but there are extensive chapter notes and scores of excellent photographs, schematics, and plates. Also includes a superb index.

Markschies, Alexander. Icons of Renaissance Architecture. New York: Prestel, 2003. This brief but wide-ranging survey of the effects of Italian innovations on the rest of Europe includes a study of Renaissance Spain’s Moorish cathedrals. Illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Rosenthal, Earl. The Cathedral of Granada: A Study in the Spanish Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. This is perhaps the definitive work on the cathedral. Covers all that is known about Siloé, his colleagues, the debates about the evolution of the cathedral, its technical construction, its setting, and its meaning. The terminology is scholarly, but the work is immensely informative. There are hundreds of photographs, illustrations, schematics, and plates. Contains a lengthy appendix, a very extensive bibliography, and an excellent index.

Rosenthal, Earl. “Changing Interpretations of the Renaissance in Art History.” In The Renaissance: A Reconsideration of Theories and Interpretations of the Age, edited by Tinsley Helton. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961. Rosenthal is a preeminent authority on Spanish Renaissance architecture, particularly on Ordóñez, Siloé, and the Cathedral of Granada. Essential reading for an understanding of Siloé. The book has plates, notes, and a useful index.