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Abstract
St Leocadia, a fourth-century Toledan Christian virgin and patron saint of the city, miraculously emerged from a sepulchre in the presence of Ildephonsus, Archbishop of Toledo, and the Visigothic King Recesvintus, in the 7th century. After this wondrous event, in which a fragment of her veil was cut as proof of her public visitation, her body was removed from Toledo to be preserved from the Muslim conquest, taken to Flanders and eventually repatriated to her home town at the request of Philip II as the Lutheran threat to the Spanish northern territories escalated. A wave of literature and images concerning her figure was produced in the wake of three events: the return of her relics to Toledo in 1587, those of Ildephonsus in 1596 and the inauguration of the chapel of Our Lady of the Tabernacle, also in Toledo, in 1616. The following essays consider why and how this virgin saint became instrumental in cementing the alliance of Church and Monarchy as well as buttressing the Archbishop of Toledo’s status as Primate of Spain in the early seventeenth century. Focusing on the historical, visual and literary portraits of Leocadia, they examine the manner in which Early Modern Spanish authors—Miguel Hernández, Lope de Vega, José de Valdivielso and Pedro Calderón de la Barca—and artists—Francisco Merino, Blas de Prado, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Antonio de Lanchares and Pedro Orrente—imagined and recreated the narrative of her sanctity paying particular attention to the function of public witness as effected by their works as well as by their readers and viewers.
Notes
1 For a general introduction to the literary lives of saints, see Andrew Louth, ‘Hagiography’, The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, Andrew Louth, with Augustine Casiday (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2004), 358–61. For a study of the conventions of hagiographical texts in Spain, see Fernando Baños Vallejo, La hagiografía como género literario en la Edad Media: tipología de doce vidas indviduales castellanas (Oviedo: Depto de Filología Española, Univ. de Oviedo, 1989) and, by the same author, Las vidas de santos en la literatura medieval española (Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2003). See also Saints and their Authors: Studies in Medieval Hispanic Hagiography in Honor of John K. Walsh, ed. Jane E. Connolly, Alan Deyermond & Brian Dutton (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1990) which offers a varied range of approaches to lives of saints produced and/or circulated in Spain, while Cécile Vincent-Cassy, Les Saintes vierges et martyres dans l'Espagne du XVIIe siècle: culte et image (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2011) considers aspects of ritual and representation.
2 Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed., with an intro. by Lewis S. Mudge (London: SPCK, 1981), 122–24.
3 Francisco de Pisa, Descripción de la Imperial ciudad de Toledo (Toledo: Pedro Rodriguez, 1605), 86v.
4 ‘[S]olo ay la memoria que los Concilios Toledanos hazen de su nombre, y templo a el dedicados: no haziendo mencion de su vida, y martyrio' (Miguel Hernández, Vida, martyrio y translacion de la gloriosa Virgen, y Martyr santa Leocadia [Toledo: Pedro Rodríguez, 1591], 25v). References to Hernández's text throughout will be given by folio number in parenthesis.
5 Hernández notes that she was ‘publicamente desnudada y cruelmente açotada’ (Vida, 28v) and is critical of those who do not record her flogging (Vida, 31v). Pisa concurs with the lashing in his Descripción (85r) and its appendix, Historia de la gloriosa virgen y martyr Santa Leocadia, where he cites the matins of St Ghislain and ‘Flos Sanctorum viejos’ as a source (6r). Antonio de Quintanadueñas records it in his Santos de la imperial Ciudad de Toledo y su Arçobispado (Madrid: Pablo de Val, 1651), 216–17. By contrast, the passio of Leocadia, probably written in the seventh century, simply mentions that she was chained and imprisoned. See Pasionario hispánico, ed. & trad. de Pilar Riesco Chueca (Sevilla: Univ. de Sevilla, 1995), 46.
6 Hernández affirms that she afflicted ‘su flaco cuerpo con asperos ayunos’ (Vida, 30r). Pisa writes of her grief upon receiving the news of martyrdoms and her desire to become a martyr herself (Historia de la gloriosa virgen, 2v). The Pasionario hispánico links her death with the receipt of the news of Eulalia's martyrdom (ed. Riesco Chueca, 46).
7 Hernández claims it was 305 (Vida, 31v); Pisa notes 306 (Descripción, 86v).
8 Pisa indicates that Leocadia should be considered a martyr as her suffering in prison was an act of witness even if no-one was present at her death (Historia de la gloriosa virgen, 6v). Juan-Miguel Ferrer Grenesche disagrees, explaining that the notion of a confessor martyr is atypical and, in the fourth century, the difference would have been clear (Contribución al estudio del oficio festivo de los santos en el rito hispánico: el ‘Corpus Leocadiae’ del oficio catedral hispánico [Toledo: Estudio Teológico San Ildefonso, 1993], 30–33).
9 The 4th Toledan council was held in a church with her name in 633; Carmen Codoñer Merino, La Hispania visigótica y mozárabe: dos épocas en su literatura (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 2010), 306. Evidence of the belief in the existence of physical remains is, to the best of my knowledge, first provided by the 17th Council of Toledo (held in 694, after her apparition to Ildephonsus) in whose Constitutiones it is stated that ‘in ecclesia gloriosae uirginis et confessoris Christi sanctae Leocadiae, quae est in suburbio Toletano, ubi sanctus eius corpus requiescit’ (see Isabel Velázquez & Gisela Ripoll, ‘Toletum: la construcción de una urbs regia’, in Sedes Regiae [Ann. 400–800] ed. Gisela Ripoll & Josep M. Gurt [Barcelona: Reial Academia de Bones Lletres 2000], 521–78 [p. 554]). The Codex Veronensis LXXXIX, a Visigothic prayer-book copied in Tarragona around 700, refers to an annual commemoration at her resting place and the Mozarabic Antiphonal from León's Cathedral uses the formula ‘ad sepulchrum’ in the office dedicated to her (Ferrer Grenesche, Contribución al estudio del oficio festivo de los santos, 34).
10 The Vita has been attributed to the eighth-century Archbishop Cixila of Toledo although recent studies suggest a later date of composition, probably the eleventh century. See Valeriano Yarza Urquiola, ‘La Vita vel gesta sancti Ildefonsi de P. S. Eladio: estudio, edición, crítica y traducción’, Veleia, 23 (2006), 279–325 (p. 285); Andrés Barcala Muñoz, Biblioteca antijudaica de los escritores eclesiásticos hispanos, 2 vols (Alcobendas: Aben Ezra, 2003), II, 477; Maria Tausiet, ‘The Prodigious Garment: A Relic Becomes Real in Early Modern Spain’, in Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe, ed. Elizabeth C. Tingle & Jonathan Willis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 197–215 (p. 199).
11 For details of their relationship see Yarza Urquiola, ‘La Vita vel gesta sancti Ildefonsi’, 320.
12 Yarza Urquiola, ‘La Vita vel gesta sancti Ildefonsi’, 318–20.
13 Hernández indicates that veil and dagger remained in ‘el sagrario de la santa Iglesia de Toledo’ from the point of Leocadia's appearance to the time of his writing (Vida, 35v). This statement is problematic: the Visigothic cathedral was turned into a mosque and subsequently demolished to make room for the building familiar to Hernández. I have found no record of the fortunes of the reliquary which held the veil during Toledo's Islamic era.
14 José Vicente de Rustant, Historia de don Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, 2 vols (Madrid: Pedro Joseph Alonso y Padilla, 1751), II, 217.
15 The role of textiles in Christian religious practices across Europe is explored in Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn M. Rudy & Barbara Baert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). Relics were generally wrapped in cloth (see, for instance, Sharon Kinoshita, ‘Almería Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary’, in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns [New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 165–76) and many were, as is the case with Leocadia's veil, textile items associated with a holy person (see, for example, E. Jane Burns, ‘Saracen Silk and the Virgin's Chemise: Cultural Crossings in Cloth’, Speculum, 81:2 [2006], 365–97). Useful studies of textiles in Spanish religious contexts are: Lesley K. Twomey, The Fabric of Marian Devotion in Isabel de Villena's ‘Vita Christi' (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013); María J. Feliciano, ‘Muslim Shrouds for Christian Kings? A Reassessment of Andalusi Textiles in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Life and Ritual’, in Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile¸ ed. Cynthia Robinson & Leyla Rouhi (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004), 101–31; Joaquín Yarza Luaces, Vestiduras ricas: el Monasterio de las Huelgas y su época, 1170–1340 (Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 2005).
16 Hernández describes how a Toledan square was ‘colgada de muy rica tapicería de oro, y seda’ to welcome Leocadia's body (Vida, 225r). The reliquary chest was ‘guarnecido de baqueta negra, por defuera, y dentro de terciopelo carmesi, puesto en vna funda de terciopelo, assi mismo carmesi, guarnecida con vn liston de oro’ (Vida, 254v). The sacrarium was ‘colgado de muy ricos paños y el suelo cubierto de alhombras, y en medio hecho vn trono muy alto cubierto de brocados de tres altos’ to receive the ‘arca’ (Vida, 260v).
17 Quintanadueñas, Santos de la imperial Ciudad de Toledo y su Arçobispado, 223.
18 Toledo had a wealth of Christological textile relics: swaddling clothes, the towel with which he dried the feet of the disciples, the robes of the Passion, and a fragment from the shroud had been given to the cathedral by Saint Louis of France in 1248. See Sixto Ramón Parro, Toledo en la mano: ó descripcion histórico-artística de la magnífica Catedral y de los demas célebres monumentos y cosas notables que encierra la famosa ciudad, 2 vols (Toledo: Imp. y Librería Severiano López Fando, 1857), I, 618. For details of the Toledan sudarium, see Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, El glorioso doctor San Ildefonso, Arzobispo de Toledo, Primado de las Españas (Toledo: Diego Rodríguez, 1618), 189–90 and Grzegorz Górny & Janusz Rosikon, Testigos del misterio: investigaciones sobre las reliquias de Cristo, trad. Miguel Martín (Madrid: Rialp, 2014), 150–51.
19 Hernández notes that the ‘velos’ were delivered to Toledo alongside Leocadia's ‘santas reliquias’ but does not indicate whether they were mutilated, as Ildephonsus' cut would suggest (Vida, 246r).
20 This uneasiness can also be sensed in Hernández's main source, the Vita vel gesta (Yaiza Urquiola, ‘La Vita vel gesta sancti Ildefonsi’, 230).
21 Gaspar de Quiroga y Vela, Archbishop of Toledo at the time of the translation, replied to Philip II's request of a relic by noting that ‘todo es de vuestra Magestad, tome lo que fuere seruido’ (Hernández, Vida, 248v–r). Although the relics were given to Toledo's cathedral, the king took with him one of the chest's four keys, which guaranteed his access to what was considered his property (Hernández, Vida, 256v–57r). See G. Lazure's ‘Possessing the Sacred: Monarchy and Identity in Philip II's Relic Collection at the Escorial’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60:1 (2007), 58–93 (pp. 80–81).
22 Lazure, ‘Possessing the Sacred’, 65–66.
23 Toledo was designated the Peninsula's leading metropolitan diocese at the 3rd Toledan Council in 589. Its cathedral would be granted the primacy of Spain by Alphonse VI in 1085; Lynette M. F. Bosch, Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo: The Mendoza and the Iglesia Primada (University Park: Penn State Press, 2000), 24 and 30.
24 Philip II ensured that his heir was involved in the delivery of the relics to the Church: ‘Y porque el principe nuestro señor no podia llegar con sus ombros [a las andas que llevaban el arca], le mando su Magestad, que asiesse de las borlas de vn cordón, que para este effeto se puso en vn braço de las andas’ (Hernández, Vida, 244v).
25 Lope de Vega, El capellan de la Virgen, in Decima octaua parte de las Comedias de Lope de Vega Carpio (Madrid: Iuan Gonçalez a costa de Alonso Perez, 1622).
26 Francisco de Rojas proposes the attribution in a 1643 MSS kept at the Biblioteca Nacional de España: Auto famoso de la Descension de Nta señora en la santa iglesia de Toledo; MSS RES/80. Rojas' attribution is supported by Joseph T. Snow in his edition of the play: José de Valdivielso, Auto famoso de la descensión de nuestra Señora en la Santa Iglesia de Toledo, ed., intro. & notes by Joseph T. Snow (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter, 1983). Valdivielso is the author of a long poem entitled Sagrario de Toledo: Poema heroico (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1616) which develops the same story as the attributed ‘auto’ over 2,918 octavas. The poem cannot be considered here due to limitations in space.
27 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Origen, pérdida y restauración de la virgen del Sagrario, in Parte segunda de comedias del celebre poeta español don Pedro Calderon de la Barca [ … ] que nueuamente corregidas publica don Ivan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel (Madrid: Francisco Sanz, 1686), 243–82; Valdivielso signed the ‘aprobación’ for this volume. Critics agree that Calderón found inspiration in Valdivielso's poem Sagrario de Toledo, with Menéndez Pelayo affirming that he was also familiar with Lope's El capellán. See Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Estudios sobre el teatro de Lope de Vega, ed. Enrique Sánchez Reyes, 6 vols (Santander: Aldus, 1949), II, 49. See also Elena E. Marcello, ‘De Valdivielso a Calderón: origen, pérdida y restauración de la Virgen del Sagrario’, Criticón, 91 (2004), 79–91 (p. 81).
28 Bosch, Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo, 44.
29 The struggle between Toledo and Zamora for Ildephonsus' relics illustrates the transcendent potential of the possession of holy remains for the status of a city. See Fernando Martínez Gil, ‘Religión e identidad urbana en el Arzobispado de Toledo (siglos XVI–XVII)’, in Religiosidad popular y modelos de identidad en España y América, ed. J. Carlos Vizuete Mendoza & Palma Martínez-Burgos García (Cuenca: Univ. de Castilla-La Mancha, 2000), 15–58 (pp. 28–29). María Tausiet writes about Ildephonsus' chasuble as a relic as well as Toledo's struggle to repatriate his remains in ‘The Prodigious Garment’ and in El dedo robado: reliquias imaginarias en la España moderna (Madrid: Abada, 2013).
30 Lope probably produced El capellán between 1613–1616 although it was published in 1623 (Marcella Trambaioli, ‘Lope de Vega y la casa de Moncada’, Criticón, 106 [2009], 5–44 [p. 36]; see also Snow, in his edition of Valdivielso, Auto famoso de la descensión, xxxii–xxxv). The Auto de la descensión was probably written for the 1616 celebrations organized by Sandoval y Rojas and is one of the two plays by Valdivielso performed in October in the king's presence and mentioned by Pedro de Herrera in his Descripcion de la capilla de N. S. del Sagrario que erigio en la Sta. Iglesia D. Toledo el Illmo. Sor. Cardenal D. Bernardo de Sandoual y Rojas (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1617), 87v–88v. Calderón's work has been variously dated 1617–1618 and 1629 (Marcello, ‘De Valdivielso a Calderón’, 81).
31 See Marjorie Ratcliffe, ‘San Ildefonso de Toledo: modelos medievales y ejemplos aúreos’, Teatro de Palabras, 6 (2012), 83–107 (p. 93); Rosa López Torrijos, ‘Iconografía de San Ildefonso en el manuscrito Ashburham’, Anales Toledanos, 14 (1982), 7–20 (pp. 10–11). See also Snow, in Valdivielso, Auto famoso de la descensión, ed. Snow, ix and xl. For details of Sandoval's literary patronage, see Rafael Laínez Alcalá, Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, protector de Cervantes (Salamanca: Anaya, 1958), 175–224.
32 See Herrera, Descripcion de la capilla; Góngora wrote his ‘El favor que San Ildefonso recibió de Nuestra Señora’ and ‘Esta que admiras fábrica, esta prima’, for the ‘justa’ (see Luis de Góngora, Canciones y otros poemas de arte mayor, ed. José María Micó [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990], 235–45).
33 Lope appears to confuse the ‘arca’ he may have seen in Toledo with Leocadia's original grave: Duke Fabila, King Recisundo's aide, notes that Ildephonsus is to show the monarch an ‘urna’ in which the saint's remains rest. In the following scene, however, a sepulchre covered by a ‘losa’ is revealed (El capellán, 154r and 153r respectively; note error in pagination).
34 The nature of Lope's relationship with Sandoval is not clear. The archbishop was present at his taking of orders and Lope included a laudatory canción to the prelate (‘Humillen a tu nombre soberano’) in his Rimas sacras (1614). The writer was none the less excluded from the 1616 ‘justa’. Snow argues that Lope wrote El capellán to improve his standing in the archbishop's eyes (Snow, in Valdivielso, Auto famoso de la descensión, ed. Snow, xxxv).
35 Although the miracle is presented in a single scene, various characters, including some who had not been present, retell the action throughout the play illustrating how acts of witness can follow the production of testimony (Auto famoso, fols 12r, 14r, 15v, 16v and 18v).
36 Valdivielso served Sandoval as ‘capellán mozárabe’ from around 1604 to the prelate's death in 1618.
37 The bodies of martyrs were deemed by the Council Trent to be ‘temples of the Holy Ghost’, hence the author's identification of the veil with a monstrance's ‘viril’ (The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. & trans. J. Waterworth [London: Dolman, 1848], 234). A converted heretic later explains that only Ildephonsus was allowed to see under the virgin's veil ‘por su virtud y pureza’ (El capellán, 11v). The surprise at the wholeness of the body echoes Hernández's account of the response of king and prelate at the opening of the ‘arca’ in 1587 (Vida, 248r, 67v and 248v–249r).
38 ‘[L]a gente no cae en la cuenta de lo que deue a las cosas sagradas [reliquias], hasta que vee la reuerencia que les hazen las cabeças, y luego estos se esmeran en esta veneracion’ (Antonio Cervera de la Torre, Testimonio autentico y verdadero de las cosas notables que passaron en la dichosa muerte del Rey N.S. don Felipe II [Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1600], 41).
39 Cécile Vincent-Cassy considers the possible links between Cervantes’ Leocadia and St Leocadia in her paper ‘La fuerza de la sangre and the Hagiographic Literature of the Time’, presented at the Renaissance Society of America's 2013 conference in San Diego.
* The author wishes to thank in the first place, as ever, María Cruz de Carlos Varona, and the following for their generous assistance in the preparation of this article: Juan Luis Blanco Mozo, David Blázquez, Laura Cleaver, Isabel García-Torraño, Catherine Lawless, Fernando Marías, José Manuel Matilla, José Riello, Cécile Vincent-Cassy, and the S.I. Catedral Primada de Toledo. Sincere thanks are also due to his co-author Arantza Mayo and to the organizers of the conference at Queen's University Belfast that stimulated the conversations included in this volume.
40 For the arches, see Fernando Marías, La arquitectura del Renacimiento en Toledo (1541–1631), 4 vols (Madrid: CSIC/Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos, 1983–86), I, 138–39. See also the eye-witness accounts by the racionero Pedro Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica en que se tratan las vidas de doze philosophos, y príncipes antiguos, y sus sentencias, y hazañas: y las virtudes moralmente buenas que tuvieron (Toledo: Viuda de Juan de la Plaça, 1590), 183–189v, included in his description of the triumphs of Julius Caesar; Hernández, Vida; Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa, Discurso de mi vida, ed., intro. & notas de Jesús Moya (Bilbao: Univ. del País Vasco, 1999), 293–99; and Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, Historia eclesiástica de la imperial ciudad de Toledo (1601), Vol. IX, BN, Ms. 1293, 230v–236, cited in Cloe Cavero de Carondolet, Una villa toledana del Quinientos: el cigarral del cardinal Quiroga (Madrid: C. Cavero-Auditores de Energía y Medio Ambiente, 2014), 27–30. For Juan Bautista Pérez, distinguished historian and subsequently Bishop of Segorbe, see Antonio Ponz, Viage de España, en que se da noticia de las cosas mas apreciables, y dignas de saberse, que hay en ella, 6 vols (Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1787–1793), I, 49, n. 1; Conde de Cedillo, Toledo en el siglo XVI después del vencimiento de las Comunidades. Discurso leído ante la Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid: Hernández, 1901), 92–93, 149, n. 205; Felipe Mateu Llopis, El obispo de Segorbe Juan Bautista Pérez: esquema biobibliográfico (Segorbe: n.p., 1950); José Antonio García Luján, ‘Historiografía de la iglesia de Toledo en los siglos XVI al XIX’, En la España Medieval, 2 (1982), 367–78 (p. 370); Ángel Fernández Collado, La catedral de Toledo en el siglo XVI: vida, arte y personas (Toledo: Diputación Provincial de Toledo, 1999), 93; Henar Pizarro Llorente, ‘Los miembros del Cabildo de la Catedral de Toledo durante el arzobispado de Gaspar de Quiroga (1577–1594)’, Hispania Sacra, 62:126 (2010), 563–619 (pp. 574, 581). A set of draft arrangements for the entry drawn up in the cathedral chapter for discussion with the archbishop (‘Las cosas q se ha de prevenir [ … ]’, BN, Ms. 5875) specified that the arches had to be approved by Pérez and the Maestrescuela, who was Antonio de Covarrubias y Leiva, Greek scholar and friend of El Greco, and who composed the inscriptions for the arch at the Plaza de Zocodover. See Benito Navarrete Prieto, ‘I segni nel tempo’: dibujos españoles de los Uffizi. Catálogo de la exposición celebrada en la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, del 12 de mayo de 2016 al 24 de julio de 2016 (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2016), Nos 23 and 24 for the Blas de Prado drawings for the arches.
41 Hernández, Vida, 49–59, 234–238v; Román de la Higuera, Historia eclesiástica, 234–235v, cited in Cavero de Carondelet, Una villa toledana, 29. The members of the king's family who attended the entry were present in their grisaille portraits by Blas de Prado on the lower part of the arch. Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica, 187, also mentions the portrait of Alessandro Farnese, Prince of Parma, Governor-General of the Netherlands, who protected the relics on their translation. See Francisco Pérez Sedano, Datos documentales inéditos para la historia del arte español, I, Notas del Archivo de la Catedral de Toledo redactadas sistemáticamente en el siglo XVIII, por el canónigo-obrero don Francisco Pérez Sedano, ed. Elías Tormo, (Madrid: Imprenta de Fortanet, 1914), 98–99; also Manuel R. Zarco del Valle, Datos documentales inéditos para la historia del arte español, II, Documentos de la catedral de Toledo, 2 vols (Madrid: Imprenta Clásica Española, 1916), II, 248–49. For surviving pictures, see Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez et al., El Toledo de El Greco [exhibition catalogue] (Toledo: Hospital de Tavera, 1982), 157.
42 Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica, 185v; Hernández, Vida, 223–225v; 242v–43. See Diego Angulo Íñiguez & Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Escuela madrileña del primer tercio del siglo XVII (Madrid: Instituto Diego Velázquez, 1969), 249–50, No. 181; Navarrete Prieto, ‘I segni nel tempo’, No. 40, for a painting of Leocadia as triumphant martyr, wearing the red tunic of martyrdom (see Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica, 188) by Eugenius Cajés in 1616 for the high altar of the parish church of Santa Leocadia.
43 Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica, 186. Hernández, Vida, 227v–229v, says all of the narrative images of the arch imitated bronze, but does not name the painter. For El Greco's paintings, see Balbina Caviró, ‘Santa Leocadia’, in A imagen y semejanza: 1700 años de santidad en la Archidiócesis de Toledo [exhibition catalogue], ed. Pilar Gordillo Isaza (Toledo: Palacio Arzobispal, 2004), 64–67 (p. 67); Fernando Marías, ‘Saraceni e la Spagna’, in Carlo Saraceni, 1579–1620: un veneziano tra Roma e l'Europa [exhibition catalogue], ed. Maria Giulia Aurigemma (Roma: Palazzo di Venezia, 2013), 51. These were inventoried in his son's workshop in 1621. See La biblioteca del Greco, ed. Javier Docampo & José Riello (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2014), 231, Nos 86, 92 and 87 respectively; No. 233; and Nos 185–88 for four other ‘lienzos de los arcos’.
44 Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica, 181v; Hernández, Vida, 229v–230.
45 Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica, 186v–87, attributes the design to the ‘buena ymaginativa’ of Pérez; Hernández, Vida, 239, 240v–241v notes that it showed the ‘mucha erudición, y diligencia’ of its designer; Zarco del Valle, Datos documentales, II, 240–41; Pérez Sánchez et al., El Toledo de El Greco, 53.
46 Hernández, Vida, 5v–6, 32–37v.
47 See Fernando Martínez Gil, La invención de Toledo: imágenes históricas de una identidad urbana (Toledo: Almud, 2007), 127; Fernando Martínez Gil, ‘De Civitas Regia a Civitas Dei: el imaginario histórico de Toledo en los siglos XVI y XVII’, in Sacra Loca Toletana. Los espacios sagrados en Toledo, ed. José Carlos Vizuete Mendoza & Julio Martín Sánchez (Cuenca: Univ. de Castilla-La Mancha, 2008), 219–68 (pp. 320–26, 332–34) for this period in the historical imagination of Toledo.
48 Tausiet, ‘The Prodigious Garment’, 125.
49 Martínez Gil, ‘De Civitas Regia a Civitas Dei’, 341.
50 Hernández, Vida, 54–55v, 281–98, reproduces St Ildephonsus' Office of St Leocadia. See also Fernández Collado, La catedral de Toledo en el siglo XVI, 123–41. For St James and the institution of the Mozarabic rite in the writings of Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, see María Cruz de Carlos Varona, ‘Speculum Pastorum: los apóstoles del Greco y la iglesia toledana de comienzos del seiscientos’, in El Greco: los Apóstoles. Santos y locos de Dios, ed. Fernando Marías & María Cruz de Carlos Varona [exhibition catalogue] (Guadalajara: Palacio del Infantado, 2010), 70 and 80. The royal family heard the Mass of St Leocadia on 26 April 1587 during the ceremony of the translation of St Leocadia's relics (Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica, 188; Garibay y Zamalloa, Discurso de mi vida, ed. Moya, 296).
51 Martínez-Gil, ‘De Civitas Regia a Civitas Dei’, 347, 352–53; Carlos Varona, ‘Speculum Pastorum’, 53, 69–71.
52 On this point, see Tausiet, ‘The Prodigious Garment’, 33. For patron saints as cultural constructions fulfilling this need for contemporaries, see A. Katie Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City's Past in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U. P., 2007); María José del Río Barredo, ‘Urbs Regia’: la capital ceremonial de la Monarquía Católica (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000), 93–118. For the larger context, see Katherine van Liere, ‘Reimagining the Origins of Spanish Christianity’, in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, ed. Simon Ditchfield, Katherine van Liere & Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2012).
53 Martínez-Gil, ‘Religión e identidad urbana en el Arzobispado de Toledo’, 28–33. Traditionally, her cult was celebrated in three locations: the parish church of Santa Leocadia erected on the site of her birthplace; her prison in the Cueva de Santa Leocadia; and the church of Santa Leocadia de la Vega. See Caviró, ‘Santa Leocadia’, 64–65. Garibay y Zamalloa (Discurso de mi vida, ed. Moya, 197, 299) praised Juan Bautista Pérez for persuading sceptics in the cathedral chapter (led by the Dean, Diego de Castilla) of the authenticity of the relics from Flanders. Hernández (Vida, 101–11) transcribes the old documentary testimonies of authenticity found with the relics. Sánchez (Historia moral y philosophica, 183) said that the king took great pleasure in these when the relics were viewed in Toledo.
54 Sánchez (Historia moral y philosophica, 182) describes the knife. See also La catedral de Toledo, 1549, según el Dr. Blas Ortiz, Descripción graphica y elegantissima de la S. Iglesia de Toledo, ed. Ramón Gonzálvez & Felipe Pereda, transcripción del texto latino de Silvia Docampo, transcripción del texto español de Felipe Pereda (Toledo: Antonio Pareja, 1999), 198; Parro, Toledo en la mano, I, 611, 615; Relación de las capillas de la Santa Iglesia de Toledo (c.1601), BN Ms. 9850, 26v–29; Carlos Varona, ‘Speculum Pastorum’, 63.
55 La catedral de Toledo, ed. Gonzálvez & Pereda, 199; Parro, Toledo en la mano, I, 609–14, n. 1; Margarita Pérez Grande, ‘Las arcas-relicarios de San Eugenio y de Santa Leocadia en la Catedral de Toledo’, in A imagen y semejanza, ed. Gordillo Isaza, 76–77. The form of the ship, in its former secular life a table ornament bearing incense, spices, or salt from overseas, also lent itself to the idea of the journey of Leocadia's relics from Flanders.
56 See Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las bellas artes en España, 6 vols (Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1800), III, 136–38 and the partial documentation in Pérez Sedano, Datos documentales, ed. Tormo, 79–80. For Merino, see Rafael Ramírez de Arellano, Estudio sobre la historia de la orfebrería toledana (Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos, 2002 [1st ed. Toledo: Imprenta Provincial, 1915]), 310–14; J. M. Cruz Valdovinos, ‘Platería’, in Artes decorativas, coord. Alberto Bartolomé Arraiza, 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1999), II, 511–610 (p. 563). Román de la Higuera (Historia eclesiástica de la imperial ciudad de Toledo, 245v–246) confuses matters by saying that the ‘mui costossa arca de plata’ was made in 1594 by ‘Merchan, uno de los famosos plateros deste Reyno’.
57 The texts read: VIRGO ET MARTYR / SANCTA LEOCADIA and RELATA. S. LEOCADIA TOLETUM EX HANNONIA / DIE XXVI APRILIS ANNO MDLXXXVII.
58 Recesvindus is conspicuous by his absence from the arches. The tabernacle at St Leocadia de la Vega included paintings of eight virtues of fictive bronze and eight virgin martyrs of fictive marble (Hernández, Vida, 217v).
59 See, for instance, the twelfth-century house reliquary of St Eugenius in Toledo cathedral, originally containing the right arm of the saint, and showing narrative scenes of his martyrdom and the invention of his relics. See Juan Francisco Rivera Recio, San Eugenio de Toledo y su culto (Toledo: Diputación Provincial, 1963), 60–63; Pérez Grande, ‘Las arcas-relicarios de San Eugenio y de Santa Leocadia’, 107–10.
60 Martina Bagnoli, ‘The Stuff of Heaven: Material and Craftsmanship in Medieval Reliquaries’, in Treasures of Heaven. Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe [exhibition catalogue], ed. Martina Bagnoli et al. (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2010), 137–47. A correlation between silver and virginity is made in the set of draft arrangements for the entry of the relics into Toledo (‘Las cosas q se ha de prevenir [ … ]’ [BN Ms. 5875]). This explained that the wooden reliquary was to be covered with ‘terciopelo carmesí de tela de plata si no rejado de plata y con chaperia de plata en cada quadro porque con estos dos colores se corresponde al martirio y la virginidad’ (f. 22).
61 Román de la Higuera (Historia eclesiástica de la imperial ciudad de Toledo, 246) said that the arca was ‘toda bruñida, que no parece si no de un christal o Espejo transparente’. The highly ornamented polished silver reliquary of St Eugenius, designed by the sculptor Nicolás de Vergara el Viejo and made by Merino in 1569 was probably even more effective in this respect, housed in its chapel beneath the high altar, perpetually lit by three large silver lamps, and seen by the faithful through a grille. See Rivera Recio, San Eugenio de Toledo y su culto, 104–06; Ángel Fernández Collado, Los informes de ‘visita ad limina’ de los arzobispos de Toledo (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2002), 201–04.
62 The sources emphasize the use of precious materials: Herrera, Descripcion de la capilla, 1–35; Diego de Castejón y Fonseca, Primacía de la Santa Iglesia de Toledo, su origen, sus medras, sus progresos [ … ] defendida contra las impugnaciones de Braga, (Madrid: Diego Díaz de la Carrera, 1645), 183–85; Quintanadueñas, Santos de la imperial Ciudad de Toledo y su Arçobispado, 42–43.
63 For the scenes see: Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico, III, 137; Parro, Toledo en la mano, I, 605–09; Rosa López Torrijos, ‘La iconografía de Santa Leocadia de Toledo’, Anales Toledanos, 21 (1985), 23–24; and Pérez Grande, Las arcas-relicarios de San Eugenio y de Santa Leocadia’, 76–77, who gives the layout. López Torrijos notes the narrative emphasis on her relics.
64 See Sánchez, Historia moral y philosophica, 185–86 and Hernández, Vida, 244v–245, 250v–252v.
65 The drawing is said to come from the royal collection. Judging from the old inventory numbers on the sheet, it belonged to a group of drawings which include those by Eugenius Cajés. Two drawings of saints on the right appear to be by the same hand, but have been cut out from another sheet and pasted down onto the first paper mount.
66 BN Dib. 13/3/38-41; B666-669. Two of the sheets (Dib. 13/3/40, 41) bear an abbreviated name (or place) written by the same hand ‘EnA.da’. The long, horizontal format of the sheets perhaps suggests that the drawings were preparations for a sculptural relief. On the reverse of one of the sheets (Dib. 13/3/41) the artist has copied the muscular anatomy of the human torso, front and back, from the second book of Varia conmensuración para la escultura y architectura (1585) of the silversmith and sculptor Juan de Arfe y Villafañe, providing a terminus post quem for the group.
67 See Bagnoli, ‘The Stuff of Heaven’, 139 on the reliquary as representation of the relics.
68 See Hernández, Vida, 97–101 for recognition of the contents in Flanders recorded by public notaries; 245v–246 for viewing the relics in Toledo cathedral; 248–248v, for the complete body laid out on the high altar of the cathedral and the royal family kissing them in a public act of devotion, although the form of anatomical arrangement of the bones is unspecified.
69 The link between relics and the doctrine of resurrection is dealt with by Tausiet, ‘The Prodigious Garment’, 113.
70 Lazure, ‘Possessing the Sacred’, 68. See Hernández, Vida, 250–59 for the ceremony of donation. See Rivera Recio, San Eugenio de Toledo y su culto, 102–06 for the case of St Eugenius.
71 Alfonso VII received the relics of the right arm of St Eugenius in person from the abbot of San Dionisio and he and his two sons helped to carry the reliquary on their shoulders. See La catedral de Toledo, ed. Gonzálvez & Pereda, 163. Philip had also borne the relics of St Eugenius in 1565.
72 See Hernández, Vida, 256–257v.
73 These were also prominent on Pérez's arch at the Puerta del Perdón (Hernández, Vida, 240v).
74 Hernández, Vida, 189v–196, 262–278v. For these feasts, see Juan Moraleda y Esteban, Santa Leocadia virgen y mártir: memoria histórico-arqueológica ilustrada (Toledo: Imprenta de Lara, 1898), 39–41.
75 For Pérez, see note 40 above; for Monsalve y Ulloa, see Fernández Collado, La catedral de Toledo en el siglo XVI, 85 and Pizarro Llorente, ‘Los miembros del Cabildo de la Catedral de Toledo’, 575, 577, 582.
76 For a list of images, see López Torrijos, ‘La iconografía de Santa Leocadia de Toledo’.
77 See J. Nicolau Castro, ‘La Colegiata de Talavera de la Reina’, Anales Toledanos, 4 (1971), 83–200; Marías, La arquitectura del Renacimiento, IV, 211; Isabel Mateo Gómez & Amelia López-Yarto, Pintura toledana de la segunda mitad del siglo XVI (Madrid: CSIC, 2003), 249 and 264–65. In the base of the altarpiece are reliefs of Leocadia's imprisonment and flagellation.
78 See Mateo Gómez & López-Yarto, Pintura toledana, 128 where, it is assumed, the photograph is correctly oriented. The cardinal's hat over (indistinct) arms on Leocadia's tomb slab suggests that it was commissioned in archiepiscopal circles.
79 Museo Nacional del Prado, Inv. Nos P5412, P5424 respectively. See José Álvarez Lopera, El Museo de la Trinidad: historia, obras y documentos (1838–1872) (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009), Nos 93–96; Maria Kusche, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz y sus seguidores (Madrid: Fundación Arte Hispánico, 2007), 211–16.
80 According to Blas Ortiz (La catedral de Toledo, ed. Gonzálvez & Pereda, 153), these were worn at Christmas, feasts of Resurrection, the Virgin Mary, ‘y de las santas Vírgines’. The veil itself was also interpreted as the dress appropriate to a virgin (see Moraleda y Esteban, Santa Leocadia Virgen y Mártir, 8). See Tausiet, ‘The Prodigious Garment’, 133–36 on the white dress as symbolic of the virginal body.
81 A. E. Pérez Sánchez, ‘Pintura madrileña del siglo XVII: addenda’, Archivo Español de Arte, 195 (1976), 293–326; Museo Nacional del Prado Inv. No. P3228, 155×102 cm. The picture was listed among the works confiscated from religious orders in the Museo de la Trinidad, without a specified provenance. See A. E. Pérez Sánchez, Museo del Prado: inventario general de pinturas, 3 vols (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 1990–1996), II (1991), El Museo de la Trinidad (bienes desamortizados), No. 222.
82 José Godoy y Alcántara, Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones (Madrid: Tres-Catorce-Diecisiete, 1981 [1st ed. Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1868]), 194–95; Martínez-Gil, ‘‘Religión e identidad urbana en el Arzobispado de Toledo’, 51. This source is given in Jerónimo de San José, Historia del Carmen Descalzo (Madrid: Francisco Martínez, 1637), 21–22; Quintanadueñas, Santos de la imperial Ciudad de Toledo y su Arçobispado, 215, 223–24.
83 On these, see Godoy y Alcántara, Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones; Julio Caro Baroja, Las falsificaciones de la historia (en relación con la de España (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1992), 163–87; Martínez-Gil, ‘Religión e identidad urbana en el Arzobispado de Toledo’, 38–57; Katrina B. Olds, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 2015). Draft arrangements for the entry of the relics drawn up in the cathedral chapter mention ‘la tragedia de s[an]ta leocadia’ written by Román de la Higuera and to be performed in the cathedral (Zarco del Valle, Datos documentales, II, 241). Hernández does not mention a performance of the work, nor does Román de la Higuera himself in his history of Toledo. See his life of St Leocadia (Sucesos desde el año 1 de Cristo hasta el de 603, BN, Ms. 2343, 75–80v) and his account of the appearance of Leocadia to St Ildephonsus (Sucesos desde el año 603 hasta el de 704 de Cristo, BN, Ms. 2344, 103v–105).
84 See Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada, 51 on this thrust in municipal histories. See also Katrina B. Olds, ‘The Ambiguities of the Holy: Authenticating Relics in Seventeenth-Century Spain’, Renaissance Quarterly, 65:1 (2012), 135–84; and especially Olds, Forging the Past, on the fluidity of notions of truth and authenticity in local history writing of the period.
85 Martínez-Gil, La invención de Toledo, 125–26. These include the works of Francisco de Pisa, Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, Baltasar de Porreño, Francisco de Portocarrero and Pedro de Salazar de Mendoza. The prestige of commentators on the chronicles was used by Quintanadueñas in his defence of these sources (Santos de la imperial Ciudad de Toledo y su Arçobispado, ‘Advertencias’ X–XIII, 27–50).
86 On Sandoval's patronage of art and architecture, see Marías, La arquitectura del Renacimiento, III, 193–213; Fernando Marías, ‘La obra artística y arquitectónica del Cardenal Sandoval y Rojas’, in Fernando Marías et al., El Toledo de Felipe II y el Greco [exhibition catalogue] (Toledo: Museo de Santa Cruz, 1986), 9–23. For the Sagrario, see Fernando Marías, ‘El Sagrario y el Ochavo’, in La Catedral Primada de Toledo: dieciocho siglos de historia, ed. Ramón Gonzálvez Ruiz (Valladolid: Promecal, 2010), 252–57.
87 Fernández Collado, Los informes de ‘visita ad limina’, 201–04. The other work the cardinal described here was his renovation of the Capilla de la Descensión.
88 Pérez Sánchez in El Toledo de El Greco, 192–95; Marías, ‘Saraceni e la Spagna’, Cat. Nos 41–43.
89 Marías, ‘Saraceni e la Spagna’, 47.
90 Angulo Íñiguez & Pérez Sánchez, Escuela madrileña, 144–45, 186–87, 223, 233–34, 258.
91 See Pérez Sedano, Datos documentales, ed. Tormo, 89, 129; Zarco del Valle, Datos documentales, II, 324; D. Angulo Íñiguez & A. E. Pérez Sánchez, Historia de la pintura española: escuela toledana de la primera mitad del siglo XVII (Madrid: Instituto Diego Velázquez, 1972), 242, 340, No. 356.
92 Antonio Palomino calls it ‘the celebrated picture’ by Orrente in the sacristy. See Antonio Palomino, Vidas, ed. Nina Ayala Mallory (Madrid: Alianza, 1986), 127. It was still in situ in the time of Antonio Ponz, who noted that it had been moved in a subsequent edition of his Viage de España (1787), I, 98–99.
93 Juan Bautista Monegro, in his annotations to elevations of the sacristy, insisted that figures in pictures projected for locations in the second storey of the room ‘sean esbeltas’, since ordinarily-sized figures would appear ‘gofas y enanas’, and urged artists to ‘inovar’ in order to overcome this problem of the site. See Pérez Sánchez et al., El Toledo de El Greco, 60.
94 Gonzálvez & Pereda, La Catedral de Toledo, 160–61.
95 The man too appears to be dressed as a commoner. See Carmen Bernis, El traje y los tipos sociales en ‘El Quijote’ (Madrid: El Viso, 2001), 386, 395–96, 425–37.
96 Hernández, Vida, 35–35v.
97 Angelo Nardi portrayed Sandoval as a magus in the Adoration of the Kings (1620) in the cycle of paintings he completed for the Cistercian convent of San Bernardo at Alcalá de Henares which was under the cardinal's patronage.
98 Hernández, Vida, 60–65; Patricia E. Grieve, The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 2009), 151–52.
99 This is the thesis of Martínez Gil, ‘De Civitas Regia a Civitas Dei’, 139–47.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.