Proceeding along the south aisle, towards the main entrance, we first reach the Capilla de San Andrés, the burying-place of the ancient family of Guzman. Behind the chapel of Nuestra Señora de las Dolores is the fine Sacristia de los Calices. It is the work of those who built the Sacristia Mayor. It contains several fine paintings--the Saints Justa and Rufina (patrons of Seville) by Goya (among his finest works), the “Angel de la Guarda” and the “St Dorothy” of Murillo, the “Death of a Saint” by Zurbarán, the “Trinity of Theotocopuli” (El Greco), a triptych by Morales, and “The Death of the Virgin”--an old German picture. This crucifix over the altar is one of the most admirable productions of Montañez.
The next chapel (de la Santa Cruz) is adorned by a fine “Descent from the Cross” by Fernandez de Guadelupe (1527). The Puerta de la Lonja has a fresco, painted in 1584, of “St Christopher carrying the Infant Jesus across a River.” A representation of this saint is to be found in nearly all Spanish cathedrals, owing to a curious superstition that to look upon it secures the beholder for the rest of that day from an evil death. This fresco, which measures thirty-two feet high, is opposite the “Capilla de la Gamba” (or, of the leg--of Adam). Here we find “La Generacion”--Luis de Vargas’s masterpiece. “The picture,” says Herr Schmidt, “is wholly in the Italian style, and one of the best examples of this phase of the Spanish Renaissance.”
The large chapel of the Antigua contains the fine tomb of Archbishop Mendoza, by Miguel Florentin, erected in 1509. Here is also a very ancient mural painting, after the Byzantine style, of the “Madonna and Child,” which was placed here in 1578, and is of unknown and rather mysterious origin. The retablo is distinguished by marble statues in the baroque style by Pedro Duque Cornejo. The small sacristy behind this chapel contains pictures by Zurbarán, Morales, and others.
The Capilla de San Hermenegildo has a good statue of the saint by Montañez, and a fine sepulchral monument to Archbishop Juan de Cervantes (1453), by Lorenzo Mercadante de Bretaña, the master of Nufro Sanchez. The Capilla de San José contains “The Espousals of the Virgin” by Valdés Leal, a “Nativity of Christ” by Antolinez, and an inferior retablo (“The Massacre of the Innocents”). The Capilla de Santa Ana possesses a Gothic retablo, dating from about 1450, and divided into fourteen sections. It comes from the old Mosque-Cathedral. The lower part of the work, illustrating the life of St Anne, dates from 1504, the artists having been Hernandez and Barbara Marmolejo. From beneath the tribune a staircase leads to the Archives, which escaped demolition at the hands of the French, through having been sent to Cadiz. The last chapel in the south aisle (San Laureano) is dedicated to a saint, who, like St Denis of France, having been decapitated, performed the unusual feat of walking away with his head under his arm. Here is the tomb of Archbishop de Ejea, who died in 1417.