d some to dishonor."

The semicircular door is crowned by a profusely subdivided, Gothic
archivolt and guarded by two scaly giants or wild men that look, with
their raised clubs, as if they would beat the life out of any one who
should try to enter the holy cavern. Saints Peter and Paul float on
clouds in the spandrels. Above rises a sixteenth-century composition of
masks and canopied niches. The Saviour naturally occupies the centre,
flanked by the various saints that in times of peril protected the
church of Avila: Saints Vincente, Sabina and Cristela, Saint Segundo and
Santa Teresa. In the attic in front of a tremendous traceried cusp, with
openings blocked by masonry, the ornamentation runs completely riot.
Saint Michael, standing on top of a dejected and doubled-up dragon,
looks down on figures that are crosses between respectable caryatides
and disreputable mermaids. It is certainly as immaterial as unknown,
when and by whom was perpetrated this degenerate sculpture now
shamelessly disfiguring a noble casing. The strong, early towers seem in
their turn doubly powerful and eloquent in their simplicity and one
wishes the old Romanesque portal were restored and the great traceries
above it glazed to flood the nave with western sunlight.

The northeastern angle is blocked by poor Renaissance masonry, the
exterior of the chapels here being faced by a Corinthian order and
broken by circular lights.

The northern portal is as fine as that of the main entrance is paltry.
The head of the door, as well as the great arch which spans the recess
into which the entire composition is set, is, curiously enough,
three-centred, similar to some of the elliptical ones at Burgos and
Leon. A lion, securely chained to the church wall for the protection of
worshipers, guards each side of the entrance. Under the five arches
stand the twelve Apostles, time-worn, weather-beaten and mutilated, but
splendid bits of late thirteenth-century carving. For they must be as
early as that. The archivolts are simply crowded with small figures of
angels, of saints, and of the unmistakably lost. In the tympanum the
Saviour occupies the centre, and around Him is the same early, naive
representation of figures from the Apocalypse, angels, and the crowned
Virgin.

[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid

CATHEDRAL OF AVILA

Main entrance]

Two years before Luther, a true exponent of Teutonic genius, had nailed
his theses to the door of a cathed