hundred and
fifty years. Alfonso de Cano's reputation was of various kinds; the son
of a carpenter and a native of Granada, as soon as his talents were
recognized, he was apprenticed to the great Montanes. To judge from
contemporaneous accounts, he must have been as hot-headed and
quarrelsome as the Florentine goldsmith of similar talents and
versatility. He was always ready to exchange the paint-brush or chisel
for his good sword, and there was scarcely a day during the years of his
connection with the Cathedral in which he was not enjoying a hot
controversy with the Chapter. His favor with the weak monarch and the
powerful ruling Conde-Duc was so great that they had the audacity to
appoint him a prebendary of the Chapter after he had been forced to fly
from justice in Valladolid on a charge of murder, as well as for having
beaten his wife on his return from a meeting of the ecclesiastical body.
The Chapter deprived him of his office as soon as they dared, which was
six years after his appointment.

Egas' original plan, like the work he actually carried out in the Royal
Chapel, was undoubtedly for a Gothic edifice, as this style was
understood and executed in Spain. From the fact that the original Gothic
intention was abandoned for a Spanish Renaissance church, many
authorities give the date of its commencement as 1529, when Diego de
Siloe's Renaissance work was under way. In the end of the fifteenth and
beginning of the sixteenth centuries, the great turning-point had come.
Italian influences were beginning to predominate over earlier styles and
the last exquisite flames of the Gothic fire were slowly dying out to
give place to the heavy Renaissance structure of ecclesiastical
inspiration. Spaniards who had returned fresh from Italian soil and
tutelage evolved with their ornate sense and characteristic love for
magnificence, the style, or rather decorative treatment, which marks the
first stage of Spanish Renaissance architecture called "Estilo
Plateresco." This is a happy name for it, its derivation being from
"plata," or silver plate, and indicating that architects were attempting
to decorate the huge superficial spaces on their churches with the same
intricacy and sparkle as the silversmiths were hammering on their
ornaments. There was evolved the same lace-like quality, the same
sparkling light and shade. Wonderful results were indeed obtained by the
stone-cutters of the sixteenth century.

The Cathedral of Gra