its fancifully
twisted shafts, elliptical arches and Gothic traceried balustrade,
similar early Renaissance work at Blois, where the Gothic and early
Italian work were so charmingly blended.

The Royal Chapel is entered through an Italian Renaissance doorway of
good general design and decoration, but the Spanish cornice and
balustrade crowning the outer walls are much more interesting in
details. The principal member consists of a band of crowned and
encircled F's and Y's, the initials of the Catholic Kings. It is broken
over the window by three gigantic coats-of-arms. To the left is
Ferdinand's individual device of a yoke, the "yugo," with the motto
"Tato Mota" (Tanto Monta) tantamount, assumed as a mark of his equality
with the Castilian Queen; to the right Isabella's device of a bundle of
arrows or "flechas," the symbol of union. In the centre is the common
royal shield, proudly adopted after the union of the various kingdoms of
the Peninsula had been cemented. The Eagle of Saint John the Evangelist
and the common crown surmount the arms of Castile and Leon, of Aragon,
Sicily, Navarre, and Jerusalem and the pomegranate of Granada.

[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid

CATHEDRAL OF GRANADA

The reja enclosing the Royal Chapel and tombs of the Catholic Kings]

The various roofs of the Cathedral are covered with endless rows of
tiles, which in the furrowed, overlapping irregularity of their surfaces
add to the general play of light and shade. Above them all spreads the
umbrella-shaped dome which crowns the Capilla Mayor.

At the period when Gothic church-building was disappearing, we find not
a few edifices where the old and new styles are curiously blended. A
Renaissance facade added in later days might encase a practically
complete Gothic interior. In Granada, with the exception of the Royal
Chapel, very little of the interior contained traces of the expiring
style. In the Cathedral proper, it is principally found in a groined
vaulting of the different bays, which is covered with varying and most
elaborate schemes of ornamental Gothic ribs, which seem strangely
incongruous to the architect as he looks up from the classical shafts in
the expectation of finding a corresponding form of building and
decoration in the later vaulting.

The general plan of the church is more Renaissance than Gothic,
exhibiting rather the form of the "Rundbau" than the "Langbau" of the
Latin cross. Its main feature is likewise