lmost totally different in aspect: the former is exceedingly poetical
and possesses carved wall decorations both rich and excellent; the
latter is intensely strong and warlike, and the decorations, if
employed at all, are Byzantine, or at least Oriental in taste.

* * * * *

TRANSITION.--Many of the cathedrals of Galicia belong, according to
several authors, to this period in which Romanesque strength evolved
into primitive Gothic or ogival airiness. In another chapter a personal
opinion has been emitted denying the accuracy of the above remark.

There is no typical example of Transition in Spain. Ogival changes
introduced at a later date into Romanesque churches, a very common
occurrence, cannot justify the classification of the buildings as
Transition monuments.

Nor is it surprising that such buildings should be lacking in Spain. For
Gothic did not evolve from Romanesque in the peninsula, but was
introduced from France. A short time after its first appearance it swept
all before it, thanks to the Cluny monks, and was exclusively used in
church-building. In a strict sense it stands, moreover, to reason that
the former (Transition) can only exist there where a new style emerges
from an old without being introduced from abroad.

* * * * *

OGIVAL ART.--The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries are,
properly speaking, those of the great northern art wave which spread
rapidly through the peninsula, bending all before its irresistible will.
Romanesque churches were destroyed or modified (the introduction of an
ambulatory in almost all Romanesque buildings), and new cathedrals
sprung up, called into existence by the needs and requirements of a new
people, a conquering, Christian people, driving the infidel out of the
land, and raising the Holy Cross on the sacred monuments of the Islam
religion.

The changements introduced into the new style tended to give it a more
severe and defiant exterior appearance than in northern churches,--a
scarcity of windows and flying buttresses, timidly pointed arches, and
solid towers. Besides, round-headed arches (vaultings and horizontal
lines) were indiscriminately used to break the vertical tendency of pure
ogival; so also were Byzantine cupolas and domes.

The solemn, cold, and naked cathedral church of Alcala de Henares is a
fine example of the above. Few people would consider it to belong to the
same class