By Royall Tayler

ALL Spanish building may be roughly divided into two classes: the
products of native schools sprung from the soil, and the work of
foreigners. The vicissitudes through which Spain has passed have
handicapped the native builders, who have usually been less well
equipped for the construction of great churches and palaces than
their competitors from abroad. But the native builders, if they have lacked
the patronage of princes and knowledge of the latest methods and styles
evolved in Europe, have possessed what the foreigners lacked: an instinctive
feeling for the local conditions--climate, light and habits of life--to disregard
which is a heavy fault in architecture. Whatever fashion reigned among the
religious orders, in cathedral chapters and at court, the native Spanish builders
have put up the houses in which their countrymen have lived, and at times have
set their hands to more ambitious tasks, but their creations, vigorous and full of
character as many of them are, have been kept in the background while the
places of honour have been given to Frenchmen, Flemings, Rhinelanders and
Italians. However, the overpowering national sentiment of the Spaniard has
not allowed the matter to rest there. His king or his bishop may have imposed
an outlandish cathedral upon him, but he has managed to enlarge and embellish
that cathedral to his own taste, without and within, until only the practised eye
detects the foreign fabric and the whole is suffused with the local colour that
pervades everything in Spain.

In practice, of course, there are many buildings that belong partly to one
of these two main classes, and partly to the other. Mediæval churches were
usually long in the making; very few can have been completed by foreign
builders, and where Spaniards were employed local characteristics soon made
their appearance. Also, the native builders themselves were to some extent
influenced by technique and fashions in design brought in from abroad. How-
ever, in the main, the division holds good. The foreign schools failed, one and
all, to strike root in Spain. Their adoption was determined not so much by
artistic affinity as by political association ; they held the field for a few years
and died away. Meanwhile the Spaniards went on building houses and churches
according to their own ideas of what houses and churches ought to be like, super-
ficially modified by a foreign formula here and there.

The Moslem influence was a different affair from the passing European
fashions which left many grand monuments in Spain and no lasting impression
on the Spaniards. Several of the Spanish kingdoms were under Mohammedan
rule for centuries, and long after the Reconquest a Moorish population continued
to live side by side with the Christian in many Spanish cities. Moreover, when
the Islamic conquerors first began building in Spain they made use of what they
found on the spot, utilising in their mosques columns, capitals and window frames
taken from Visigothic churches and palaces. Very little remains of what was
made in the Moslem cities during the first century or two of Moslem rule, but
that little [PLATE 6, B] and the rather more numerous vestiges in the lands that
were then held by Christians are enough to show that for a long time after the
Islamic conquest Christians and Mohammedans went on building in closely similar
styles. Later, the divergences springing from the different character of the cult
in the two communities, and their manner of life, became more and more
marked. The mosque and the cathedral of the middle ages are far apart. But
even then the domestic architecture of the greater part of Christian Spain has

-3-