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Updated: May 24, 2025
Imitation, not creation, is its end, and in its attempt to imitate the general aspect of things it leads the way to the substitution of things themselves for perfectly satisfactory indications of them. "Real water" we have all heard of, and we know its place in the theatre; but this is only the simplest form of this anti-artistic endeavour to be real.
Yet, as I say, such men exist, and I have troubled you with speaking of them, because I know that those honest and intelligent people, who are eager for human progress, and yet lack part of the human senses, and are anti-artistic, suppose that such men are artists, and that this is what art means, and what it does for people, and that such a narrow, cowardly life is what we, fellow-handicraftsmen, aim at.
The square tower, surmounted by a cupola, at the foot of the church, as well as the entire western front, dates from the eighteenth century; it is cold, anti-artistic, utterly unable to appeal to the poetic instincts of the spectator.
The architect died before his monument was completed, and Churriguera, the most anti-artistic artist that ever breathed, according to the author's personal opinion, was called upon to finish the edifice: his trade-mark covers almost the entire western front, where the second body shows the defects into which Herrero's severe style degenerated soon after his death.
Be that as it may, the fact is that the cathedral of Avila, seen from the east, west, or north, is a fortress building, a huge, unwieldy and anti-artistic composition of Romanesque, Gothic, and other elements.
To the rear of the building the remains of the Romanesque Church of Santa Maria la Mayor are still to be seen; what a difference between the rigid, anti-artistic conception of Herrero, ridiculized by Churriguera, and left but half-completed by successive generations of moneyless believers, and the simple but elegant features of the old collegiate church, with its tower still standing, a Byzantine recuerdo of the thirteenth century.
The western façade is never used, and is surrounded by the old cemetery, a rather peculiar place for a cemetery in a cathedral church; the northern façade is anti-artistic, but the tower to the right has one great virtue, that of comparative height.
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