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Updated: June 13, 2025
As it is, the period which above all interests us here is that reaching from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, embracing Romanesque, ogival, and plateresque styles.
The workmanship of these two rejas is of the most sober Spanish classic or plateresque period, and though the black has not as yet been taken off, the silver and gold peep forth here and there, and show what a brilliancy must have radiated from these elegantly decorated bars and cross-bars in the eighteenth century.
The Military College of Santa Cruz is one of the most precious specimens extant of those somewhat confused but beautiful results of the transition from florid Gothic to the Renaissance. The plateresque is young and modest, and seeks to please in this splendid monument by allying the innovating forms with the traditions of a school outgrown.
They must be examined one by one, and they will be admired; the view of the ensemble will puzzle and amaze him, yet it will be wise for him not to criticize harshly the lack of unity of style. Frequently the choir stalls are ogival, the retablo Renaissance, the rejas plateresque, and the general decoration of columns, etc., of the most lavish grotesque.
When this is grayed with age it is indeed of the effect of old silver work; but the plateresque in Valladolid does not suggest fragility or triviality; its grace is perhaps rather feminine than masculine; but at the worst it is only the ultimation of the decorative genius of the Gothic.
The decorative wealth of the chapels, which is really astonishing in so small a town, the luxurious display of grotesque elements, the presence of a fairly good transparente, as well as the rich leaf-decoration of Byzantine pillars and plateresque arches, give a peculiar cachet to this church which is not to be found elsewhere. The same can be said of the city and of the inhabitant.
The merit of the church was incalculable, for it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic Kings, who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral at Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and it is a most beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the guide-books remind me, and extravagantly baroque as I myself found it.
It is a very clean-looking, cold-looking white monument of the Catholic faith, with a retablo attributed to Berruguete, and much plateresque Gothic detail mingled with Byzantine ornament, and Moorish arabesquing and the famous stucco honeycombing which we were destined at Seville and Granada to find almost sickeningly sweet.
The plateresque style showed its fanciful grace in the door of the cloister, and even the chirruguesque showed at its best in the famous lanthorn of Tome, which broke the vaulting behind the high altar in order to give light to the abside. In the evenings of the vacation Gabriel would leave the seminary, and wander about the Cathedral till the hour at which its doors were closed.
Perhaps the facade of the college and that of the neighboring Church of San Pablo may be elsewhere surpassed in the sort of sumptuous delicacy of that Gothic which gets its name of plateresque from the silversmithing spirit of its designs; but I doubt it.
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