The Plaza Mayor is, to quote Baedeker, "the finest city square in Spain." It is a Spanish version of the Place Stanislas at Nancy, but instead of the pale grey French stone cut into refined and calculated elegance, it is all of the warm golden colour of Salamanca stone, and its proportions are not so nicely adjusted and, though the same elevation is maintained all round the square, the Spanish architects could not achieve symmetry, and façades are broken where its streets happen to enter. It is of a kind of heavy Rococo style which in reality is hardly changed from Churriguerra's seventeenth century Town Hall at one side. But then Churriguerra's Baroque is already half way to Rococo.
The main street recovers its composure soon after the Plaza Mayor and runs straight to the Cathedral. This is Hontanon's second masterpiece, and like the cathedral of Segovia is splendidly planned for its situation; rising from the sloping edge of the hill with a tremendous face (I speak of the side elevation) of orange masonry before at an incredible height the ornate window of the transept breaks it. The system of rectangular boxes which his Renaissance training caused him to give to the general shape is here less frittered away with crochets and pinnacles than it is at Segovia and as regards the outside it is certainly superior.
Wherever, as in the West Front or round the North Door, the use of sculpture is indicated, it is of course of an incredible intricacy and multiplicity, with elaborate arabesques of animals chasing one another along cornices and in the hollows of mouldings. The carving is wonderfully sharp and precise and of great technical brilliancy—the Spaniards of the sixteenth century must have got up earlier than they do now to have carved such vast areas of stone with so incredibly minute and rich a sculptured surface. In effect it is the creation of a surface that is aimed at. The sculptures could hardly be meant to be looked at as sculpture, as, for instance, most of the French Gothic sculpture can be, even though it fits also into a general decorative scheme. In these Plateresque churches both scale and quantity defeat the searching eye. The scale because each individual form is so minute—the quantity because a whole façade may be covered with them.
The real meaning of this sculpture then is the creation of a richly varied surface, however little conscious of this the artist may have been.
