The fact is the Spaniards could never get quit of their Moorish antecedents and perhaps no people have ever had so exquisite a sensibility for surface as the Arabs—so marvellous a sense of how to play one kind of surface against another. But then until the fourteenth century when their art went to pieces they preserved their fine tact—they knew how to keep their rich surfaces precious—how to give them value by the opposition of large unbroken and massive surfaces. Think of the Mesopotamian pottery of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. The animal form that fills the centre of the bowl or plate is drawn with large blunt outlines and then the interstices may be filled with the minutest intricacies—these will count, none the less, as just another surface, and the eye grasps at once the interplay of the two.
Then again the Arabs knew how to make the relief of a rich surface incredibly delicate, using only the shallowest relief, i. e., the weakest contrasts of light and shade, or, if it was painting, only the finest strokes or the fainter colours.
And finally they knew that it was worse than wasted labour to use forms of real objects, animals or men, merely to create a surface. They knew, as the Byzantines had already discovered, that that can be done even better by merely geometric or meaningless shapes, by mere dots and dashes and rounds and crosses.
Now the Spaniards when they came to work on their own, had in their minds the Mudéjar traditions, but not the Mudéjar artist's tact. They used Gothic and Renaissance forms to produce the rich surfaces of the Arab geometrics. Now this produces a certain want of ease. One feels that one might, perhaps one ought, to look at each of these animals biting the tail of the next, at all these nude, putti, and floral interweavings and it requires an effort to say to oneself that they have no meaning except as so much variegation of surface, that they are no more than the rustications on classic coins.
Then again in their desire to astonish the Plateresque designers cut their stone far too deeply so that the contrast of carved and plain surfaces is too violent.
But Hontanon merits the tourists' gratitude as much for what he so piously left as for what he built. For he left the little Old Cathedral standing under the shadow of his new and towering structure. It is a simple and well-planned twelfth century build-
