Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/260

244 244 SPANISH ARCHITECTURE. Part XL they came there ; but this hardly hei^DS us, for neither the Phoenicians nor any of the Semitic races were ever builders, and we look in vain in Spain or at Carthage, or at Tyre or Sidon, for anything to tell us what their architecture may have been. The Goths who invaded Spain in the beginning of the 5th century must have been of Teutonic race, Aryans pur sang, for they have not left a building or a tradition of one, and they therefore can hardly have influenced the style of their successors in the Peninsula. Even the Moors were scarcely an architectural people in the proper sense of the term. Their mosques were, so far as we know them, made up of fragments of classical temples arranged without art or design. Their palaces were orna- mented with plaster work of the most admired complexity of design, colored with the most exquisite harmony ; but all this was the work of the ornamentalist, hardly of the architect. It was j^erfectly suited to the wants of an elegant and refined Oriental race, but most ill-adapted to the wants of a hardy race of mountaineers struggling for freedom asfainst the invaders of their birthright. The Celtic Melement must have been the one wanting in this " olla podrida" of nations to fuse the whole together, and to give the arts that imjnilse which in Spain was always wanting. All the other elements they se(^n to have possessed, but the absence of this single one prevented them from attaining that unity which would enable us to follow their story with the same interest which we feel in tracing the development of the arts in France or England. Notwithstanding this, however, it must be confessed that the result in Spain is frequently grand, and even gorgeous, though never quite satis- factory. The periods of Gothic architecture in Spain coincide in age very nearly with those in this country ; far more nearly than M'ith France or Italy, or any other nation. Before the era of the Cid (1066-1099), Avhich was coincident with that of William the Conqueror, there existed a style similar in importance and character to our Saxon style. This the Spaniards call " obras de los Godos," and the term may be practically correct, but it would confuse our nomenclature to -call it the " Gothic " of Spain. "Asturian " or " Catalonian " might nearly describe it, but for the present some such indefinite description as " Early Spanish " must suffice. . In the latter half of the 11th century it was overwhelmed, as in this country, by a wholesale importation of French designs. These continued to be employed, as if no Pyrenees existed, for about a century, with the round arch in all the decorative features, but with an occasional tendency to employ the pointed arch in construction. By degrees this round-arched style grew into an early pointed Spanish, which, like our own lancet, is more national and more