penings. Some have good
though not excellent coloring.

The form of the Renaissance lantern is not infelicitous, either from the
inside or outside. It was first built by Sacchetti. The double base is
octagonal, with corners strengthened by columns and pilasters and
executed with much artistic skill. Were it not for the vulgar interior
coloring and ornamentation of cherubs, scrolls, and scallop shells,
contorted, disproportionate, and unmeaning, its high, brilliantly
lighting semicircle might be pleasing. Horrible decoration fills the
panels of the octagonal base. The dome itself is almost as gaudily
colored.

The interior is built of a clear gray stone on which sparing employment
of color in certain places is most effective. Thus in the bosses of the
vaulting ribs throughout, in the capitals of the piers of nave and
transept, in the very elaborate fan-vaulting of the Capilla Mayor, and
in the soffits of nave-clerestory, the blue and gold contrasts finely
with the cold gray surfaces. Renaissance medallions decorate the
spandrels of the nave, but those of the side aisles bear the
coats-of-arms of the Cathedral and the City of Salamanca. A differently
designed fan-vaulting spreads over every chapel. Great rejas enclose
choir and Capilla Mayor from the transept. The rear of the choir is
badly mutilated by a Baroque screen, while the sides and back of the
high altar still consist of the rough blocks which have been waiting for
centuries to be carved. The choir-stalls are very late eighteenth
century, a mass of over-elaborate detail, as fine as Grinling Gibbon's
carving, and if possible even more remarkable in the detail.

The west and north facades are, for a Spanish cathedral, singularly free
and unencumbered. The west faces the old walls of the university. The
entire composition is overshadowed by the tremendous tower that looms up
for miles around in the country. It is indeed "Salamanca qui erige ses
clochers rutilants sur la nudite inexorable du desert." Though it has
nothing to do with the rest of the composition, it is a happy mixture of
the two styles; the massive base is as high as the roofing of the nave,
blessedly bare and severe beside the restlessness of the adjoining
screen. A clock and a few panels are all that break it. Classical
balconies run round it above and below the first bell-story, the sides
of which are decorated with a Corinthian order and broken by round
arched openings. A similar order decorates