ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN BEFORE IOOO
In Spain the Visigoths, rulers from the 5th to the early 8thcentury,
had built churches of an oddly mutilated basilican type. S. Juan de
Banos, for example, dedicated in 661, consisted originally (fig. 9
shows the plan before the kter alterations) of a short nave separated
from the aisles by arcades with horseshoe arches, exaggeratedly pro-
jecting transepts, a square apse, two rectangular eastern chapels or
vestries inorganically detached from the apse and, as another in-
organic appendix, a rectangular west porch. There is no spatial flow
nor even a unity of plan in this minute building. The exterior
colonnades originally running along the north, south and west
walls are of Late Antique-Oriental origin, as
incidentally is the horseshoe arch.
This motive however the Arabs, when
they conquered the South of Spain in the 8th
century, made so much their own that for
several centuries to come it remained the
hall-mark of Mohammedan and Mozarabic,
i.e. Christian Spanish, architecture under
Arab influence. The Arabs, as against the 9- s- JUAN D^ BANGS,
TT.« . 1 TT • C C DEDICATED 66l. THE
Vikings and Hungarians, were far from EAST PARTS HAVE LATER
uncivilised. On the contrary, their religion, BEEN ALTERED'
their science and their cities, especially Cordova with her half-
million inhabitants, were far ahead of those of 8th-century Franks
in France or Asturians in Northern Spain. The Mosque at
Cordova (786-990), a building of eleven aisles, each twelve bays
long, with interlaced arches and complicated star-ribbed vaults, has
a filigree elegance more in keeping with the spatial transparency of
S. Vitale than of the sturdy uncouthness of the North.
Owing to their proximity to Mohammedan sophistication, the
Asturias show a certain airiness here and there which is absent in any
other contemporary Christian buildings. At S. Maria de Naranco near
Leon, for example (pi. vi and vn) the fluted buttresses outside—as
a structural device and a decorative motif still remotely evocative of
Rome—and the slender arcade inside which now separates nave from
choir are in a strange contrast to the heavy tunnel-vault, the odd
shield-like or seal-like medallions from which spring the transverse
arches of the vault and the clumsy spiral shafts with their crude block
capitals along the walls.
The building incidentally is of very special interest, in so far as in
all probability it was designed between 842 and 848 as a Royal Hall
13