SPANISH AND GERMAN BABOQtHB
expressing itself in the piling of ornament on to surfaces. This
ornamental mania had been a Spanish heritage ever since Moham-
medan times, the Alhambra, and the Late Gothic of such works as
the front of St. Paul's at Valkdolid (pL xun), but never yet had it
taken quite such fantastic shapes as it now did in the so-called
Churrigueresque style, named after its chief exponent Jos6 de
Churrigu6ra (1650-1725). The immediate inspiration of the barbaric
scrolls and thick mouldings of, e.g., the Sacristy of the Charterhouse
at Granada (1727-64; pi. LXX; by Luis de Arevalo and F. Manuel
Vasquez) must have been native art of Central or South America,
as the immediate inspiration of the Manueline style in Portugal
has been found in the East Indies. It is in fact in Mexico that the
Spanish architects celebrated the wildest orgies of decoration.
The Trasparente stands on a higher aesthetic level no doubt than
the incrustations of the Churrigueresque, though morally, especially
to the Ruskinian morality of Late Victorian England, they may both
be equally objectionable. Southern Germany in the i8th century
was almost as fond of ornament for ornament's sake as Spain. There
again the tradition leads back to the Middle Ages. But as it has been
shown that German Late Gothic was fonder of spatial complexity
than the late Gothic of any other country, so the exploitation of
space became now the central problem of German Late Baroque, a
problem occasionally solved with the knock-out technique of the
Trasparente, but more often by purer strictly architectural means.
Two architects only out of the many working between 1720 and
1760 can here be introduced: Cosmas Damian Asam (1686-1739)
and JohannBalthasar Neumann (1687-1753).
Cosmas Damian Asam was a painter and decorator, his brother
Egid Quirin (1692-1750) a sculptor. The two as a rule worked
together, not considered as anything but competent craftsmen and
not apparently considering themselves as anything else either. They,
and in common with them the majority of the German i8th-
century architects, were not really architects in the Renaissance or
modern sense. They were brought up in villages to know something
about building, and that was enough. No big ideas about professional
status entered their heads. In fact the sociological position of archi-
tecture in Germany before the I9th century was still mediaeval, and
most of the patrons were still princes, bishops, abbots, just as they had
been three hundred years earlier. Neumann belongs to another
category, one that had not existed in the Middle Ages or die Re-
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