Cathedrals of Spain

Stone prayers. That is what John A. Gade offers readers in this elegant 1911 survey of Spain's greatest religious architecture. Beginning in Salamanca, that ancient university city where Romanesque and Gothic compete for dominance, Gade unlocks the secrets embedded in Spain's cathedrals: how to read the horseshoe arch that survives from Moorish days, how to distinguish the heavy Romanesque of the reconquest from the soaring vertical ambition of French-inspired Gothic, and why the contrast between Salamanca's smaller old cathedral and its grander new one tells the story of an entire civilization's evolving faith. Gade writes for the traveler who has stood before these vast interiors and felt the overwhelming desire to understand what they are seeing. His prose is precise but never dry, offering both the casual reader and the serious student of architecture a path into these stone cathedrals of Spain, where every column and capital carries the weight of centuries.