The original plan of the building was a rectangle, 411 feet long by 204 wide, divided in its length by a nave and two aisles, and in its width by a broad transept situated exactly half-way between the apse and the foot of the church. The form was thus that of a Greek cross; each angle of the building was to be surmounted by a tower, and the _croisée_ by an immense cupola or dome. (Compare with the new cathedral in Salamanca.) The lateral walls of the aisles were to contain symmetrical chapels, as was also the apse.
From the foregoing it will be seen that symmetry and the Greco-Roman straight horizontal line were to replace the ogival arch and the generally vertical, soaring effect of Gothic buildings.
The architect died before his monument was completed, and Churriguera, the most anti-artistic artist that ever breathed,--according to the author's personal opinion,--was called upon to finish the edifice: his trade-mark covers almost the entire western front, where the second body shows the defects into which Herrero's severe style degenerated soon after his death.
Of the four towers and the cupola which were to render the capitol of Valladolid "second in grandeur to none excepting St. Peter's at Rome," only one tower was erected: it fell down in 1841, and is being reërected at the present time.
In the interior the same disparity is everywhere visible, as well as in the unfinished state of the temple. Greek columns are prevalent, and, contrasting with their simplicity, the high altar, as grotesque a body as ever was placed in a holy cathedral, attracts the eye of the vulgar with something of the same feeling as a blood-and-thunder melodrama. Needless to say, the art connoisseur flees therefrom.
[Illustration: WESTERN FRONT OF VALLADOLID CATHEDRAL]
To the rear of the building the remains of the Romanesque Church of Santa Maria la Mayor are still to be seen; what a difference between the rigid, anti-artistic conception of Herrero, ridiculized by Churriguera, and left but half-completed by successive generations of moneyless believers, and the simple but elegant features of the old collegiate church, with its tower still standing, a Byzantine _recuerdo_ of the thirteenth century.