This mingling of styles, owing to the difference in time between the building of different parts of the same church, has a real advantage to the student of Spanish architecture and sculpture. The Cathedral of Tarragona (Plate 18) especially furnishes an almost complete series of examples of all the Spanish art-styles. For the church, built on the site of a mosque, was begun about the year 1118, and dates mainly from the end of the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries, but additions were made from the fourteenth century onwards as late as the eighteenth century. Thus we have examples of early Christian art in a sarcophagus of the façade, and that in the ancient window of the Capilla Mayor with the three Byzantine columns. The main building is a brilliant example of the developed Romanesque Transition style; the beautiful cloisters, among the most perfect in Spain, and the earliest of the side chapels are Gothic; the other chapels, added later, date from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and are in the Renaissance and baroque styles. Even Moorish art is represented in the _azulejo_ roofing of the N.W. lateral chapels, and in the small Moorish window, said to be a prayer niche or _mihrab_, with its Cufic inscription dating from the year of the Hegira 347--that is, 958 A.D.--in the ancient Capilla de Santa Maria Magdalena. The splendid doorway, with elaborate carvings, which gives entrance to the cloisters is the most notable pre-Gothic work in marble in Spain (Plate 19). But of this work we shall speak in the next chapter. Following these early Gothic buildings we have the developed French cathedral style of the thirteenth century introduced into Spain. It is first seen in the great cathedrals of Burgos and Toledo (Plates 20 and 21), and a little later in that of Leon (Plate 22), the most perfect of the Gothic cathedrals in Spain. Very little of the national Spanish art is visible in these buildings; built for the most part by French architects, they recall in turn the cathedrals of Rheims, Beauvais, Bayonne, and Amiens; some see in Leon a copy of the great cathedral at Chartres. The truth is that the style of these buildings is eclectic; they are all distinguished by the romantic magnificence of their ornamentation. The elaborately carved choir-stalls of Leon Cathedral (Plates 23-29) furnish a splendid example of the power of carving. They are the masterpiece of John of Malines and the Dutch artist Copin. It was from carvings such as these that the native artists drew their inspiration. CHAPTER IV THE SCULPTURED PIECES AND TOMBS OF THE ROMANESQUE AND EARLY GOTHIC PERIODS