If the influence of Gregorio Hernandez speaks in the artists we have just considered, it is to the influence of the impassioned and dramatic Juan de Juni we must turn to account for those tragic representations of severed heads of martyrs, depicted with such strange delight in all the details of horror and putrefaction, of which we find many examples belonging to the late seventeenth century. Such heads, representing most frequently St. John the Baptist, St. Paul, or St. Anastasius, may be seen in many places--Nuestra Señora del Pilar at Zaragoza, the cathedral and hospital church at Granada, and the Monastery of Santa Clara at Seville are a few examples. The Museum of Valladolid possesses two heads of St. Paul. The finer one, taken from the Convent of St. Paul, is the work of Alonso Villabrille, a sculptor of Madrid who lived at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. It is perhaps the best example of these astonishing heads (Plate 133). The polychrome is carried out with great care, and the horror of the dissevered head is lessened by the beard which shields the severed neck. The influence of Gregorio Hernandez did much to stay the deterioration which now, at the end of the seventeenth century, threatened the plastic arts of Northern Spain. The baroque style was introduced with disastrous results, and we find the ugly, overloaded, exaggerated decoration known as Churriguera. Perhaps the greatest evil was the destruction of many of the old Gothic and classic altar-screens, with their beautiful polychrome statues. Images were carved with apparatus for moving the head and eyes, and the mouth. These figures were really wooden dolls, with real hair and real dresses, in which only the head and hands were carved: they mark the lowest level of the plastic arts. A notorious example is the Transparente in the Cathedral of Toledo, executed by Narciso Tomé in 1752. It is remarkable that side by side with these degraded works we find a number of bas-reliefs and statues in which the earnestness of the Spanish religious spirit has inspired the baroque form. We may mention as especially worthy of study, a Conception in Palencia Cathedral, and a superb monument let into the wall on the right of the great altar; a beautiful Virgin in the Chapel of Ayuntamiento, Pampeluna; the Madonna over the high altar of Cuenca; the kneeling figure of an archbishop in San Andrés at Avila; and the magnificent tomb of Cardinal Valdés in the Church of the Sala, Oviedo. This last work is a masterpiece. CHAPTER VIII THE SCHOOL OF ANDALUSIA--JUAN MARTINEZ MONTAÑÉS--SEVILLE AND ITS SCULPTORS