Everywhere here the buttresses are finished with pinnacles, always planned in the same way, each group being planned on a square, counterchanged over the one below: they are of several stages in height, furnished throughout with crocketed finials on all sides, and at last with a single tall pinnacle. Nothing can be more wearisome than this kind of pinnacled buttress, but the later Spanish authorities were very fond of it, and repeated it everywhere. The dome, or Cimborio, is altogether Pagan in its design and detail outside, and on the inside is so plastered with an _olla_ of pink cherubs, rays of light, and gilt scallopshells of monstrous size, and the like, as to be utterly contemptible in its effect. It is, moreover, too small, and too little separated from the rest of the vaulting, to look really well. The church throughout is finished with hipped roofs in place of gables: but the parapets in front of these are all Renaissance, and marked at intervals by the favourite urns in which Renaissance architects still generally and most unfortunately indulge. The cathedral was first used for service in A.D. 1560, when on all sides Renaissance buildings were being erected, and perhaps it would be more just to Juan Gil de Hontañon to look upon him as striving to the last to maintain the cause of Christian art against the inroads of the enemy, and failing in his detail not for want of will, but because it was simply impossible to resist the tide which had set in before he died. Much, too, of the church must, no doubt, be attributed to other men; Juan de Alava, Rodrigo Gil de Hontañon, Martin Ruiz, and Juan de Ribero Rada, having been masters of the works after Juan Gil, and the church not having been completed until more than a century after its commencement.[97] It will have been noticed that the old steeple is spoken of by the Junta of Architects as a work of so much importance as to make it advisable to change the position of the new cathedral, rather than interfere with it. I do not quite understand this, for the greater part of it is now entirely of late Renaissance detail,[98] though some large crocketed pinnacles still exist at the angles of the highest stage. The lower part is very plain, but the upper stage of the square tower has a rich balustrade, and windows and pilasters, and above it is an octagonal stage with pinnacles at the angles, and this in its turn is surmounted by a dome, with a lantern at the top. The outline is certainly fine, and its great height and mass make it a conspicuous object for a very long distance from Salamanca.