This book is prefaced by the portrait of the author, given above. It shows us--what he really was--a quiet, cultured, gentle-hearted man. Indeed, while Arfe was studying anatomy at Salamanca, it gave him pain to lacerate the bodies even of the dead. "I was witness," he records, "to the flaying of several pauper men and women whom the law had executed; but these experiments, besides being horrible and cruel, I saw to be of little service to my studies in anatomy." Arfe's workmanship of the _custodia_ of Avila cathedral, which he began in 1564 and terminated in 1571, won for him an early and extended fame. He also made the _custodia_ of Burgos (brutally melted during the Spanish War of Independence), and those of Valladolid (finished in 1590), Lugo, Osma, and the Hermandad del Santísimo at Madrid. The _custodia_ of Palencia is also thought by some to be his handiwork. But Arfe's crowning labour was the Greco-Roman _custodia_ of Seville cathedral (Plate xvii.). The chapter of this temple selected his design in 1580, and nominated the licentiate Pacheco to assist him with the statuettes. Pacheco also carried out his portion of the task with skill and judgment. A rare pamphlet, written by Arfe and published at Seville in 1587, gives a minute description of the whole _custodia_. In Appendix C, I render this description into English, together with a similarly detailed notice of the _custodia_ (1513 A.D.) of Cordova. This last, which we have seen to be the work of Juan de Arfe's grandfather, Enrique, is not to be surpassed for fairy grace and lightness, seeming, in the eloquent metaphor of a modern writer, "to have been conceived in a dream, and executed with the breath." [Illustration: XVII _CUSTODIA_ OF SEVILLE CATHEDRAL (_By Juan de Arfe. Late 16th Century_)]