[68] Payments made to "Master Juan Francés" are recorded by Zarco del Valle, _Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de las Bellas Artes en España_, pp. 320, 321. It is, however, in the _rejas_ that the craftsmanship of older Spain attains its loftiest pinnacle. They consist, says Banister Fletcher, of "rich and lofty grilles in hammered and chiselled iron ... strongly characteristic of the national art. The formality of the long and vertical bars is relieved by figures beaten in _repoussé_, in duplicates, attached back to back, and by crestings and traceries adapted to the material, and freely employed. Few things in Spain are more original and artistic."[69] [69] _History of Architecture_, p. 303. They possess, too, the advantage, from their ponderous solidity and fixedness, that most of them are still extant and in the best of preservation, although Napoleon's Vandals rooted up the chapel _rejas_ of the Church of Santo Domingo at Granada, and turned them into bullets; just as their general, Sebastiani, threw down the tower of San Jerónimo to make a trumpery bridge across the trickling stream of the Genil. Scores of thousands of such crimes, not to forget the blowing up of the gate and tower of the Siete Suelos, were perpetrated by the French all over Spain; yet Washington Irving, in a strangely infelicitous passage of his _Tales of the Alhambra_, congratulates the invaders for their reverential treatment of the noblest monuments of Spanish art! The _reja_ generally was not, as many have supposed, of late invention. It existed from the earliest days of Christianity; but it was only in the Gothic and Renaissance ages that Spain converted it into a vehicle for decorative art. The growth of these ornamental _rejas_ may be traced in cities of Old Castile, together with Seville, Salamanca, Cuenca, and Toledo. Spain, it is idle to observe, was at no moment so appreciative of her craftsmen as was Italy, so that our information as to mediæval Spanish craftsmen and the process of their lives and labours is, upon the whole, deplorably deficient. Nevertheless, among the oldest of her artists known in Spanish as _rejeros_, or (a finer and more venerable term) _"reja_-masters"--_maestros de rexas_--appears Juan Francés, working in 1494 in Toledo Cathedral and, in the same capacity (for he seems to have been an armourer besides, and to have held the title of "master-maker of iron arms in Spain")[70] at Alcalá de Henares, as well as, in 1505, at Osma, in whose cathedral he made the _rejas_ of the choir and high chapel.[71] [70] So, in Spain, does war appear to have been connected even with the peaceful _reja_. Similarly, in 1518, the contractors for the grille of the Chapel Royal of Granada were Juan Zagala and Juan de Cubillana, "master-artillerymen to their highnesses." Valladar, _Guía de Granada_, 1st ed., p. 302, note.