The Plateresco sixteenth-century doors of the Capilla de los Vargas at Madrid (Plate xiv.) are attributed by Cean Bermudez and by Ponz to an artist named Giralte, who carved them in walnut with various military and other scenes from Scripture, alternating with shields and floral ornament; the whole surrounded by an exquisitely delicate and tasteful border. Lampérez remarks that the errors of perspective recall the similar productions of Ghiberti. [Illustration: XXVI CHOIR-STALLS (_Burgos Cathedral_)] The _celosía_ or decorative wooden window-grating, imported by the Mussulman conqueror from Egypt and the East, extended to all parts of Christian Spain, and was particularly used in convents. These gratings, identical in form and workmanship with those of Cairo,[45] were attached to projecting windows, so that the women of a household could look into the street without themselves being seen, a custom which the Spanish woman still recalls to us by peering, for hours at a time, between the lowered _persiana_ of her balcony.[46] By the seventeenth century, which may truthfully be called the age of Spanish jealousy, and when the "Othello-like revenge of the Moor" had eaten into the very entrails of society, the _celosía_ had become as indispensable to houses as the door or window. "La," wrote Bertaut de Rouen of a residence on the outskirts of Madrid, and obviously alluding to these gratings, "il y avoit bien des Dames dans l'appartement d'enhaut qui y demeurerent cachées, se contentant de nous voir promener dans le jardin par les fenêtres." [45] "The windows, which are chiefly composed of curious wooden lattice-work, serving to screen the inhabitants from the view of persons without, as also to admit both light and air, commonly project outwards, and are furnished with mattresses and cushions."--Lane's _Arabian Nights_, vol. i., p. 192. [46] It is strange that Ford should have confounded the _reja_ with the _celosía_ (_Handbook_, vol. i., p. 153). However, he opportunely quotes the Spanish proverb, _Muger ventanera tuercela el cuello si la quieres buena_ ("The remedy for a woman who is always thrusting her head from the casement is to twist her neck"). We know from the stone coat of arms which is carved above the doorway of the "House of Castril at Granada" that in the olden time the balconies of the Hall of Comares in the Alhambra were fitted with projecting wooden _celosías_; and Contreras says that in the Torre de los Puñales of the same palace there used to be "a kind of wooden _mirador_ or _menacir_, covered with _celosías_ like those of Cairo, and many of which were still to be seen in Granada early in the nineteenth century."