TRANSITION.--Many of the cathedrals of Galicia belong, according to several authors, to this period in which Romanesque strength evolved into primitive Gothic or ogival airiness. In another chapter a personal opinion has been emitted denying the accuracy of the above remark. There is no typical example of Transition in Spain. Ogival changes introduced at a later date into Romanesque churches, a very common occurrence, cannot justify the classification of the buildings as Transition monuments. Nor is it surprising that such buildings should be lacking in Spain. For Gothic did not evolve from Romanesque in the peninsula, but was introduced from France. A short time after its first appearance it swept all before it, thanks to the Cluny monks, and was exclusively used in church-building. In a strict sense it stands, moreover, to reason that the former (Transition) can only exist there where a new style emerges from an old without being introduced from abroad. * * * * * OGIVAL ART.--The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries are, properly speaking, those of the great northern art wave which spread rapidly through the peninsula, bending all before its irresistible will. Romanesque churches were destroyed or modified (the introduction of an ambulatory in almost all Romanesque buildings), and new cathedrals sprung up, called into existence by the needs and requirements of a new people, a conquering, Christian people, driving the infidel out of the land, and raising the Holy Cross on the sacred monuments of the Islam religion. The changements introduced into the new style tended to give it a more severe and defiant exterior appearance than in northern churches,--a scarcity of windows and flying buttresses, timidly pointed arches, and solid towers. Besides, round-headed arches (vaultings and horizontal lines) were indiscriminately used to break the vertical tendency of pure ogival; so also were Byzantine cupolas and domes. The solemn, cold, and naked cathedral church of Alcalá de Henares is a fine example of the above. Few people would consider it to belong to the same class as the eloquent cathedral of Leon and the no less imposing see of Burgos. Nevertheless, it is, every inch of it, as pure Gothic as the last named, only, it is essentially Spanish, the other two being French; it bears the sombre _cachet_ of the age of Spanish Inquisition, of the fanatic intolerant age of the Catholic kings. * * * * * LATER STYLES.--Toward the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, Italian Renaissance entered the country and drove Gothic architecture out of the minds of artists and patronizing prelates.