Not so the too famous and too horrible _Trasparente_ behind the High Altar. What such a thing can possibly mean surpasses the average understanding. In the midst of all that one must venerate, in the home of majesty and loveliness, where beauty in stone and wood and colour takes its supreme form and hues, what effect but that of artistic scandal can such a monstrous creation have? One stares, one wonders, one could even weep for such inexplicable desecration, but one remains mystified and disheartened. Ponz a century ago wrote: "It is marble, an enormous affair in which it would have been better to have forever in the bowels of the hills of Carrara than to have brought it here to be a real blot in the Cathedral." This celebrated atrocity is the work of Narciso Tomé, a native of Toledo, who, if he were useful for nothing else to posterity, offers an exceptional opportunity of measuring the frightful depths into which the dignity of Spanish art was plunged in the beginning of the last century. The degraded art of Churriguera may be bad enough elsewhere; here only does it stand out a gilt, magnificent marble nightmare, which cannot even be criticised, so awed is imagination by an ugliness that defies classification and repels reason. The man who paid 200,000 ducats for this blot upon a perfect temple, were he pope or bishop, merited at least a strait-waistcoat. Instead, he and the artist, and the thing itself, evoked, on its conclusion, national triumph and rejoicings, processions, illuminations, fire-works and bull-fights. Consistency is not a virtue we have a right to expect from races any more than from persons, so the massacre of horses and the idle torture of bulls, the encouragement of the brute instinct of cruelty, the destruction of which is admittedly the object of the mild and tolerant religion of Christ, may be regarded as nothing inordinately outrageous in ecclesiastical feastings. A modern Spanish critic is proud to own that for his part "he would not touch a hair of the smallest statue of this sumptuous fabrication," and regards it as an interesting page in the history of Spanish architecture. There are of course curious natures who find interest in corruption and a certain majesty in madness. To these Churrigueresque masterpieces may be left, and with so many stupendous demands upon our admiration as the Cathedral holds, such a flaunting provocation of the contrary feeling may by the wise and grateful be accepted as a pause, a rest in interjectional contentment. In the dim subterranean chapel of the sepulchre, there are sculptures and paintings worthy of inspection if there were light enough to see them by. One can see, however, that the sculptural group representing the burial of Christ by Copin of Holland is remarkable, but the paintings remain vague and blurred in the partially illuminated obscurity.