Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE DEVELOPMENT OF ITALIAN INFLUENCE PERIOD OF PHILIP II (1556-1598) THE second half of the sixteenth century, comprised in the reign of Philip II, is notable, on the one hand, for the influx of Italian painters into Spain, and, on the other, for the excellence attained under Italian influences by certain painters of native birth, though many of them, by the dryness of their imitation of Raphael and others, are known as "Mannerists." Philip inherited from his father a discriminating love of the arts and lavished a generous patronage alike on architects, sculptors, and painters. The great monument of his reign was the Escorial, built in fulfilment of a pledge to his father that he would found a fitting mausoleum for the Spanish kings, and of a vow to Saint Laurence, on whose festival his generals won the battle of St.-Quentin. Reared on the rock terraces of the Guadaramas, the stupendous pile is at once a convent, college, palace, church, and royal mausoleum. In contrast to the profuse ornamentation of the "Plateresque" style and to the exaggeration of the "Grotesque," the design is in the severest simplicity of the Greco-Roman. The planning and commencement were the work of Juan Baptista de Toledo, who had studied in Rome and practised his art in Naples; and after his death, in 1567,the building was carried to completion by his pupil and assistant, Juan de Herrera, an Asturian. The latter is said to have been responsible for the plan of the church, which has been described as one of the happiest examples of classical architecture adapted for Christian worship. So admirable are its proportions, that St. Peter's itself, in spite of its unapproached magnitude, does not at first sight impress the mind with a stronger sense of its vastness or awaken a deeper fe...