Plateresque, Spanish Plateresco, © vlas2000/Shutterstock.com(“Silversmith-like”), main architectural style in Spain during the late 15th and the 16th centuries, also used in Spain’s American colonies. Cristóbal de Villalón first used the term in 1539 while comparing the richly ornamented facade of the Cathedral of León to a silversmith’s intricate work. Later the name came to be generally applied to late Gothic and early Renaissance Spanish architecture, since it was characterized by an intricate and minutely detailed relief ornament that is generally applied to the surface of buildings for extravagant decorative effect and without regard for structural articulation. Favourite motifs of this florid ornament include twisted columns, heraldic escutcheons, and sinuous scrolls. Clusters of this jewelry-like ornament contrast with broad expanses of flat wall surface.
The Plateresque style went through two distinguishable phases. The first phase, termed the Isabelline style because it flourished during the reign of Isabella I, lasted from about 1480 to about 1521. In this phase (also known as the Gothic-Plateresque style), the forms of late Flamboyant Gothic still predominate, and Renaissance elements are used with only imperfect understanding. The first phase, like its successor, utilized Mudejar ornament—i.e., the intricate and elegant decorative patterns used by Moorish artists working in Christian-ruled Spain. The Isabelline style is well represented in the buildings of Enrique de Egas and Diego de Riaño and is typified by the facade of the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid (1488), in which architectural ornamentation seems free from all external dictates and pursues its own life without regard to scale, composition, placement, or appropriateness.
The second phase, the Renaissance-Plateresque, or simply the Plateresque, lasted from about 1525 to 1560. The architect and sculptor Diego de Siloé (d. 1563) helped inaugurate this phase, in which High Renaissance structural and decorative elements clearly predominated over late Gothic ones. In the Granada Cathedral (1528–43) and other buildings, Diego evolved a purer, more severe, harmonious, and unified style using massive geometric forms; correct classical orders became frequent, and nonstructural Gothic ribbing tended to disappear in favour of Italianate round arches and domical vaults. The buildings of Alonso de Covarrubias and of Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón, particularly the latter’s facade of the University of Alcalá de Henares (1541–53), are the masterworks of the second style, which lasted only a few decades. Even the balance and correctness of the style seemed excessively rich to the sombre young man who became King Philip II in 1556 and supervised construction of the severe El Escorial.