page_title: Church of Saint Anthony the Great
section_title: Façade of Renaissance
hierarchical_section_title: Church of Saint Anthony the Great / Façade of Renaissance
caption_attribution_description: English: Façade of Renaissance in San Anton of Bilbao.
context_page_description: The Church of San Antón is a Catholic temple located in the Old Town neighbourhood of Bilbao, Spain. It is dedicated to Anthony the Great, known as San Antón in Spanish. It is featured, along with the San Antón Bridge, in the city's coat of arms. The estuary of Bilbao flows next to it.
context_section_description: The Saint Anthon church, in Bilbao, contains a typical front, not of the own and general style of the church, which is the Gothic, but of the Renaissance style born in the 16th century. This owes to the repeated reforms to which the church has been submitted, and every reform has contributed something new and characteristic of that epoch.
  To begin with, it is necessary to emphasize that there exist features that belong neither to the Renaissance nor to the Gothic. Example of it we have the arches of the entry. These arches are called round arches and are typical of the Romanesque style; and at the door there is another type of arch that was used at the end of the 15th century.
  A really Gothic and visible element from any point of view, are the rib vaults, that are in the whole church, so much in as externally, though in this paragraph we indicate only the ones outside.
  In the front we find the front of the church, a front that goes from the sides of the door up to being over it. The mentioned front was built in the year 1548, a generous front in proportions and rich in all the decorative resources of the Renaissance. Around the arch we notice small sculptures of low relief, with the form of heads, symbol of the anthropocentrism that dominated the Renaissance epoch. The great majority of the heads contain wings of angels behind them; and just in the middle of all, in the central keystone, we notice a slightly bigger sculpture than the others, with the form of a shield, and with the year 1548 recorded in it, as a signature of the builder.
  In every side of the door we can see another typical example of the Renaissance, which was the use of Corinthian columns. Those which appear in this church are of small size in comparison with other buildings, but they support all their essence: a Corinthian capital with its rectangular annulet and abacus and its acanthus' leaves, some coiled forming "caulículos". The shaft we find it in grooved style and the end of the shaft and the foot we can see it with sculptural drawings of plants (basically leaves) and human representations.
  And to finish with the front, as we can observe in this image, we find two niches, one to each side of the door, which until 1892 were empty, and that from that year's reform, the sculptures of Saint Pedro and Saint Paul went to occupy them.
  The niches contain scallops, which are the space of the niche itself, with representations that venerate what is inside the niche. In this case we also find in the scallop two little angels holding a medallion with the head of another human being.
  All these elements (niches, angels, scallops, medallions, Corinthian columns) are representative elements of the Renaissance style of the 15th and 16th centuries; all of them have as canon to represent the beauty and the naturalism, and all of them shape the great front of the Saint Anthon church of Bilbao.
caption: Façade of Renaissance in San Anton of Bilbao.
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