Hontañon Family. Father and son, they worked on some of the last Gothic buildings in Spain. Juan Gil de Hontañon (c.1480–1526) worked on Sigüenza Cathedral, and designed and built mortuary-chapels in the hall-church of San Antolin, Medina del Campo, Valladolid, and the Church of Santa Clara, Briviesca, Burgos (both c.1503–c.1523). He worked on the cloister and chapter-house of Palencia Cathedral (1505–16). In 1512 he was appointed Master-Mason at Salamanca Cathedral, and by 1520 the building had risen to the vaults of the side-chapels. He designed the new crossing-lantern at Seville Cathedral with its complicated rib-vaults (1513–19) to replace Colonia's structure that had collapsed. From 1524 he was engaged on the design of Segovia Cathedral, the building of which was carried out by his son, Rodrigo Gil de Hontañon (1500–77).

Rodrigo seems to have worked at Santiago, probably with Álava, in 1521, and was consulted at Valladolid before becoming Master-Mason (1530) at Astorga Cathedral, where he probably built the nave. He then worked on the transepts at Salamanca from 1537, and then, or simultaneously, at the cloisters of Santiago. He also contributed at Plasencia and designed the chevet of Segovia Cathedral (from c.1560). At Salamanca he introduced Renaissance ideas, and at the façade of the College of San Ildefonso, Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid (1537–53), the style is entirely Renaissance, of the Plateresque type. He designed Monterey Palace (1539–41), the Monasterio de Bernardas de Jesús (from 1542), both in Salamanca, and the Church of La Magdalena, Valladolid (1566–72). He wrote Compendio de Arquitectura y Simetria in c. the 1560s, which exists in a distorted copy made by one Simon Garcia in 1681.

Bibliography

Aznar (ed.) (1941);
Chueca Goitia (1951, 1953);
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, xli/4 (Dec.1982), 281–93;
Kubler & and Soria (1959);
Pereda de la Reguera (ed.) (1951);
Jane Turner (1996)