Vitruvian influence in eighteenth-century Spain was fuelled by the 1787 translation of the Ten Books on Architecture by the Spanish antiquarian Fray Jose Ortiz y Sanz (Los diez libros de arquitectura de Marco Vitruvio Polion), even though the first edition in Castillian had been produced by Miguel de Urrea in 1582, and a manuscript edition by Lazaro de Velasco had been circulating as early as 1564 (Sanchez Canton 1923: I, 183-221; Velasco 1999). Vitruvius emerged in eighteenth-century Spain as a central concern of the new Bourbon monarchs who were intent on shaping Spanish society and culture away from the previous Hapsburg dynasty into a more national and monarchical sensibility, as well as in intellectual circles where Vitruvian theory continued to resonate as an ideal (Rodriguez Ruiz 1987). To that end, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando made explicit the goal of addressing the emerging problems of architectural education in eighteenth-century Spain, including the role of beauty in building, the appropriateness of sacred and secular building typologies, and the image of the city as a whole. A library of great authors beginning with the Spanish translation of Vitruvius’ De architectura, by Miguel de Urrea (1582) made up a list of treatises (both ancient and modern) with which the students of architecture at the academy needed to be familiar.
While Vitruvian influence on Spanish architecture can be easily traced in the early eighteenth century, the Roman author’s impact on the city and
Planning is less discernible. It is generally thought that Philip V and Ferdinand VI had little interest in urban planning, unlike Charles III who saw it as a valuable tool for shaping society and culture. Nevertheless, urban reform was a concern that both Philip V and Ferdinand VI took seriously, particularly in respect to Madrid where the court principally resided (Blasco Esquivias 2002a). The relationship between urban planning and an idealized social vision was obvious - by organizing the space society occupied, it was possible to change people’s habits, as well as the larger community structure. In this sense, idealized urban plans were extremely useful symbols in early Bourbon Spain, and the impact of Vitruvius on Spanish urbanism was particularly noticeable.
The first indication that Vitruvian principles would influence eighteenth-century Spain came unexpectedly from two Late Baroque Spanish architects known for their flamboyant designs, Jose Benito de Churriguera, and Teodoro Ardemans. Famous for his decorative retables, Churriguera would design the model town and palace of Nuevo Baztan near Madrid (1709-13) for Juan de Goyeneche, an influential political figure in the early court of Philip V (Rodriguez G. de Ceballos 1971b: 27-8; Bartolome 1981; Chueca Goitia 1987: 156-7; Lozano Bartolozzi 2011: 588-90). The plan of the new town marked a decisive move towards greater rationality and stress on function over scenic decoration, though the latter was certainly not lacking. The town was also built to house a community of farmers and a small manufacturing plant specializing in fine domestic glassware, though the impressive Goyeneche family residence, a combination of church, palace, and square - not unlike the Escorial - occupied the center of the town. Additional market and festival squares flanked the lateral and rear sides of the palace and church. Unlike the Escorial, whose town would not be built until after 1767 under Charles III, in Nuevo Baztan rational planning was married to grandiose decoration, suggesting that the two were not entirely incompatible. The church fagade and palace entrance in particular reveal how French and Italian decorative influences were already beginning to shape the architecture of early eighteenth-century Spain.
The combination of town and palace would appeal greatly to Teodoro Ardemans, who, as we have already seen, became involved in 1720 in what would be his finest work for Philip V, the plan for the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso. While Ardemans was busy working on the palace, a small town was growing informally on a declivity to the northwest that included modest residential dwellings, a hospital, cemetery and a glass factory (Callejo Delgado and Lorrio 1996: 30-3). The adjacent town was completely reconfigured during the reign of Charles III (from around 1762), extending axially to the north with the great plaza extended into a trapezoid and flanked by new service buildings, a theatre, and monumental gates (Chueca Goitia 1987: 170-72; Sancho 1995: 539-67; Lozano Bartolozzi 2011: 565-6). From there, new residences (casas particulares) replaced the previously shoddy ones, and filled out the rest of the town. A new street was laid perpendicular to the main axis, and the town was given a new hospice, church, and royal glass manufacture plant. In this sense, La Granja could be seen as a model town that followed the principles of regularity, order, and cleanliness. This did not necessarily imply a geometric plan or ideal form, but rather suggested that it conform to the topography of the site and its pre-existing buildings by providing straight streets and regular blocks, as well as offering solutions to the social displacement that would occur with the new development.
However, the principles for the layout of the town of La Granja closely follow those of Ardemans’ own treatise, the Ordenanzas de Madrid (Ardemans 1719), a work on urban planning and civil engineering that expanded on a previously-written treatise by Juan de Torija in 1664 (Rodriguez G. de Ceballos 1971a). Ardemans enhanced the original by providing it with a commentary and recommendations on the difficulties of building technology, concluding the work with an appendix of illustrious Spanish artists and architects alongside their European counterparts. From the start, Ardemans referred to Vitruvius and his principles of architecture (order, symmetry, disposition etc.), the education and role of the architect in society, and the proper way to lay out a healthy idealized city as described by the Roman author near the end of his First Book. Hygiene, meteorology, the regime of the winds, light, and the heat of the sun all conditioned the health of the inhabitants. From there his treatise moved from the specific needs of individual structures (both formal and technical) to the larger context of public space, streetscapes, and the servicing of a town. For an architect and artist typically associated with pageantry and splendor, Ardemans’ urban ideas (like those of his contemporary Churriguera) demonstrate how early eighteenth-century Vitruvian theory in Spain was not produced by Enlightenment or reform thinkers but rather Late Baroque and Rococo artisans and craftsmen. Moreover, while many insist that Philip V cared little for urban planning, the examples of Nuevo Baztan and La Granja suggest that that was not entirely the case.
As already noted in Chapter 6, both Tomas Vicente Tosca’s Tratado de Arquitectura Civil, Montea y Canteria, y Reloxes (Tosca 1727), and Agustin Bruno Zaragoza y Ebri’s Escuela de Arquitectura Civil (Zaragoza y Ebri 1738) were structured around Vitruvius’ principles of firmness (materials and methods), commodity (plans of public and private buildings), and delight (the orders of architecture). They were followed by Jose de Hermosilla who in early 1750 began to organize and write a treatise titled La Architectura Civil de Dn Joseph de Hermosilla y de Sandoval. Produced while he was still in Rome completing the church of Santissima Trinita degli Spagnoli, the work appeared in two manuscript forms (Hermosilla y Sandoval 1750) but unfortunately never achieved the success one might have expected given its timely appearance at the middle of the century (Rodriguez Ruiz 1985: 33n39). It was never published afterwards, even though it received significant praise from such distinguished figures as
Ferdinando Fuga, Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, and P. Alonso Cano, the superior of the Trinitarians in Rome. Yet the Architectura civil proved to be of tremendous importance to Spain, for the King’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jose de Carvajal y Lancaster, who also happened to be the Academia de San Fernando’s Protector, had instructed Hermosilla to consider a future course of architecture for the new academy. His treatise, as well as his subsequent proposal for the academic program of study at the Academia, set the intellectual framework for architectural discourse and practice in Spain in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and contributed to the formation of several generations of Spanish architects.
Arquitectura civil was structured around three books on civil architecture situated between a preliminary compendium on practical geometry and a final survey of architectural machinery. The three central books appropriately followed the Vitruvian triad - fortaleza, comodidad, y hermosura - with the latter category occupying a middle position between the two more practical ends. The first book, fortaleza, dealt mainly with materials and methods of construction, foundations, walls, paving, roofs, vaults, and timber trusses. The second book, hermosura, occupied a central position for it addressed the essential problem of beauty in building, namely in the disposition of the orders of architecture and the types (gen-eros) of buildings according to Vitruvius’ description of temple plans. In early-modern Spain, translations of Vitruvius tended to use two renditions of venustas to describe beauty in building: belleza which was the Castilian version of the Italian bellezza, and hermosura, which was a more expressive Spanish term used to signify physical beauty. Though the two were often interchangeable, belleza was more often used to describe beauty in general, wHereas hermosura was typically associated with grandeur, excellence and perfection, with additional interpretations suggesting nobility, serenity, and correspondence of part to whole.2
Book two also followed Tosca’s division into civil and military architecture, followed by Caramuel’s distinction between upright and oblique dispositions. Even though Hermosilla believed that no singular building stood as a paradigm of perfection, he cited the Temple oF Solomon as the model to which all architecture should aspire.3 HErmosilla also believed that the discussion of the orders of architecture was ultimately arbitrary in comparison to the three more important themes of fortaleza, comodi-dad and hermosura. This admission was perhaps the first time that a Spaniard readily acknowledged Claude Perrault’s distinction between the positive and arbitrary aspects of beauty in architecture. Like Tosca, Hermosilla also described the method for making spirally-twisted shafts, believing that Solomonic columns were legitimate variants to the canonical orders of architecture.
Book three, comodidad, dealt with the larger context of urban planning, civic spaces, and public and private buildings. The relationship between urban planning and social reform was obvious (Oechslin 1978b: 406 ff).
Hermosilla believed that it was possible to change people’s habits, as well as the larger community structure, by organizing the space society occupied. In this sense, his approach was a profoundly ethical one.
It is important to note that at the time of Hermosilla’s writing there were very few architectural treatises or pattern books being published in Rome, or elsewhere in EuropE.4 The great Baroque treatises of Lobkowitz, Guarini, Desgodets, and Daviler had been published more than half a century earlier and in many cases reprinted several times. The critique of Baroque and Rococo architecture, in the form of a rigorist approach to composition, the orders and planning - mainly through the treatises of Laugier, and Lodoli (via Algarotti) - would begin to appear in the years immediately following Hermosilla’s manuscript. With the exception, perhaps, of Giuseppe Vasi, Piranesi, the Galli Bibiena, and others whose theatrical stage sets and vedute of ancient and modern Rome would add a new dimension of drama and per-spectival fantasy to architectural representation, the dearth of theoretical treatises on architecture around 1750 was noticeable. Hermosilla’s treatise, therefore, stands at a critical moment in the history of architectural theory, for not only was it intended to be a synthesis of all previous works of architecture, but also posited the challenges that he and others would have to face if architecture was going to play a critical role in the future development of Spain. Yet in this respect Hermosilla’s ideas were clearly split: that is, while he believed that the canonical Roman exemplars served as the central doctrine for the education and practice of architecture, he understood from experience that every structure has its own temperament and unique character.
In the wake of Hermosilla’s treatise, interest in Vitruvius’ treatise grew quickly at the Madrid academy, where architectural education was not only concerned with the grand manner of Roman classicism, but with regional Spanish variants as well. Among the most influential works that contributed to this notion was the Spanish translation of Claude Perrault’s French edition of Vitruvius (Perrault 1673), the Compendio de loz diez libros de arqui-tectura de Vitruvio (Madrid, 1761) by the professor of architecture Josef de Castaneda, with an introduction by Ignacio de Hermosilla, the younger brother of Jose de Hermosilla and Secretary of the Academia de San Fernando. As the Secretary of the academy, the younger Hermosilla had at that time offered to translate into Spanish a number of Latin, Italian, and French works to supplement the list of great authors on architecture that had been previously espoused by his older brother Jose. Perrault’s inclusion was therefore critical, as it was not a Roman or Renaissance treatise but rather a recent and novel adaptation of the ancient author. The frontispiece of the book (modeled on Perrault’s well-known image) showed the figure of architecture presenting to Spain the image and plan of ancient architecture according to the rules of Vitruvius (Figure 7.1). In plan the Escorial figures prominently, and, in the distance, the great monastery stands in place of Perrault’s celebrated east front of the Louvre. The attention given to the Escorial clearly underlined Juan de Arfe y Villafane’s comment in his De
Figure 7.1 Claude Perrault, frontispiece, from the Compendia de loz diez libros de arquitectura de Vitruvio (1761). Courtesy Biblioteca de Catalunya. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Varia conmensuracidn (Arfe y Villafane 1585, 3v) that the royal monastery was not only indebted to ancient Greco-Roman architecture and planning but rivaled it as well.
However, Perrault’s distinction between positive and arbitrary beauty, and its corollary that the proportioning of the orders was ultimately a subjective task, challenged the long-held trust in proportional symbolism. Perrault also championed the Hebraic interpretation of Solomon’s Temple, producing his own reconstruction in the De Culto Divino of 1678, a work modeled closely on the code of Maimonides (Taylor 1991). His attempt - perhaps a reflection of his dislike of Villalpando’s reconstruction - presented the Temple in a “Jewish style” of architecture rather than in Greco-Roman classicism. Though Catholic, Perrault had Jansenist leanings and his archaeological inclinations were evident in his independence from theological preference. But the seeds of this transformation had already been pre-figured by Caramuel (who supported Villalpando) and they continued under Tosca, and Hermosilla, whose Vitruvian tendencies made him appear relatively neutral on the subject.
Shortly thereafter, a published treatise compiling the essential components of all the previous literature on civil architecture appeared in Spain. The work entitled Elementos de toda la architectura civil (1763) was the product of an Austrian Jesuit and mathematician, Christian Rieger (1714-80), who had come to Madrid. The treatise was originally published in Vienna in 1756 as Universae architecturae civilis elementa, and later translated into Castillian by the Spanish Jesuit Miguel Benavente, a professor of mathematics at the Seminario de Nobles in Madrid. The aim of developing a new comprehensive treatise on architecture fit in well with the interests of the Madrid Academy, who at that time was still seeking a definitive course on architecture. The frontispiece of the Spanish edition (Figure 7.2) was produced in imitation of Abbe Laugier’s famous illustration from the Essai sur l’Architecture (1753). A naked figure was seated on a rock, inventing the orders of architecture from the form of the primitive hut. On the ground nearby was a basket around which acanthus leaves were sprouting, and in the far background a cluster of rock forms represented Stonehenge. Part III of Rieger’s treatise, the section on the ornaments of architecture, began with a perspective image of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem from Villalpando’s reconstruction. The Solomonic order though was not singled out as an exemplar but included among other stereometric diagrams and details. By now, all that remained of Solomonic imagery in Spain was the Escorial itself. Finally, Part IV of Rieger’s treatise dealt primarily with the construction of buildings and the architectonic embellishment of cities, in particular that of streets, plazas, and entrances. Among the many examples he singled out was the Royal Palace at Caserta (1752-80), a colossal structure built by Luigi Vanvitelli for Carlo di Borbone, king of the Two Sicilies (Figure 7.3). Of course at the time of Rieger’s publication in 1763, Carlo di Borbone was already king of Spain, having left behind his beloved Naples to assume his duties in Madrid as Charles III.
Figure 7.2 Christian Rieger, frontispiece, from Elementos de toda la architectura civil (1763). Courtesy Biblioteca de Catalunya. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Figure 7.3 Christian Rieger, view of the Royal Palace at Caserta, from Elementos de toda la architectura civil (1763). Courtesy Biblioteca de Catalunya. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
With the definitive Spanish edition of Vitruvius’ Ten Books by Jose Ortiz y Sanz in 1787, dedicated to Charles III, the Spanish monarch achieved a distinction that had only been reserved to Augustus (Vitruvius), Pope Julius II (Fra Giacondo), Francis I (Guillaume Philander), Philip II (Miguel de Urrea), and Louis XIV (Claude Perrault). But among those, Charles III was the first to have had two editions of Vitruvius dedicated to him as the 1758 edition of L’architettura by Berardo Galiani had been dedicated when he was the King of Naples and the Two Sicilies (Vitruvius 2005). Add to that the fact that the Compendio of 1761 was also dedicated to Charles III, and it becomes absolutely clear what a great influence the Roman author had in eighteenth-century Bourbon Spain. Whether in the form of Rococo decorative ornament or Late Baroque classicism, or even Neoclassicism, Vitruvian influence was flexibly adapted to suit the urban and architectural needs of early eighteenth-century Spain without much fuss or reservation. Only in the latter half of the century would the Roman author be equated with the rigorist tendencies of pure Roman architecture.
World History
