The Madrid Academy and the course of architecture

During the reign of Ferdinand VI (1746-59), the first Bourbon monarch born in Spain, a number of different architectural tendencies began to appear simultaneously (Sanchez Canton 1959; Bonet Correa and Blasco

Esquivias 2002). His founding of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1752 was an effort to re-establish the credibility of Spain’s artistic culture, which in turn necessitated striking a middle course between the differing tendencies of Spanish and European art (Caveda y Nava 1867; Sanchez Canton 1952; Bedat 1989). This entailed establishing new relationships with Roman architects and sharing knowledge with the Accademia di San Luca. Like the Roman academy, the basic purpose of the Real Academia was to provide a course of architecture (and the other fine arts) that promoted infallible rules and precedents that stood the test of time. Even though the aim was to provide students with the highest education possible, individuals of ordinary talent could follow the academic discipline and achieve a degree of acceptable competence. This approach may seem outdated by contemporary academic standards but, at the very least, the most inferior form of design promoted by the academy was of a sufficiently higher standard than what would have been produced otherwise.

As previously noted in Chapter 3, the academy took possession of apartments in the Real Casa de la Panaderia in the Plaza Mayor, and thereafter classes were taught in the evenings. The King’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jose de Carvajal y Lancaster, was appointed as the academy’s Protector, providing the first oracion and description of its mission. Baltasar Elgueta y Vigil and Juan Magadan were assigned as the academy’s Vice-Protector and Secretary. AdditionallY, the academy appointed a number of honorary members to serve as a councilors (consilarios) to the Protector and Viceprotector in the general assemblies.5 THey wielded tremendous power at the academy - many of them also served as Grandees, Ministers of State, or consultants to the King - and were often more influential than the professors or honorary academics. The class of professors, called directores, consisted of a director general (appointed for a three year term), two directors each in painting, sculpture, architecture, and etching, and a number of honorary and assistant directors in the various arts. The formal instruction was entrusted to Louis-Michel Van Loo and Antonio Gonzalez Ruiz (painting), Giovanni Domenico Olivieri and Felipe de Castro (sculpture), Ventura Rodriguez and Jose de Hermosilla (architecture), and Juan Bernabe Palomino and Tomas Francisco Prieto (etching). The honorary and assistant directors included Pablo Pernicharo, Juan Bautista de la Pena and Andres de la Calleja in painting, Juan de Villanueva, Antoine Dumandre, Robert Michel, and Luis Salvador Carmona in sculpture, and Diego de Villanueva, Giovanni Battista Sacchetti, Frangois Carlier, and Giacomo Bonavia in architecture.

Though the Junta preparatoria - the preparatory council of the academy - had been teaching courses on architecture since 1744, the idea of a much more succinct and clear course on architecture had become an immediate concern of the directors (Marias and Bustamente Garcia 1989: 151 ff.). Felipe de Castro, fearing that the academy was being ruled by the aristocratic representatives of the King, proposed a plan in 1751 that increased the role of artists in the academy, setting themselves equivalent to the consilarios. But his statutes of 1751 challenged the hierarchical structure of the academy, arousing renewed control by the administration. Perhaps even more condemning to Felipe de Castro’s plan was the intense rivalry between the professors and the disorder and lack of discipline exhibited by the students, a predicament which ultimately brought about the rejection of the 1751 statutes. As noted by Jose Caveda y Navas (1867: 279), there was a visible lack of a well-ordered plan in the academy, one that embraced the entire domain of the fine arts, placing its different disciplines into a harmonious whole, and nowhere was this more noticeable than in the discipline of architecture.

The primary challenge, then, was to provide a geometrical textbook (cuaderno) that could serve as a general rule for the instruction of architecture. The task was given to the two directors of architecture, Ventura Rodriguez and Jose de Hermosilla, who had already prepared a treatise on geometry and architecture, the Architectura civil (Hermosilla y Sandoval 1750),while he was a pensioner in Rome. Hermosilla presented his copy as A primary text and began referring to it during the first academic course in 1753-54. Rodriguez submitted his text in 1755, and in the following year it was combined with Hermosilla’s to produce a printed textbook in 1756.6 In 1757, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, the Conde de Aranda and the future First Minister of State, collected all of the existing and available texts on geometry written prior to Hermosilla’s Architectura civil in order to produce a more systematic course on architecture. As a consilario of the Madrid academy, Aranda had enormous control over his fellow directors and honorarY members. His Dictamen sobre el estudio de la Arquitectura was presented in an effort to coordinate the teaching of architecture at the academy (Bedat 1989: 145).7 Its main purpose was to specify a proven way to teach the art of building, based on the study of all’antica architecture and the development of good taste. The statutes of 1757, which definitively formed the structure of the institution, had provided Ferdinand VI and his councilors with central control over the academy, effectively overturning the 1751 proposal by Felipe de Castro to place responsibility in the hands of the artists and educators. Aranda’s direct link with the academy’s Protector, Vice-protector, and Sovereign enabled him to exert his influence rather easily. Though the Dictamen was not dated, it was probably submitted to the academy in 1757, or soon thereafter, the same year that the academy requested that Hermosilla’s treatise on architecture be transferred from Rome to Madrid (Quintana Martinez 1983: 67-8). Not surprisingly, Aranda’s Dictamen was strikingly similar to Hermosilla’s Architectura civil, dividing the course into three main components, Firmeza, Hermosura, and Comodidad.

Part I, Firmeza, was further divided into mathematics, geometry, materials and methods of construction, qualities of terrain, stone-carving, carpentry, plastering, and machinery. Part II, Hermosura, contained a brief account on beauty in architecture, ancient buildings, the orders and their attributes, perspective, and optics. Like Hermosilla, Aranda considered hermosura the most important principal of architecture and the one demanding the greatest attention. Part III, Comodidad, dealt with the siting and disposition of buildings, fortifications, temples, plazas and public buildings, private houses, and hydraulics. In addition to the three main components, Aranda suggested that the academy should be responsible for the translation and publication of the most important treatises on architecture throughout history. These included the Spanish translation of Vitruvius’ De architectura, by Miguel de Urrea (1582), Claude Perrault’s French translation of the same work, the Spanish translation of Serlio’s Third and Fourth Books by Francisco de Villalpando (1552), and the works of Scamozzi, Alberti, Palladio, and Desgodets. Complementing this brief library, Aranda also recommended that the students pensioned in Rome should be responsible for collecting casts of ancient fragments such as ornaments, capitals and profiles. In the wake of Aranda’s Dictamen, the academy requested a second proposal, this time from Ventura Rodriguez, Diego de Villanueva, Alejandro Gonzalez Velazquez, and Josef de Castaneda. Hermosilla had already presented his ideas in the form of the Architectura civil, so it was left to the remaining directors to prepare an altogether different proposal.

Despite the academy’s earlier criticisms of Hermosilla’s work in Rome, the directors of the Academia prepared a course of study that was entirely indebted to his Architectura civil. Their Plan Presentado por los Directores de Arquitectura para el Curso de esta Facultad was submitted on February 24, 1759, and consisted of four parts; Mathematics (the science of numbers, algebra, geometry, conical and spherical sections, and gnomonics), Strength (principles of statics, qualities of terrain, materials and methods of construction, masonry, stone carving, and carpentry), Beauty (the five orders of architecture and their attributes, as well as the principles of optics and perspective), and Function (the siting and disposition of buildings, including temples, plazas, private houses and fortifications, hydraulics, and restora-tion).8 THese four not only followed closely the division in Hermosilla’s Architectura civil, but were also subdivided according to his outline, with the notable exception of the study on building machinery.

At the same time that the academy was busy trying to formulate the course of architecture in Madrid, the idea of sending Spanish pensioners to study in Rome was becoming increasingly more important. To that end, the Academy requested on September 10, 1758, proposals for the course of study for the Spanish pensioners in Rome (Lopez de Meneses 1933-34). Antonio Gonzalez Ruiz, Pablo Pernicharo and Antonio Gonzalez Velazquez prepared the proposals for the painting course. Giovanni Domenico Olivieri, Felipe de Castro, and Juan Pascual de la Mena outlined the sculpture program. Jose de Hermosilla, Ventura Rodriguez, and Jaime Marquet (a French architect who had just recently been made academico de merito) were responsible for the architecture component. Ventura Rodriguez, however, fell unexpectedly ill and did not submit his proposal as planned.

Consequently, Jose de Hermosilla, whose previous experience in Rome had set the standard for future Spaniards to emulate, submitted his plan to the approval of the Academy on September 28, 1758 (Moleon Gavilanes 2003: 109-12). On October 10, the proposals were read at the Academy listing some sixty instructions for the students to follow, of which twenty-two pertained solely to architects. The course was to have lasted six years, and was divided into three parts. The first two years were to have been spent studying in Rome and its environs, the next two years travelling to Bologna, Milan, Genoa, Venice, Germany, and Flanders, and the last two years in Holland, London, and France. The students were required to study geometry, statics, hydrostatics, perspective, and stereotomy, among other things. They were required to familiarize themselves with Vitruvius’ treatise and its modern commentaries by Daniele Barbaro, Philander, Alberti, Perrault, as well as the treatises of Serlio, Palladio, Scamozzi, Vignola, Arfe y Villafane, Fray Lorenzo de San Nicolas, Caramuel, and Tosca. Additionally, the pensioners were required to undertake a number of activities while in Rome, including making copies of well-known works of art, imitating the styles of famous artists, carefully examining the monuments and ruins of Antiquity, and engaging in the design, assistance, and construction of buildings and projects. Finally, students were expected to study the larger context of the city and the natural landscape. Admittedly, Hermosilla’s course of study would have taken far too long to complete, and did not take into account individual inclinations or interests. His instructions were never formally approved by the academy, and the debates that ensued over the appropriate course of education only served to neutralize what would have resulted in a unique and exciting program. Debates on the course of architecture at the Academia de San Fernando would continue well into the latter half of the eighteenth century with proposals from Jose de Castaneda in 1760, Diego de Villanueva in 1766, and Benito Bails in 1768, among several others (Quintana Martinez 1983: 64-75; Marias and Bustamante Garcia 1989). It was not until 1774 when the academy established itself permanently in the Palacio Goyeneche on the Calle de Alcala that it would begin to put in place a more definitive course of architectural education, a process that continued well into the nineteenth century.

Despite the debates regarding the appropriate course of architecture at the academy, pensions to study in Italy resumed in 1758 with Domingo Antonio Lois Monteagudo (1723-86) from Galicia, and Juan de Villanueva (1739-1811) from Madrid representing the first class of architects (Moleon Gavilanes 2003: 114-53). Miguel Fernandez was called back to Spain to make way for the young Spaniards, and Hermosilla’s instructions for the pensioners were issued as an ideal framework. While in Rome, Domingo Lois produced a set of exceptional drawings of ancient and modern architectural fragments which he later arranged into a book titled Libro de barios ddornos sacados de las mejores fabricas de Roma asi antiguas como modernas (Lois Monteagudo 1759-64), a collection of free-hand ink sketches and notes that resembled the loose format of Hermosilla’s Architectura civil (Cervera Vera 1985). Consequently, Lois was made an Accademico di merito at the Roman Academia di San Luca in 1764 for which he donated his project for a centralized church in plan, section, and elevation (Marconi et al. 1974: II, 8).9 JUan de Villanueva, nineteen years old at the time of his appointment, would also fulfill one of Hermosilla’s primary instructions by examining the ancient and modern works of architecture in Rome. His careful study of antiquities in situ, and loose pen and ink fantasy cityscapes, in the tradition of Juvarra and Piranesi, would distinguish him from Lois as both a scholar and visionary. More importantly, Villanueva’s experience in Rome would place him at the forefront of architecture in Spain in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a position he would never relinquish throughout his remarkable professional career.

It is clear that Hermosilla’s various proposals for the study of architecture at the Academia de Bellas Artes provided a new framework for architectural education in Spain. They called for sharing in the many cultural and artistic activities in Rome and further afield, and the re-establishment of the tradition of Spanish al romano architecture through the study of the ancient and modern works of Italian art. And though his proposals were modeled primarily on those of the Accademia di San Luca and the Academie de France, from the point of view of celebrating certain recognized building types and forms of artistic patronage, the Spanish academy was far more modest in its goals. For the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando sought to promote the currents of enlightenment thought on the one hand, while on the other, it understood the necessity of upholding the traditions and customs that distinguished Spain from the rest of Europe.

As I have tried to demonstrate, Italian influence on Spain’s architecture in the early eighteenth-century was tied to very powerful Spanish artistic and cultural traditions. The celebrations in Spain and Italy surrounding the Bourbon succession, as well as the many built and ephemeral projects that followed Philip V’s rise, reveal how early eighteenth-century architecture could be so symbolically charged. Rome, of course, was the key; politically, culturally and artistically. The city and its magnificent monuments, streets, and piazze were the stage for testing European architecture and diplomacy. Maintaining close links with Rome further strengthened the Bourbon claims in Italy and underlined the Bourbon monarchs’ faith and piety. As Italian influence increasingly spread to Spain, it supplanted the French presence that immediately followed Philip’s ascendancy. If French taste was fashionable, Italian art and architecture was authoritative. The many Italian architects and artists that graced the early Bourbon courts of Philip V and Ferdinand VI brought to Spain a renewed sense of Roman artistic vigor and purpose that transformed the Spanish reales sitios into international

Monuments. The lessons of Rome also translated directly into a coherent program of academic instruction that fundamentally shaped the newly established academy in Madrid, and educated several generations of Spanish artists and architects in Roman grandeur and excellence. Yet what made Italian influence in eighteenth-century Spain so remarkable, was that it transcended the strictly formal and academic approach and married national sympathies with practical considerations to achieve a truly distinct Spanish contribution to the architectural fabric of early modern cities and towns. The art and architecture of Spain and the Ibero-American world would certainly be worse off without the contributions of eighteenth-century Spanish artists and architects, but so would the face of Rome.