Review: Nueva Roma: Mitología y humanismo en el Renacimiento sevillano by Vicente Lleó Cañal

Abstract

Vicente Lleo Canal Nueva Roma: Mitologia y humanismo en el Renacimiento sevillano Revised ed., Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanica, 2012, 339 pp., 120 color and 16 b/w illus. €28.85, ISBN 9788415245247 Vicente Lleo Canal’s Nueva Roma , first published in 1979 by the Diputacion Provincial de Sevilla, has been reissued in a revised and updated, handsomely produced volume by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanica. The “New Rome” of the title refers to Seville, the southern city that became the center of the Spanish Empire— and the center of Spanish humanism, the author argues—as Spain’s official port of transatlantic trade in the sixteenth century. Over the course of the sixteenth century, classicizing art and architecture, especially in the form of triumphal arches all’antica , helped transform Seville’s outward appearance to match its new status as imperial entrepot. But superficial appearances aside, did Seville really experience a Renaissance? Were the expressions of Renaissance style in Seville’s urban palaces, funerary monuments, and public architecture merely formal borrowings, or did they represent a more profound shift in ways of thinking about life and death, the ancient past and the modern city, nature and urbanism? These are the questions that drive Lleo’s study, and they are far from easy to answer since shockingly little of Renaissance Seville has survived the centuries. The triumphal city gates were demolished in the nineteenth century. Dozens of urban palaces have been destroyed, too, among them the famous house-museum of Gonzalo Argote de Molina and the palaces and gardens of Ferdinand Columbus. Surviving sixteenth-century constructions like the town hall on the Plaza de San Francisco have undergone heavy-handed renovations that profoundly altered their original decorative programs. Much secular painting and sculpture on mythological (and sometimes erotic) themes has been lost, as have many humanist manuscripts that never made it into print. As a result, Lleo’s project is what he describes as an almost archaeological endeavor to reconstruct the humanists’ sixteenth-century Seville, a “Carthage” buried beneath the victorious culture of the …