The Distracted Believer and the Return to the First Basilica: Marqués de Ureña’s Reflexiones sobre la Arquitectura, Ornato, y Música del Templo of 1785

Abstract

A key text on Spanish architectural reform, Marques de Urena’s Reflexiones sobre la arquitectura, ornato, y musica del templo of 1785, contains a rich and layered discussion of the doctrinal and aesthetic foundations of ecclesiastical architecture. Urena’s Reflexiones appears at a moment of transition for Spanish architectural history by calling for a return to the ancient basilica type. The paper reconstructs a discussion waged by Urena and his contemporaries on problems within the contemporary Spanish church interior: its use of wooden ornament, ephemerals, transformable altars and other Spanish late-baroque ecclesiastical decor. Thus, the return to origins in Christian architecture might be framed in terms of a wider debate on usage, and the sense in which the basilica offered a corrective for the relationship between the religious building and religious practitioners. The integration of doctrine and aesthetic reason in this defence of the original basilica furthermore demonstrates Urena’s wish to modernize devices that had traditionally undergirded religious practice and featured materially in the education of the faithful. Finally, the paper argues for the importance, given Urena’s introduction of a framework that allowed for an aesthetic way of reasoning, of considering affective responses to architecture in the Iberian and Hispanic context.