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

Tomas Macsotay

doi:10.5334/ah.249

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.

Highlights

In 1785, in the southern port of Cádiz (Figure 1), the writer and amateur architect Gaspar de Molina y Zaldívar, 3rd Marquis de Ureña (1741–1806), wrote a pocket-sized manual that called for a return to the early Christian basilica and the Temple of Solomon as the optimal type of Christian church
The author [Mézières] says: let the site be sombre, hazy and producing half-tones: imagine yourself in a mountain range, not one covered in arid rocks, but made up of mountains and hills uniformly covered with trees and bushes without other objects; we find a sensible analogy between spectacle and sensations
His work reveals that the confrontation with Hispanic traditions of ecclesiastical construction was more than a clash between one architectural style and another

Summary

Tomas Macsotay

A key text on Spanish architectural reform, Marqués de Ureña’s Reflexiones sobre la arquitectura, ornato, y música del templo of 1785, contains a rich and layered discussion of the doctrinal and aesthetic foundations of ecclesiastical architecture. Ureña’s Reflexiones appears at a moment of transition for Spanish architectural history by calling for a return to the ancient basilica type. The integration of doctrine and aesthetic reason in this defence of the original basilica demonstrates Ureña’s wish to modernize devices that had traditionally undergirded religious practice and featured materially in the education of the faithful. The paper argues for the importance, given Ureña’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

Introduction

Conclusion