492 Coroneo
the church had been one of the most significant and stylistically sophisticated
monuments of Catalan Gothic in Sardinia; for instance, its presbytery replicat-
ed that of Girona Cathedral. In addition, the Franciscan church in Stampace,
which had a thirteenth-century plan, with fifteenth- through seventeenth-
century modifications, was demolished in the 1970s. The loss of these men-
dicant churches has deprived the island not only of two benchmarks in the
history of architecture, but also of two spaces that once displayed, in a coher-
ent setting, Iberian late Gothic and Italian Late Mannerist polyptychs, which
are now scattered among various public and private collections.
As for the history of scholarship and research, there have been few signifi-
cant contributions since the productive period between the 1950s and 1970s.
The one good existing monograph points to the need of a comprehensive ac-
count of Catalan Gothic architecture in Sardinia and its relationship to that of
Catalonia and other Iberian regions.18 This analysis would distinguish between
the competencies of external authorities in establishing this style, and those
exercised by local craftsmen who elaborated on it.
5 Late Renaissance Churches
Between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Europe underwent
an epochal transformation. In 1492—after the marriage of the “Catholic
Monarchs” and the consequent unification of Castile and Aragon—the capture
of Granada, the last Iberian principality in Islamic hands, marked the end of
the Reconquista. Christopher Columbus’s first expedition opened the way to
the colonization of the New World, shifting the barycenter of commercial inter-
ests from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. After 1506, the proclamation of the
Spanish Crown and its progressive “imperial” expansion from Flanders to Peru,
saw a Catalonia and Sardinia much more confined to the limited horizons of
Mediterranean traffic and Spanish feudalism. Sardinia suffered from the endem-
ic problems caused by fiscal pressures: a lack of social mobility, recurrent plague
epidemics, and Berber incursions. The Administration of Towers, instituted by
Philip II in 1587, erected a circuit of lookout towers along the coast as part of a
precise plan to defend the maritime villages against the last of these threats.
Philip II, who showed a particular interest in Sardinia, was succeeded by others
ever more deaf to the requests of the Sardinian stamenti, which they disregard-
ed so regularly as to spark various episodes—sometimes serious—episodes of
18 Francesca Segni Pulvirenti and Aldo Sari, Architettura tardogotica e d’influsso rinascimen-
tale (Nuoro, 1994).