Success on the home front
Spanish Baroque architecture peaked with the western
façade of Santiago de Compostela cathedral. Dubbed
El Obradoiro, after the plaza it surveys, the façade was
stitched onto the cathedral in the 1740s by architect
Fernando Casas y Novoa.Thin columns, statues of St
James and his disciples and the usual brood of
elegantly gabled designs create a busy but enticing
prospect: a fitting welcome for the Camino pilgrims
filing wearily underneath. Spanish Baroque architects
often conjured a dog’s dinner of discordant styles,
adding new work to older structures with little eye for
harmony, but here, in the Baroque façade of Santiago’s
Romanesque structure, they triumphed.The façade of
Murcia cathedral, its cherubs and gargoyles carved in
light stone, was another rare success. Churrigueresque
architecture, a rare homegrown Spanish style, would
actually find its greatest expression in Latin America.
Mexico, in particular, had a soft spot for draping civic
and religious buildings in a blanket of sculptural detail.
French bred: Baroque palaces
Spain’s early Bourbon monarchs began building their
Iberian palaces during the Baroque era, although they
favoured French modes over the movement’s local
style. Architects unencumbered by the fripperies of
Churrigueresque were imported from France and Italy.
Giovanni Battista Sacchetti’s 2,800-room Palacio Real
in Madrid, commissioned by Felipe V in 1734, is an
elegant affair, reminiscent of the Louvre with its long
columned facades. Inside, a room with walls and
ceilings coated entirely in porcelain hints at how much
cash the King threw at lavish decor throughout. La
Granja de San Ildefonso, just outside Segovia, is
similarly grand in its Baroque ambitions, apparently
based – symmetrical gardens and all – on Versailles.
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- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
Cadiz cathedral, started in
1722, is the only cathedral
in Spain with a Baroque
foundation. However, much
of its body – the façade,
dome and towers included
- was completed later, in a
Neoclassical style.
Hole in the wall
Churrigueresque was all
about surface detail, about
the play of light and shade
on carved stone. The so-
calledTransparentein
Toledo cathedral did most
to realise this obsession.
By replacing a rib vault in
the cathedral ceiling with
glass and cutting another
hole in the wall, Narcisco
Tome directed shafts of
light down onto a Baroque
altarpiece, the figures of
which appear to reach up
to the heavens.
Term of abuse
The Churrigueresque
style, exaggerated and
somewhat cheapened by
followers of the initial
Baroque flowering, wasn’t
popular for long. Indeed
within a few years of its
birth, Neoclassicists were
hurling‘Churrigueresque’
around as a term of abuse,
deriding the flamboyance
so at odds with their own
restrained style.
