Francisco Hurtado and His School

Abstract

THE eulogies which their contemporaries lavished upon the architects of the Baroque in Spain were followed for over a century by disparagement and abuse. Thus Palomino, the court painter,2 calls Don Francisco Hurtado “the eminent architect” and asserts that the Sagrario which the latter designed in 1718 for the Carthusian monastery at El Paular would suffice to immortalize his name. Don Antonio Ponz,3 on the other hand, visiting this same monastery toward the end of the eighteenth century in the very fullness of the neoclassical reaction was unable to contain his indignation. “I would to God,” he wrote, “that I had never set eyes on what they call the Transparente, a term from which I recoil in horror. It consists of two chambers, one larger than the other, attached to the church. What Churrigueras and what Tomés have we here! Yet these were Palladios indeed compared to him who raised this work and, nothing daunted, styled himself chief architect of the cathedrals of Córdoba and Granada, and I know not what else.” Later on he returns to the attack, as if unable to banish the vision from his mind. Yet the very violence of his emotion indicates that here was an architect who, whatever his merits, did not leave in the beholder an impression of indifference but was a personality to be reckoned with and continues to be so.

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