April 19, 2005

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

FIVE LINES OF RESEARCHON NAVARRESE ART

Baroque Art: Pamplona between Innovation and Tradition

D. Ricardo Fernández Gracia.
Organized by the Chair of Navarrese Art and the Ateneo Navarro.

Professor Ricardo Fernández Gracia made a balance of the historiography on the artistic manifestations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Old Kingdom of Navarre, highlighting the importance of the doctoral thesis conducted in the last twenty years and the most important programs of study that have contributed unique assessments to knowledge of an art that was reviled from the late eighteenth century until recent times.

As topic to develop, he chose the innovation and tradition in the arts of Pamplona in those centuries, in which the guilds dominated the artistic activity. Through the projection of several other works, he commented on different aspects related to them. In the first place, the difficulties for the entrance of urban and architectural novelties and in the figurative arts themselves, as it happened with the beautiful canvas of the Foundation of the Trinitarian Order of Carreño -today in the Louvre Museum- that the friars did not want to receive because they considered it too innovative. He also analyzed some of the great promoters of the arts: the institutions of the Kingdom, the City Council of Pamplona, the nobility, the Indianos, and the Church (cathedral, parishes, convents, etc.). Special attention was paid to the origin of outstanding works imported from Rome, Naples, the Court of Madrid, Toledo, Aragon, Castile and other areas of Navarre, such as the powerful and expansive focus of retablists from Tudela. All of them introduced, in general, novelties in a city constrained within its walls and little permeable to innovations.

It ended with a work of capital importance of our heritage in the change of course from baroque forms to the aesthetics of academicism: the facade of the cathedral, designed by Ventura Rodriguez, with the semi-hidden participation of a canon of the Pamplona chapter and resident in Madrid, Don Felipe Garcia de Samaniego, of clear enlightened thinking and mixed in the process of Olavide.