18 February 2009

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

STATELY HOMES AND PALACES OF NAVARRA

House and social position. The trousseau, a reflection of status

Ms. Letizia Arbeteta Mira
Museum of America

If it is difficult to preserve unique civil buildings, it is even more difficult to preserve their interiors, since the furnishings are distributed according to the tastes, status, wealth and other circumstances of those who inhabit them. To expect people to live in an unalterable setting, without being able to modify the interiors to adapt them to their needs, is absolutely impossible. However, the interiors can contain as much or more historical data than the properties themselves, and provide first-hand information about the way of life in past eras. It is obvious, therefore, that a formula must be found to reconcile conflicting interests, such as comfort and the preservation of the historical and artistic heritage.

Despite the fact that for centuries, travelers' testimonies have highlighted the great richness of Spanish interiors compared to the exterior of the buildings, the truth is that very little of this subject of ensembles has come down to us, to the point that original interiors more than a century old are a rarity (in fact, interiors prior to the eighteenth century are very rare).
This status is due, in part, to a tradition of jealous intimacy, together with the lack of social sensitivity towards the topic and the fact that there is no effective protection rules and regulations to ward off the fear of the fiscal voracity of the Administrations. 

Just as stone or brick, beams, walls and floors form a whole that is the building, the interiors constitute a network of relationships between objects and their container, where they lose their individuality and become part of a whole.

This consideration is important for the study of art history, where the object (a painting or a piece of furniture, for example) is often seen as something complete in itself, without asking whether it was originally part of something larger.

Apart from the decorative elements, which have symbolic, advertising or representational values, the furnishings that make up the interiors are characterized by their usefulness, the constant employment and, therefore, their foreseeable wear and tear and deterioration. As a general rule, the spaces or areas make up, in the home, two basic zones: the private and the public, sometimes connected by an intermediate space (patio, staircase, garden...). These areas, which can be reversible in certain circumstances, articulate specific places, determined by the use, such as the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathrooms, the conference room or living room, the living rooms, the chapel, the office, etc. Each of these rooms has its own defining elements. Precisely, well-preserved antique interiors, in addition to often constituting an artistic expression, contain clues whose study and systematization serves as an auxiliary science for the historical and artistic research .
 

"The house of the Virgin". Elements of the XVI-XIX centuries.
Carmelites of Toledo
 

In this brief exhibition, a visual tour was proposed, complementary to the previous one, which covered both the scarce graphic documents of Spanish interiors (taken from engravings, paintings, etc., with some B exception of scale model), and photographic images of interiors, now disappeared or existing, of important palaces throughout Spain, from Andalusia to the Pyrenees, Santander or Galicia. In addition, nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century recreations were analyzed, in museums such as the Museum of Decorative Arts in Madrid or the Casa del Greco in Toledo, or the domestic interiors of collectors, such as Páramo in Toledo, Sanchez-Dalp in Seville or José Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid. 

accredited specialization The immense variety of textiles, ceramics, furniture, silverware, artistic and culinary collections, etc., among which there are objects and areas, such as the dais, which are testimonies of lost uses, is also of great importance.

From all this we can infer certain specific characteristics of Spanish decoration and trousseau in certain periods (17th-18th centuries), such as symmetry in the distribution and the presence of serial elements, as well as the use of spaces, which could be different at certain times of the year.
 

"Interior madrileño". Engraving by García Hidalgo, XVII century.

Sanlúcar de Barrameda. chapel of the Arizon house in 1960.
Today empty and vandalized