30 August

lecture series
TUDELA CONVENT CITY

Conventual architecture in Tudela: ideas, promoters and foreign artists

José Javier Azanza López
Chair de Patrimonio y Arte Navarro

It is well known that in the centuries of the Modern Age Navarre became the scene of numerous convent foundations, with a marked tendency to group them together in those towns with the largest populations, giving rise to the phenomenon known as the "Church in the city", already identified by authors of the period such as Damasio de Frías.

Tudela was no exception, becoming one of the main convent-cities of the Navarrese Baroque thanks to the construction of new convent buildings, to which was added the renovation or reconstruction of the old ones. All this meant an updating of the architectural subject and the implementation of the new Baroque language through plasterwork, altarpieces, sculptures and paintings, which filled these sacred spaces with the Counter-Reformation spirit, while at the same time helping to define the new urban layout of the city, which took on a cenobitic character.

The phenomenon was of such importance that it did not go unnoticed by the travellers who visited the riverside town during this period, from the soldier and chronicler of royal travels Enrique Cocq as a member in 1592 of Philip II's entourage attending the Aragonese courts meeting in Tarazona, to the Augustinian Enrique Flórez on his trip to Bayonne in 1766. And neither did Pedro de Madrazo, who reports on the state of the old convents in Tudela and their reuse after the vicissitudes of the 19th century in an attempt not to lose their report.

The fact that travellers from abroad took note of the conventual presence in Tudela serves as the starting point for our approach in this lecture, which focuses on some of the foreign promoters and artists who took part in the foundation and subsequent construction process of its conventual buildings. Through all of them, we approach the Tudela conventual Baroque, learning more details about the terms in which a conventual foundation is established in the Modern Age, the phenomenon of the Tracian friars with their characteristic itinerancy to carry out works inside and outside their order, and the arrival of the most recent proposals both in architectural and ornamental subject proposals in the capital of the Ribera del Duero.

Thus the name of Melchora Dionisia de Guaras, daughter of Dionisio and Jerónima de Guaras and heiress of the family entailed, who after her death without descendants in 1651 stipulated her burial in the church of the Compañía de Jesús in Tudela, where the remains of her late husband José Donamaría Ayanz already rested, for which purpose she earmarked an oath of 8,000 ducats on the field of Montiel and Segura.The burial would be temporary "until they have built the church that the said fathers are trying to build".

The reactivation of the works centred on the construction of the new convent church justifies the intervention of the "master architect" of French origin Juan Dutreu, active in various towns in Navarre in the second third of the 17th century, a period in which he carried out the contracting of the tower of the monastery of La Oliva, the reconstruction of the Caparroso bridge over the river Aragón and another series of works in Larraga, Falces, Caparroso itself and Sangüesa. And also the Jesuit architect Antonio Ambrosio, of Italian nationality, who in 1652 was at high school in Tudela, from where he travelled to Salamanca to survey the vaults of the Jesuit church of the Real high school del Espíritu Santo or Clerecía, a work sponsored in 1617 by Queen Margarita of Austria with a plan by Juan Gómez de Mora and the work of the Jesuit architect Pedro Mato. His presence in León is later documented as the author of the plans for the new main place after the fire in 1654 of the old place de San Martín, showing his Italian origin in the criteria of order and regularity of the project - on which the architect Francisco del Piñal Agüero would later introduce modifications - as well as in the novel use of arcades in the arcades.

In the case of the Dominican convent of Tudela, its founder was Estefanía de Lira y Huidobro, daughter of Pedro de Lira and Catalina de Huidobro. Her father was a native of the town of Lier (Flanders), from where he arrived as a lieutenant of the major armourer of Philip II. The family relationship with the Flemish community established in the town and court is evident in the fact that Peter and Catherine were godparents at the christening of Lorenzo van der Hamen y León, son of Jehan van der Hamen, a member of the Guard of Archers born in Brussels and brother of the well-known painter Juan van der Hamen y León. After being widowed by her second husband Antonio Orlándiz, in 1621 Estefanía de Lira decided to found a Dominican convent in Madrid, to which she would allocate 40,000 ducats and into which she would enter; but the civil service examination of her brother Juan de Lira, an influential man at the court of Philip III, and the presence in Madrid of the dean of the Collegiate Church of Tudela, Antonio de Cuellar, meant that the foundation was finally made in the riverside city, where she entered under the name of Sister Estefanía del Rosario.

Tudela. Dominican convent. Façade. Second half of the 17th century.

His nephew Manuel Francisco de Lira, secretary of the Universal Office of Charles II and member of his committee, played a fundamental role in the subsequent endowment of the convent and the construction of its convent church. In 1689 he drew up the will of Queen María Luisa de Orleáns. The church of the convent in Tudela is closely related to the convent architecture of Madrid in the second half of the 17th century, both in its spatial conception - reduction of the longitudinal axis of the nave in favour of greater centrality - and in the decorative language displayed on the stone façade based on plant motifs, flower and fruit pendants, cut-out plaques and masks fused with the vegetation, of great fleshiness and naturalistic treatment that favours contrasts of chiaroscuro. Consequently, the project must have been commissioned by Manuel de Lira himself from one of the masters active in the court environment during this period.

Focusing our interest on the high school de la Compañía de María, founded in 1687 thanks to the initiative of Francisco Garcés del Garro, its new convent church was built from 1732 onwards in accordance with a central plan project which is an exceptional example of Baroque convent architecture in Navarre. The design is attributed to the observant Carmelite tracista fr. José Alberto Pina, one of the most highly qualified masters of the central decades of the 18th century, whose work was carried out mainly in the lands of Aragón, Castellón and Valencia, where he inspired numerous projects covering the fields of civil, military and religious architecture, up to the time of his death in 1772; Three years earlier he had seen his prestige and architectural mastery recognised with the award of Degree as an academician of merit by the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia, arguing that "he was the oldest architect known in this Kingdom", "having devised and directed many factories" and "having illustrated different architects". His presence in Navarre can be seen in a period between 1732 and 1735, when he established his office at residency program in the convent of El Carmen in Tudela, issuing various reports for buildings in the capital of the region and also documenting his intervention in towns such as Villafranca, Cascante and Tarazona.

The church in Tudela has an octagonal floor plan surrounded by an ambulatory that is interrupted at the height of the two lower choirs, one for novices and the other for schoolboys, as it had to adapt to the needs of an institution in which cloister, teaching and apostolate coexisted. This original layout may have been influenced by Italian Jesuit architecture, an area in which in the second half of the 17th century numerous central-plan churches with ambulatories were designed, and whose echoes reached Spain in examples such as the sanctuary of Loyola in Azpeitia (Guipúzcoa), by Carlo Fontana. Inside, the giant columns on which the evangelists and fathers of the Church are mounted, the "roller" entablature which takes on a cylindrical shape at the height of the columns and which is present in other constructions by Pina such as the sacristy of the Collegiate Church of Santa María in Calatayud, the tribunes and the effective use of light are elements that contribute to creating one of the most grandiose spaces in Navarrese Baroque.

In 1742, the Mexican María Ignacia Azlor y Echeverz entered the convent of the Company of Mary in Tudela. Together with her cousin Ana María de Torres Cuadrado, she made her solemn profession on 2 February 1745, exchanging the applause of the world for the seclusion of the cloister. She was a generous benefactor of the convent in Tudela, paying for the altarpiece of the Virgin of Guadalupe and making numerous gifts that also reached the chapter of the Collegiate Church of Tudela. In 1752 he left for his homeland, where he founded the high school de la Compañía de María de México, earmarking 60,000 pesos for its construction and indicating that "the church should be made eight-sided and as polished as possible so that, although many are ahead of it in size, none will equal it in beauty". This is how the Augustinian master of architecture, fr Lucas de Jesús María, carried it out from 1754 onwards, developing a church with an octagonal plan which, at the express wish of María Ignacia Azlor, took the church in Tudela as model , the general plan of which was largely copied in the foundations carried out later on.