The Madrid of Philip IV: Architecture for the Capital of the Hispanic World

FAIN: FT-57350-10

Jesus R. Escobar
Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)

This book project reconstructs the urban fabric of seventeenth-century Madrid and examines the ways in which architecture was used in the Baroque era, and especially during the reign of Philip IV (1621-1665), to represent various ideals of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy. Though based in the discipline of architectural history, this interdisciplinary study combines visual analysis of buildings, paintings, and drawings with rigorous archival work that employs a historian's method and a careful reading of literary sources that follows the models established by scholars of Romance languages and literatures. The book examines Madrid in the comparative light of others cities in Europe and the larger Spanish world, from London to Brussels and from Palermo to Mexico City. Such a re-assessment in the context of the expansive Spanish Habsburg Empire and Madrid's precarious status in a changing Europe helps us better understand the place as a new kind of city, an early modern capital.