Las ‘condiciones de reparos’ de Manuel del Olmo encargadas por la VIII duquesa del Infantado, ¿una anticipación en la tutela de la arquitectura palatina?

Abstract

Between 1676 and 1678 the eighth Duchess of the Infantado, Catalina de Sandoval y Mendoza, commissioned the master builder Manuel del Olmo to work on several palaces belonging to her lineage. These were the two urban palaces, the Armería and the palace of the Infantado, the suburban palace of the site of the Forest and Grove of Heras, and the small villages of Maluque and Fresno. All of these were located in Guadalajara and the environs around it, which was the neuralgic core of the duchy before its transfer, three decades earlier, to Madrid. These works are described in precise reports of repairs. Its analysis allows us to understand the relationship between the nobility and their palatine architecture in the context of the Ancien Régime. They featured interesting interventions with the aim of keeping the codes of representation of the lineage's most famous past legible. Contrary to what might be expected, the works not always relied on uniformity or on the use of a baroque language. These unpublished documents and their contextualisation led us to affirm that there was an effective and deliberate precedent in the protection of these possessions. This was due to the rhetorical role they played, rather than a simple maintenance action. Their preservation made it possible to remember and reconstruct a narration of the duchy and its legitimacy in a period of decline for the Spanish nobility.