The UNESCO-listed historic centre of the Mexican city of Queretaro, about 2 hours north of Mexico City, is a treasure house of New World baroque architecture, of which the chief secular jewel is the Casa de la Marquesa.
The façade of the Casa de la Marquesa.
Built in the mid-18C as an aristocratic residence, it’s now run as an elegant boutique hotel. I didn’t stay there, but I went for a meal in the excellent restaurant.
I had never heard of Cristobal de Villalpando (1649-1714) before stepping through the doors of the Palacio de Iturbide in Mexico City’s Centro Historico in May, 2017.
The Palacio (see the previous post for details of this building: http://versaillescentury.com/2017/06/20/versailles-century-building-palacio-de-iturbide/#more-1068) now belongs to the Banamex Cultural Foundation, which happened to be running an exhibition dedicated to Villalpando.
Sign for the Villalpando exhibition at the Banamex Cultural Foundation, May, 2017.
Walking through the exhibition, I was thunderstruck by Villallpando’s canvases and amazed that I had never heard of him.
The Palacio de Iturbide in Mexico City has a double distinction: it’s one of the great surviving baroque mansions of New Spain AND it was home to independent Mexico’s first emperor.
It was built between 1779 and 1785 for Miguel de Berrio y Saldívar, Count of San Mateo Valparaíso and Marquis of Jaral de Berrio, a creole aristocrat whose fortune was based on mining. He commissioned it as a wedding gift for his daughter, allegedly spending the exact amount of the dowry for fear that his new Italian son-in-law, one Marquis of Moncada, would otherwise squander the money.
He certainly got his money’s worth.
The facade of the Palacio de Iturbide on Madero Street in Mexico City.
The palace was designed in the Mexican Baroque style then still prevalent in New Spain, but architects Francisco Antonio Guerrero y Torres and Agustín Duran purportedly modelled it on the royal palace in Palermo, perhaps in honour of their employer’s son-in-law. It has 3 floors and the inner courtyard is surrounded by an 18-arch arcade.
In some ways, the Kingdom of New Spain, centred in what we now call Mexico, was at its height in the Versailles Century (1682-1789).
It certainly reached its greatest territorial extent in the 1700s, as the map below illustrates.
By Eddo – Own workFile:BlankMap-World-90W.svgFile:New Spain.pngFile:Nueva España 1795.pngFile:Spanish Provinces in the Pacific.png, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11435488
The light green areas represent the last areas to be claimed by the Spanish before the onset of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of Independence, which resulted in the collapse of Spanish rule and Mexico’s independence in 1821, not to mention that of the other countries of Central and South America.
It’s true, dear readers: VC is off to Mexico for the next week. Consequently, there will be no new blog posts until at least Monday, 22 May, 2017.
However, on my return, I plan to bring you words and images related to Mexico as it was during the Versailles Century (1682-1789), when it was still the Kingdom of New Spain.
For instance, late in the period, Carlos III of Spain (r. 1759-1788) initiated a number of reforms in colonial government and sent out energetic viceroys to enforce them. One of them, Bernardo de Galvez, the 49th viceroy of New Spain who ruled from 1785 to 1788, initiated the construction of the hill-top palace of Chapultepec in Mexico City. I will definitely visit it and report back to you.
