“Matritun, urbs Regia” (Madrid, Royal City) reads the banderole above Pedro Teixeira’s 1656 map of the capital of the Habsburg Empire, perhaps the most famous view of the city ever produced. Teixeira’s image merged two different—and not always harmonious—aspects of the Madrid of the Habsburgs, as both a municipality and also the residence of the royal court. By strategically casting the Royal Alcázar’s main façade and square as the protagonist of the print, but with the Plaza Mayor as its compositional center, Teixeira depicted a synthesis of Villa y Corte, as Madrid was known in the seventeenth century. Madrid was only a small city at the center of the Iberian Peninsula when King Philip II decided to establish it as the seat of his previously itinerant court in 1561. Over the next century—roughly the period covered in the book under review—new buildings and urban forms seeking to represent this...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
June 2023
Book Review|
June 01 2023
Review: Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy
Jesús Escobar
Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy
University Park
: Pennsylvania State University Press
, 2022
, 288 pp., 117 color and 26 b/w illus. $124.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271091419
Felipe Pereda
Felipe Pereda
Harvard University
Search for other works by this author on:
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2023) 82 (2): 208–210.
Citation
Felipe Pereda; Review: Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 June 2023; 82 (2): 208–210. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2023.82.2.208
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.