Review: Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy

“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...