Draughtsman engineers serving the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

ETIENNE MARCHAND. Design for eastern parterre, Aranjuez Palace, July 1727. Madrid, General Palace Archives, No. 2456.

FIG. 9

FIG. 10 FERNANDO MÉNDEZ DE RAO. General grounds, La Granja de San Ildefonso ca 1736-1740. Madrid, Army’s Geographic Service, Historic Maps Section, Case E, shelf 6, folder 2, No. 214.

The career and graphic production of yet another actor, Fernando Méndez de Rao Sotomayor, carries the reader back to La Granja. In 1727 he had been posted to Aranjuez as Marchand’s assistant, although in 1732, on the occasion of his promotion to full engineer and captain, he was given a new assignment at the northern Guadarrama Mountain site of La Granja. By that time the palace had already been enlarged to the guidelines of painter and architectural theorist Andrea Procaccini (1671-1734) along with one of his assistants, architect and painter Sempronio Subisati (1680-1758). From 1734 to 1736 the young Spanish engineer drafted a superb cartography of the place that attested to the status of the palatial compound and its grounds and contained as well the earliest indications of the birth of the adjacent town [FIG. 10]18. Méndez de Rao’s delineation skills, visible in this «as-built» drawing, were apparently supplemented by designer aptitudes, as inferred by a drawing custodied at the Army’s Geographic Service [FIG. 11]. The object here is a road leading out of La Granja de San Ildefonso (the site’s full name) to the west

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DRAUGHTSMAN ENGINEERS SERVING THE SPANISH MONARCHY IN THE SIXTEENTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

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Draughtsman engineers serving the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

Published on Jun 20, 2016

FUNDACIÓN JUANELO TURRIANO

This volume of the collection Juanelo Turriano Lectures on the history of engineeringcontains the findings of R&D+I research project HAR 2012-31117El dibujante ingeniero al servicio de la monarquía hispánica. Siglos XVI-XVIII (DIMH)[draughtsman engineers serving the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries], funded by the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness and implemented under the leadership of Alicia Cámara Muñoz, Head of the National Distance University’s (UNED) Art History Department. Authored by project researchers and other specialists, the chapters are grouped under four main sections: «Engineers vs architects, Illustrated design»; «Describing frontiers»; «Dissemination: Custom and form»; and «Digital humanities in the DIMH Project». Key aspects of engineers’ drawings, applied by the court to a number of purposes throughout the three centuries, are addressed under each heading.