Architects and Tracists: The Triumph of the Baroque at the Court of the Habsburgs

The doctrine poured into treatises on architecture, painting and sculpture, as well as historical chronicles, artistic biographies and other sources, allows us to establish the decline of practical architects or master builders in the face of certain painters who defended a new conception of the arts of drawing and of architecture itself, based on the capacity of invention of the human being, in the mastery of descriptive drawing and in the comprehensive knowledge of mathematics, geometry and perspective, vindicating their condition as inventive architects and putting architectural design or invention before the construction process. The arguments of this debate shed new light on the history of architecture in the Spanish court, drawing a panorama in which not only architects have a place, but also painters, writers who made possible the triumph of the Baroque in the Madrid of the Austrias. 444 p.: Illustration, Photo, Color, 24.5 x17 cm., Paperback