Graphic Heritage: 15 Graphic Works Explain Private Architecture Drawings of the City of Alicante During the Academic Cycle (1752–1860). A.M.A. Archives

Abstract

This concise study aims at giving a well-rounded and realistic picture of the drawings produced to obtain privately commissioned building permissions in the city of Alicante. The period covered runs from 1752 —when the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid was founded— to 1860, three years after Madrid’s School of Architecture became formally and effectively independent in 1857, after having been created in 1844. The present work is based on pictures and comments of fifteen architecture plans selected from the Historical Municipal Archive of Alicante (AMA) graphic heritage. It was possible to objectively select fifteen representative works among the 870 executed within the period from AMA’s archive thanks to a previous study by the author —unpublished to date— which gave a detailed description of each. This work resulted in a catalogue, also unpublished, describing all graphic characteristics as well as other non-graphic ones (Domingo 2012). It was necessary to digitise all the archives to facilitate joint visualisations of large groups of plans, comparisons, overlays and any study included within our graphic discipline. The aim here is not to show the most spectacular examples, but the most representative in graphical terms, and, where appropriate, the milestones that influenced subsequent works. The present study represents a first step for future differential studies linking Alicante’s archives to that of other cities or of the Academies themselves.