On August 10, 1557, Felipe II's troops defeated the French in the battle of San Quentin. As a result of the victory, Felipe II had made public the purpose of building a monastery in honor of San Lorenzo. But what was no more than a mere declaration of intentions took shape a year later, when his father, Emperor Carlos V, died in Yuste.
A few days after his death, Felipe II convened a multidisciplinary commission of architects, scientists and stonemasons. They had to look for the suitable location to erect a monastery in the Sierra de Guadarrama. In it the remains of the king's parents would rest and the royal pantheon of the dynasty would be established.
It is probable that by then the monarch was already considering the possibility of moving the court from Toledo to Madrid, and the 50 km that separated El Escorial from the future capital of Spain was an easily overcome distance. The place also had abundant game and firewood and good quality water, and in its vicinity there were quarries.
From that moment, events precipitated. As the court settled in Madrid, the king commissioned the plans for the monastery to Juan Bautista de Toledo, a Spanish architect trained in Italy. Custody of the building was entrusted to the Hieronymite order, traditionally linked to the Crown.
With his project, Felipe II recovered the medieval tradition of promoting the construction of a monastery where he could dwell in life and find eternal rest. There were many medieval kings who asked to be buried in those centers that they had previously founded and where they had spent their last years. However, in his time such a decision seems strange.
Barely twenty years earlier, Francis I of France had completed the Chambord castle and enlarged the Louvre. In these cases, similar to those of other European courts, the monarchs wanted to show off their power by building magnificent castle-palaces, but leaving aside any spiritual connotation. In the French case, the abbey of Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, continued to be the place chosen for royal burials.
Felipe II's decision was apparently inappropriate for his time. But only apparently, because we must not forget that the Council of Trent was closed at that time. By bringing together a residence, royal pantheon and monastery in a single location, thus linking faith and monarchy, the king pursued only one purpose: to institutionalize the dynasty as the supreme defender of the Christian faith and the Hispanic monarchy as the visible head of the Counter-Reformation promoted by by the Vatican.
On April 23, 1563, after the acquisition of the land and approval of the proposal of Juan Bautista de Toledo, the first stone of the monastery was laid. Shortly after, Juan de Herrera and Juan de Valencia joined the team as assistants, and upon the death of the owner several years later, the former became chief architect.
Herrera was an old acquaintance of the royal family. He had accompanied Carlos V in some of his military campaigns and later in his retirement in Yuste, and on the emperor's death he remained at court as tutor to Prince Carlos, Philip II's eldest son.
A cultured and restless man, Herrera combined with his status as an architect a deep knowledge of geometry. This discipline was manifested in the remodeling of the original plans of Juan Bautista de Toledo. He removed some towers and, above all, simplified the main lines of the building through the abundance of geometric shapes. He also enclosed the Patio de los Reyes with a double façade as a prelude to the basilica.
It seems that it was inspired by the descriptions that the Jewish historian Flavio Josephus made of the temple of Solomon, the biblical king so admired by Philip II, because he was supposed to be the paradigm of the just and wise monarch. On the other hand, it seems that it was in this definitive project that Herrera intentionally searched for the famous grill shape attributed to the floor plan of the building.
The monarch granted the Charter of Foundation and Endowment of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial to the Hieronymite friars. The works were considered finished in 1586, when Francisco de Mora finished off the basilica.
Felipe II only enjoyed his work for twelve years. Retired in the sober rooms that he reserved for himself next to the basilica, and accompanied by his two daughters, Catalina Micaela and Isabel Clara Eugenia, born from his marriage to Isabel de Valois, he alternated his intellectual life with the exercise of politics and a regime of almost monastic life.
The monastery was the ideal refuge for a man like him, shy and insecure, as well as fragile in health. It was there that the idea of assembling what was to be the most powerful squadron of its time, the one known as the “Invincible”, destined to fight the England of Elizabeth I, was gestated.
It was not the only tragedy for the already sick monarch. Nine years later, the news reached El Escorial of the premature death of Catalina Micaela, married to Carlos Manuel I of Saboya, as a result of the birth of her tenth child. It seems that the drama hastened the end of the king, who, sick with gout, osteoarthritis and dropsy, died.
The monastery of El Escorial has been seen as the architectural transcript of the monarch himself, and, like him, has been the recurring target of the black legend. There are authors who have considered it the paradigm in stone of the repression and obscurantism of the Catholic monarchy. Others have even searched for supposed esoteric keys in its plan and layout.
However, it is often forgotten that, in addition to being an authoritarian monarch with a complex personality, Philip II was a great humanist. His travels to Italy and Flanders as crown prince and during the first years of his reign sparked an interest in classical ideals, art and architecture. They gave him a cultural training that not only allowed him to personally supervise the progress of the works, but also led him to design the bases to make El Escorial a true temple of wisdom.
Felipe II installed a large library which, together with the basilica and the royal pantheon, is the greatest point of interest in the monastery. Located over the main entrance of the west façade, the Escorial library is an immense room divided into seven spaces in which the seven liberal arts are represented. It is completely surrounded by wooden shelves designed by Herrera himself, packed with countless books, manuscripts, codices and maps from all periods and origins.
An accomplished bibliophile, Felipe II not only set out to make El Escorial a center from which an empire would be governed, but also a place where all the knowledge known to date would come together. For this, he commissioned humanists and diplomats to select and acquire the funds in an obvious attempt to emulate the legendary Library of Alexandria.
In addition, a complete science laboratory was installed in the monastery and he planned an astronomical observatory (which was never built due to his death), a botanical garden, a hospital and an apothecary. It is not an exaggeration to say that most of the scientific and technical projects in Spain at the time were conceived in this place.
After the death of Felipe II, the monumental complex continued to grow at the rate of various renovations. His son Felipe III began the installation and decoration work on the royal pantheon, which was completed during the reign of Felipe IV, a monarch who considerably enriched the painting collection started by the founder. Carlos II was given the task of rebuilding the monastery after a terrible fire that occurred in the last third of the 17th century. He entrusted this responsibility to the Toledo architect Bartolomé Zumbigo.
However, after the Bourbon dynasty came to the throne, the monastery of El Escorial fell into a deep lethargy. The simple lines and the sober majesty of its decoration were not at all to the taste of Felipe V, a sovereign raised in the shadow of the spectacular Versaillesque splendors. Hence, both he and his son, Fernando VI, preferred other royal residences, such as Aranjuez, La Granja or the Quinta de El Pardo, for their days off.
El Escorial would recover the brilliance lost during the reigns of Carlos III and Carlos IV, not so much because these monarchs knew how to appreciate the strong beauty of the place, but because of another of the qualities of the Royal Site. The Escurial environment was an excellent hunting ground, and the sovereigns, both excellent hunters, decided to visit it frequently.
However, they changed the interior decoration to adapt it to the rococo fashion of that time. With this, the austere rooms that, according to legend, Felipe II had described as "a palace for God and a hut for me" ended up being repositories of luxurious furniture made of exotic woods, ornate bronze clocks and dazzling crystal chandeliers, while its walls were covered with more than three hundred tapestries from the Royal Factory of Santa Bárbara, but also from Flanders, France and Italy.
In addition, Carlos III, at the end of the 18th century, urbanized the surroundings and ordered the erection of the new houses of the Lonja, as well as two hunting lodges for his children, baptized as the little houses of the Prince and the Infante. And under the esplanade that opens before the north and west wings of the monastery, the king drew an underground passage, the Mine, which was used to transport people and materials in the cold winter months.
Carlos IV, for his part, remodeled the so-called Palace of the Bourbons and commissioned Juan de Villanueva to build a spectacular access staircase. One of the most delicate moments of his reign took place precisely in El Escorial, when at the beginning of the 19th century a note appeared on the king's desk accusing the crown prince, the future Ferdinand VII, of plotting the overthrow of of the.
After searching the rooms of the Prince of Asturias, they found the evidence that revealed the plot. The prince and his accomplices were arrested, although the pressure of the people, then opposed to the king, caused the matter to be buried without further ado.
The French invasion first and the confiscation of Mendizábal later separated the Hieronymite friars from the monastery. They rejoined it in the middle of the century, but after four years the order was definitively dissolved.
Isabel II and her son Alfonso XII frequented the Royal Site, and the initiative to hand over the care of the monastery to the Augustinian friars was due to them, considering that their rule was in accordance with what was stipulated by Felipe II in his charter of foundation: the dedication to worship and ecclesiastical and profane studies.
Declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1984, the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial bears witness to the spirit of an era in which, from the Sierra de Guadarrama, the destinies of the Spanish Empire were governed. Or, what is the same, of a good part of the then known world.
This text is part of an article published in number 500 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
