Sculptures of smoke. Chimneys of the Renaissance in the north of Extremadura

Abstract

One of the aspects most singular of the urban and architectural landscape of the High Extremadura during the Renaissance it was that of his chimneys and esculturas of smoke, which there were crowning all over the eaves and roofs of residential architectures, already they were pertaining to nobility palaces or of leaders of the church, already suburban and rural villas, monastic centres or popular housings. Cardinal buildings of the urban Renaissance from Extremadura landscape like Plasencia's Episcopal palace, Guadalupe's Royal Monastery or the principal houses of the Carvajal Vargas in Trujillo, were outlined then in the mediate and distant environment for a luck of urban milestones of factory of brick decorated with all kinds of ornaments esgrafiados on a mortar of lime. These urban "sculptures" summarize, better than different many you depart from that architecture, the ornamental wealth and the finished typical ones of our Renaissance. Also the diversity of influences and sources of which they drank and were an object our architects those centuries.

The fingerprint of the Spanish Muslim living under Christian rule, the French Flemish influence, the ornament and the Italian forms add to generate a few unique structures, in that it is not difficult to remember the models gathered in his respective agreements of architecture by Sebastián Serlio and Cesáreo Caesarino or the types designed by the makers of the roofs of the Royal summer residences during the reign of Philip II.