Between Gaspar Serrano and Giovanni Battista Contini: the baroque improvement of the bell tower of the cathedral of Zaragoza

Abstract

The placing of the Valera bell, which had been remelted in 1679, finally required a refurbishing of the bell tower of the cathedral of Zaragoza. The projects prepared by different local masters were presented by the Chapter to Francisco de Herrera, Charles II’s architect, who rejected them one after the other, until the canons decided to send the one made by Gaspar Serrano to the Academy of San Lucas in Rome, where it was left to Carlos Rainaldi, Caria Fontana and Giovan Battista Contini to judge. The latter had just been named "Príncipe" in that institution, and Carlos Rainaldi and Carlo Fontana were, at that time, the "stimatori di architettura". After rejecting it, they elaborated a new project -in fact, a correction following the codes of the late classical baroque- which was sent to Zaragoza, where it received general assent and was practically immediately undertaken. A huge amount of documentation related to the process is kept in the Archives of the Seo of Zaragoza, as well as part of the plans corpus, from Gaspar Serrano's project to the copies made by Giovan Battista Contini. All this documentation provides evidence for an utterly interesting debate between an architecture considered as "local", (though actually open to exogenous models, only very different from those proposed by the Academy), and the late classical baroque from the Roman school, which would be spread all around the European continent thanks to the above mentioned institution.