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Post by Jake on Feb 12, 2008 11:46:23 GMT -5
Stuart: Yes, your thinking about plaster vs. stonework is good. For example, we have cases here where decorative plasterwork was used extensively inside mission churches -- most surviving examples are in the really dry country of southern Arizona and northern Sonora. Even there, when the roof falls in, the plaster is exposed to the weather and decays and falls off the walls.
However, like Mark says, things here in missions on the Spanish frontier are somewhat different from the older churches in Europe. Facades are plainer, especially the farther north you get, although part of that is because it costs more money to hire master masons and finecarvers to produce such facades the farther north you get, and interiors tend to be covered with painted decoration rather than carved or molded.
So I'm not willing to say that stonework like Gentilz shows would be more likely to be interior or exterior stuff. Stuart's suggestion that it might have been interior plaster that fell off is certainly possible, but would require that the plaster survive exposed to the weather for about 120 years before it fell -- on the other hand, we have coarse plaster on the walls of some of the missions still in place after more than 250 years, so it's certainly possible that molded or carved plaster decorative designs could survive from about 1745 to about 1870.
Mark, I found an example of the quatrefoil pattern, or whatever we should call it, on a church wall -- unfortunately, it's on the facade of San Miguel Arcangel de Ures, in Sonora, and it's unclear that it was built in the Spanish or even Mexican period. There are two of the things, just used as designs, symmetrically on either side of the main doorway. They may have been windows to the second floor or upper part of the first floor of the two bell towers, and later filled.
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Post by Jake on Feb 11, 2008 10:47:24 GMT -5
Mark: You've put your finger on the question. That sort of thing is usually seen on the facades of churches in New Spain, but if it was on the facade, there would be some indication of symmetry. The two forms are typical of windows, fairly large ones in this case, so you could argue that they are filled windows, but if a builder puts in such windows, he usually uses the same design for all of them, not a sort of selection from his window design book.
From my viewpoint, what I would have to argue is that, if they existed, these are designs placed on the wall of the convento. Since I've speculated among myself (so to speak) that that wall surface may have been intended to be the interior surface of a row of second story convento rooms (that would have begun at the church in the space between the north bell tower and the connecting wall), I've proposed to myself that these may have been decorations on the walls of some of the rooms (it wasn't the presence of the markings that led me to speculate on this possible layout, but rather a number of other characteristics in the history of development of that south wing). Somewhat similar patterns are painted on the interior walls of the second-story convento rooms at San Jose, for example. How likely is this layout? I can't say -- no excavation information to tell me if there are structural traces along the south face of the connecting wall. You understand that excavating and finding wall traces there won't prove a church there -- just the presence of a building at some point in the past -- a building like a convento, for example. For it to be Tello's first church, it would have to be a large structure, about the same size as the present Valero church, and it would have to have transepts. If it faced east-west, the north transept would have to go through the line of the connecting wall.
So anyway, yes, the patterns are an anomoly, and I don't know what to make of them. Insufficient data.
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Post by Jake on Feb 10, 2008 11:37:59 GMT -5
Mark, I don't have a problem with the designs existing. Sure, Gentilz was a fairly good artist, not prone to making things up -- I mean, even his mistakes in his big Alamo battle picture are mistakes of chronology, rather than just making things up. But I have yet to see the photograph that you keep talking about -- and "faint traces" makes me nervous -- possibly you guys are fooling yourselves? But show me the designs reasonably present in a photo and I'll accept them without question. In fact, I pretty much accept them without the photo, because Gentilz was pretty good at recording the way things looked.
But let's be clear on the battling speculation. You both are operating on the assumption that these marks on the wall make a church. I say you have no evidence suggesting that such marks mean a church was there, no similar marks on the wall of actual churches, and you have nothing else, no documents, no physical evidence, no similar examples, nothing. Far as I can see, you guys have made up a church and just put it there.
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Post by Jake on Feb 8, 2008 15:07:17 GMT -5
“For the record, calling the planforms of Con. and Valero #2 ‘virtually identical,’ was fine - just not ‘identical,’ because of their size difference mostly.” So you’re accepting that we can say they’re the same plan, just sized slightly differently. For example, the nave of Valero is 25' 3" wide at the transept end, while Concepción’s at the same point is 21' 3". Valero is 105' long, while Concepción is 93' 1 ½" long, and so on. Depending on what you measure, the ratio of Concepción to Valero varies from 1:1.13 to 1:1.19.
“Ibarra wouldn't have had to do any mapping if he had Tello's actual plans; and then it wouldn't have been any more work for him to enlarge them than it was for Tello to do so, when/if he designed Valero #1/#2.” You’re arguing that the reason the Valero church plan is virtually the same as the Concepción plan is because Ibarra copied Tello’s plan in order to build it? As of 1755-1756, Valero still had a larger Indian population, although I would have expected the Father President, then at Concepción, to insist that the Valero church be made smaller than the one he was using at Concepción. You would argue that congregation size was the determining factor?
“And I could be an awful snit and say, ‘why didn't Tello exercise real economy and just use Concepcion's plan again as is - size and all?’” As I said in the above long posting, Valero was the headquarters mission at the time – and if that wasn’t enough, it was also the largest mission with 238 Indians in 1740. Concepción was next, with 210, then San Juan with 169, and finally Espada with 121. Because mission church sizes tended to be determined by the size of the congregation, that, too, would be enough of a reason for Valero to be larger than Concepción as of the time of Tello’s design about 1739-1740.
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Post by Jake on Feb 8, 2008 14:18:45 GMT -5
First, let me deal with Craig’s comments. “Virtually identical in plan” – this is, of course, subjective, but how close is “virtually identical”? For example, my plan of Valero on my desk is identical to the plan of Valero the building sitting in Alamo plaza – the size of the plan doesn’t enter into it. I don’t mean that both are sort of similar, I mean if you get a plan of Concepcion and a plan of Valero, and you size them on a xerox so that both are the same size, and you lay them on a light table, as I’m doing now, you find that all the walls overlap each other by at least half their thickness in the worst fitting areas (the side walls of the transepts and the end walls of the bell towers) and in most cases fit virtually their entire widths over each other. Buttresses fall in the same places with about a three-quarters thickness overlap. It’s the same plan within the vagaries of laying the places out using measuring sticks, string and stakes and a crew new to this sort of thing. I doubt you could find another plan on the northern frontier of New Spain that would fit either of these two as well, even though there are hundreds of transepted churches out there. “The fact that their drawn planforms are so similar has objectively no value as evidence in placing both Valero #1 and Valero #2 on Tello’s footprint.” Huh? I’m arguing that one piece of evidence that the Valero church of today is on the Tello foundations is that it’s the same plan as the Tello church at Concepcion, and you’re saying that the fact that the plans are the same has no value in my argument? I’m sorry, I don’t understand your reasoning there. “Concepción’s church was built as close to permanent standing structures as possible – in fact, its sacristy butted up against the existing granary.” Well, no. Tello apparently planned and began the granary as well (it was going to be a vaulted structure like the one at San Jose, which he may also have begun, and he apparently started another similar one at San Juan that never got above the foundations), so the location of the church is a matter of his choice – or rather, his design following the Franciscan’s requirements. The relationship of the Concepción church to its convento. Craig, you’re mixing periods together in order to create an argument out of nothing. First of all, I wrote both the Park Service manuscript and much of the historical text for the HABS drawings, and I can assure you that my research results have progressed considerably in the 25 years or so since then, the late 1970s and early 1980s. For example, in the later 1980s, as testing in the area of the present visitor’s center at Concepción, we found by archaeology that the old convento formed a complete square, rather than being only the northern row of rooms we knew about from Harvey Smith’s excavations in the 1930s. And although some of the earliest buildings were adobe (like the early church, a nice little adobe rectangular building), the convento we’re talking about here was of stone. In the 1740s, when Tello designed and began his church and convento wing, all of this was in use (and some parts were still under construction) and apparently was intended to continue in use, and the new vaulted convento wing was obviously intended to connect the church to the original convento. Over the years after Tello’s departure and the hiring of Ibarra about 1750, Franciscan priorities and plans changed (part of the change was the appointment of a new Father President, the chief administrator of the Franciscans in Texas, who moved Franciscan headquarters from Valero to Concepción – while Tello was working out the designs, the Father President was at Valero, which would explain why the Valero church was bigger. The size of the church would be affected by the size of the congregation as well). But what happened later has no effect on what happened before – no predestination in this sort of architectural development. That the Franciscans eventually gave up on the old convento was part of the ongoing progression of construction at Concepción over the years, not some indication that in the 1740s they had no intent to use the building. Tello began the construction of the convento and probably built the first six feet or so, and it was designed to reach the north wall of the old convento. Ibarra, in response to the requirements of the new Father President, added an east corridor to the convento plan, as well as a wing going west, and extended foundations across the old convento, apparently intending to build an entire vaulted convento enclosure up beside the Tello wing on its west side, and to convert some of the rooms of the old convento to utility rooms and workshops – making it into the “second courtyard,” in other words. “Tello’s vaulted design was not being carried through for a good reason: it was impractical, even with master masons present.” Well, no. Ibarra continued the Tello-designed convento, finished the section still standing, and added an eastern corridor and a west wing to it (and both of these Ibarra constructions were as inaccurately parallel as anything built by Tello). The whole use of vaulted construction at Valero was called to a halt in 1759, not because of some failure on the part of Tello fifteen years earlier, but apparently because part of what Ibarra was building collapsed – in other words, it was Ibarra’s mistake that stopped the vaulted construction, not Tello’s. The evidence suggests that it was the collapse of the west wing that did it – that’s the broken half a vault running west from the south end of the standing vaulted building at Concepcion. “I don’t see any of this speculation helping your argument ... I was hoping you had some document where Tello or some friar explained boggy ground, or an existing cemetery ... no mention of his plans or any progress on the convento ... I can’t recall anything mentioned about one being attempted ...” Craig, that’s the nature of this business. If I went only with what was specifically mentioned, I would just recap Habig and spend the rest of my time in a bar. Instead, I take the scattered mentions of work and building conditions in the records (the Franciscans who wrote the reports had a pathological resistance to mentioning work being done, so usually you have to guess that he’s wandering among scaffolding and piles of materials, dodging people hauling doors and beams, to write his report), I work out what masons are in town (I found one mason and one sculptor by reading through all the mission account books), I look at the physical remains of the buildings above ground and in the archaeology, I look at the methods of construction, mason-hiring, and job-management elsewhere on the frontier as context for the work in San Antonio, and I work out a plausible pattern of planning and work that fits the scattered bits of evidence I have. It’s all speculation, Craig, and that’s the only way we get anywhere with this. So of course the speculation helps my argument, because it’s a large part of the basis for the argument.
Now to what I see as the worst thing you could have said: “I feel you are perhaps too heavily invested in Antonio Tello.” Craig, look what you’re doing. You have created an entire building from nothing but a few odd marks on a wall as shown by one artist, and you are telling me to trust that, to change my entire reconstructed sequence of development at all the missions based on all the physical, archaeological, and historical evidence I can find, to ignore the clearly plausible body of work of a known and present master mason, all to do what? Not even to come up with evidence to support your view, but simple to get rid of apparently reasonably probable events that would argue against your view. All this, and I’m too heavily invested in Antonio Tello? An actual, provably present person? To support an idea with no evidence at all other than questionable interpretations of not all that demonstrably present markings on a wall? Who’s too heavily invested, Craig?
Finally, responding to Mark’s comments about the location of the walls of the portería room next to the portería opening. Mark, you’re forgetting that the walls of the interior of the convento were moved at some point after the 1790s, probably during the remodeling of the building as a hospital. Originally, during the period we’re talking about, the walls of the portería were symmetrically located on either side of the main entrance, and included the two little arched openings on either side of that entrance as well. So the location of the portería doorways relative to the later walls tells us nothing about the presence of stairs in 1756. Also, Ibarra built the stone porch and, presumably, stairs after the 1756 report – at the time of the report, the porch and stairs were both probably of wood.
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Post by Jake on Feb 6, 2008 13:34:54 GMT -5
Craig--
Is there some way we could make an overlay of the Valero and Concepcion plans and post them here? That would show what level of "identical" I'm talking about. Considering the huge range of designs and proportions that make use of a cruciform plan, it should be made clear that I don't mean "yeah, they're kind of similar transepted churches." Other than that Concepcion is slightly smaller, the plans are really, really alike. Really.
For Ibarra to have replicated the plan so closely, he would have had to carry out a detailed mapping of the Concepcion church, enlarged the plan slightly, and pegged it out at Valero. Since what you call "the ubiquity of the cruciform design" would indicate that any old cruciform plan would work, why replicate the Concepcion plan so exactly?
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Post by Jake on Feb 2, 2008 16:56:20 GMT -5
So I'm tired of waiting and leaving Craig's last broadside sitting there. Let’s clear out the battlefield a little here.
First of all, Craig, I know you carefully said this over and over, but let me restate it here, because it seems to fade from view in your discussion: my argument 25 years ago was about the location of the temporary church, which for a while I thought had been at the south end of the convento. I wrote my early version of the discussion about it to see how well I could support that idea. Ultimately, it didn’t work, and I changed my thinking about the location of the temporary church to have been in the granary from fairly early, after 1727 and perhaps after 1740, as you say. When you look at an ms in progress, you get things like that. But I believe it’s better to have even the interim ms available, to avoid all those cases where one has heard somebody was working on such-and-such a discussion, but now he’s dead and who knows where that went?
But I have never doubted that the Tello church was on the same site as the present church, and formed the lower two feet or so, of the present church – and every piece of evidence I have seen continues to support that idea.
So let’s quit being distracted by the temporary church and look at the evidence for the first permanent church.
First, the stairs. You say you were not claiming that there was only one set of stairs in the convento “throughout history,” and that I shouldn’t go conjuring up stairs. Well, let’s see: you said “there was only one set of stairs in the convento; the stairs were where La Bastida, Everett, et al placed them - in the southeast part of the convento, where they could double as access to the choir loft of the church - the first stone church.” How am I supposed to interpret this, if not a statement that the stairs shown by Everett and Labastida are the same stairs that are mentioned in 1756? Since these are the only mentions of stairs, and you’re saying they’re the same stairs, aren’t we forced to assume you therefore must be claiming that there was only one set of stairs, even if we leave off my faintly sarcastic “throughout history”? How can this be seen as protesting too much? And don’t you conjure stairs as well? Don’t you say “A few wooden steps, inside the building would have sufficed”? Sure, there was an access to the choir loft in the granary. It was either the stairs described in 1756 or another set of stairs, undescribed, that we both would have to assume existed.
We have only two (well, one and a group) of references to stairs. The first is in 1756 (this is the only reference during the colonial period to any stairs in the convent). This mentions stairs to the second floor of the convento that also have a doorway to the choir loft of some church. No mention of a landing – the doorway to the choir loft is “en la escalera,” in the stairs, so why are you making an issue about a landing that isn’t mentioned? No location is given for these stairs, but they are to give access to the second story of the convento, almost certainly by means of a temporary (probably wooden) second story deck or porch ran along the east side of the convento building – something else we have to assume existed. The stairs probably were wooden and temporary as well. It was Hieronymo Ibarra who built the arch-supported stone porch between 1756 and 1759, and where he put the new permanent stone stairs is unknown. These stairways, the temporary wooden one of 1756 and the stone one built soon thereafter, could be anywhere along the east side – where one places them, in fact, is determined by where one places the choir loft that is accessed from them (or at least how one assumes that access).
We have a second reference or group of references to stairs. This is the 1836 stairway shown at the south end of the second-story porch by Labastida and Sanchez, and a similar stairway in the same general location shown by Everett in 1848. Note, however, that the Everett 1846 plan shows no stairway, which suggests that the 1836 stairway had fallen by 1846, and a new one was built by the US Army by 1848. There can be no direct or necessary connection between these two, possibly wooden, stairways of 1836-1848 and the temporary wooden stairway of 1756 that we know must have been replaced with stone stairs by Ibarra.
The Tello church: We know something about the first permanent church. First, and most important, we know it was transepted, like the present church – two people were buried in the church on November 16, 1749 – the first person buried in the center of the transepts, and the second buried in the south transept [see John O. Leal, “Burials of Mission San Francisco de Solano (San Antonio de Valero – the Alamo), 1703-1782,” p. 37, entries 737-39, November 17, 1749, ms. in the library of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the Alamo, San Antonio, Texas]. Any interpretation of the connecting wall as the wall of this church has to include a transept extending to the north through this wall.
Second: we know construction on the church was continued after Tello’s departure in 1744, and that the church eventually collapsed sometime between the end of 1749 and mid-1756. You acknowledge the variations in the statements about the completeness of the Tello church, the one in 1756 saying the Tello church was still under construction, the 1759 saying nothing about this, and the 1762 saying that it had been “completed perfectly with its tower and sacristy...” In other words, the statement made closest in time to the event described the church as incomplete, while the one written six years later claims it was completed (with this sort of statement we’re creeping into the area of missionaries making cases, rather than reporting factually, but that’s another story). Not that this matters particularly – a building can fall down at any point, depending on how poorly the walls are built.
Third: we think we know Tello worked on the other missions as well. Actually, we don’t know this as a certainty – I infer this, based on the evidence of work going on at the other missions at the same time Tello is in town, and there being no other master mason mentioned in the records for this period. It’s a simpler explanation than three other masons that we know nothing about all working at the same time on the four missions and all leaving before 1745. Also, it is an assumption on my part that Tello used the same design for the Valero church as he used for the Concepcion church – again, it’s simpler to assume that two churches with the same plan came from the same designer, rather than the Valero church being an Ibarra copy of the Concepcion church. The reason I make these assumptions is because of the similarities between Concepcion and Valero. At Concepcion, (presumably) Tello laid out and began the construction of a church and one wing of a convento. He placed the church way off from the original convento and designed the new, vaulted convento wing to connect the two together. At Valero we find a church of the same plan set way off from the existing convento wing, and parts of a new vaulted convento wing tying the church to the old convento, while at the same time forming the south side of a complete convento square enclosure. We also find oddities about the church – its lowest walls seem different up the first two or three feet from the construction above that, and form a ledge at the front and inside the church.
It seems simplest to me to assume both churches were designed by Tello to the same plan, placed in the same way relative to the existing convento, and the oddities of the lower Valero walls are because the lowest section is construction by Tello, while above about two or three feet it’s new construction by Ibarra. I see no need to invent an entire second church foundation at the south end of the convento without the slightest documentation.
That leaves the connecting wall and its figuring, supposedly of raised stone. We have Gentilz’s paintings and drawings showing this figuring, and one photograph that you say shows the same thing with enough enhancement or whatever. I’ll accept that, provisionally, although I’ve also suspected that Gentilz simply misinterpreted markings he saw on the walls. But although I said 25 years ago that that sort of figuring would be on the wall of the nave of a church, I have come to believe I was wrong on that. In fact, I don’t know where such figuring would go. I haven’t seen it anywhere else, so who knows?
You say your case doesn’t depend on the 1756 stairs with a choir doorway. OK, but your case does depend on the connecting wall and its figuring shown by Gentilz. It boils down to this: if you can find one example of a church with those designs built into the wall of the nave, I’ll admit that you have enough of a case for the possible existence of some church, not necessarily (or even likely) the first permanent church, there that I should at least mention that possibility in a footnote.
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Post by Jake on Jan 22, 2008 11:47:05 GMT -5
Stuart: The problem is more like background noise. That area has been re-used so many times that we would probably get mostly a god-awful mess rather than a good return -- but still, the results could clear things up -- it's worth a try.
Mark: You're right -- the answer is in the earth, if I may quote a well-known archaeologist. I've got such a list of things about San Antonio history that could be resolved with just one little dig.
Jack Eaton had no real problem with people protesting that he was digging in a camposanto, but that was a different time. Right now, I think you could dig a trench right along the base of the wall's south face without anyone objecting -- I don't know what sort of review process is now in place for this sort of thing, but a) we don't have anything that specifically says this area was a camposanto,, and b) it's less likely to hit burials right along the boundary wall, and c) you can recognize burials by the burial pit outline, without having to go deeper to hit bodies, so you can explore an area without the potential of big, toothy smiles to surprise you.
But of course, we are talking about politics, and reason doesn't necessarily enter into it.
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Post by Jake on Jan 20, 2008 13:43:01 GMT -5
This is a sort of catch-all post while I’m waiting for CRC’s next broadside.
Stuart, normally I’d agree with you about having to give up on a church if it collapses. But the circumstances in this case are a little different.
Tello, a master mason, began the church. He built the foundations and the beginnings of the above-ground walls, and he built these to support a church intended to be vaulted and domed. This was therefore a substantial and (presumably) well-designed beginning. Tello then left town, after only about three months of work on the Valero church. Someone else, and someone apparently not a master mason, since I can’t find any mention of another one in town in the period this happened, more or less finished the first permanent church, presumably with a flat roof, since it took a master mason to build vaults. At some point in this process of construction by the non-master, the church fell.
My position is that because the construction above Tello’s original foundations was shoddy enough to collapse (I figure the tower fell over onto the roof and blew out the side walls), even thought it was probably only a flat-roofed building, then the collapse could well not have affected Tello’s original construction, and the master mason Hieronymo Ibarra, on clearing off the rubble and looking things over, then decided to go ahead with Tello’s original design on his original foundations. This would explain why Valero has a plan identical to the Concepcion church, which we know was also Tello's design, and his construction up to about the mid-point of its height.
You guys have to see this from my perspective. I’m writing the definitive (actually, so far, the only) architectural history of Valero, and at the same time a complete rewriting of the architectural history of the other missions, based on but completely revised from the original structural history Craig mentioned – among other things, I worked out the master masons who designed and worked on the San Antonio churches that Mark has told you about in terms of what they did at Valero, and through a long process of physical examination compared with the documents, what they actually built. (At the same time, I’ve finished an MA in art history specializing in the architecture of the Spanish colonial American southwest and northern Mexico, what we in the biz call Mexico North, and I’m almost finished with a PhD on the same area.) I see Valero in the context of the other missions in San Antonio, and the broader context of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century missions of New Mexico, about some of which I’ve also written major studies, one of which is about to be published by UNM press, the missions of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, the missions of Baja California, and the missions of Alta California, the present state of the US, and to some extent, in the context of the seventeenth-century missions of Florida. I have to go with what seems to be the least complicated, most direct sequence of events that I can support from the documents and the physical remains themselves, within what I’ve become familiar with as standard procedures for Franciscans and Jesuits.
One reason I want to have this fight is to see what it is I haven’t thought of, what I didn’t allow for, or what I ignored because I didn’t like it. We all do these things, but you have to go over the stuff again and again and try to see the obvious, one of the hardest things to do.
Mark – you’d think your question about the original words for Habig’s statements about the quarrying would be a simple one, but it isn’t. The Spanish says: “[the first church fell] por la mala inteligencia del artifice, y se está fabricando otra de armoniosa arquitectura con piedra de canteria, la que aqui se halla á medias con la solidéz, y perfeccion que se requiere, para su hermosura, y sostener las vovedas.” Once again, as Craig says, you’d swear these guys were doing this on purpose. “[the first church fell] because of the poor skill of its maker, and another is being built of harmonious architecture with cut stone [or “stone from a quarry” – “canteria” can mean either the quarry, or the cut stone from it, or the art of cutting stone], *la que aqui se halla* at the midpoint with the solidity and perfection that is required for its beauty and to support the vaults.” The critical phrase here is “la que aqui se halla” – if the sentence had ended there, that would have meant “which is found here,” or something like that. But it didn’t, and in the context of the whole sentence, the phrase continues with “á medias” and means, more or less, “which is now at its midpoint.” In other words, Habig made a mistake with his translation, or paraphrase, or whatever you want to call what he was doing. Tom, can you confirm my reading on this?
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Post by Jake on Jan 19, 2008 16:58:33 GMT -5
Holy Toledo, Batman!
I'm going to go sit in my corner now, grumbling, and read through this mass of stuff, and then count my fingers and toes and see if I still have all my bits...
And then I'll come up with some sort of answer.
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Post by Jake on Jan 3, 2008 14:13:54 GMT -5
Finally, the question of the “wall” itself, and why the church was set back from the plaza and convento, that I’m not allowed to get away with. Since Craig insists, I’ll walk you through it, but let me warn you it’s not easy.
It took me a while, looking at the mission churches we have in San Antonio, to work out what seems to have been going on with Tello (other than hanky-panky during off hours)(or even work hours, who knows?).
Tello was hired to design and build four mission churches, at the four Queretaran missions of San Antonio (San José was run by the friars of the college of Zacatecas), and apparently was hired to build the parish church as well. It appears that he designed what amounts to the same church for all four missions – the two we have, at Valero and Concepción, are virtually identical in plan. The other two, at Espada and San Juan, didn’t get above-ground, although the 1772 inventory says that the foundations of the permanent church at Espada were “half-built.” There are indications at both missions of significant foundations in the ground, and probably excavated foundation trenches where the foundations themselves were not completed. Archaeology would be able to trace these structures and tell us more about Tello’s approach.
Working with the construction at these other missions, some things become apparent. First and foremost, Tello had a sort of over-complex approach to church/convento design and the relationship between the two. Concepción is the best example: what you see there is not what he was dealing with. The convento there was to the south, around the area where the visitor’s center is now (they built it there over my screams of outrage, but at least they did some archaeology first). The vaulted and arcaded structure running south from the church is Tello’s design, half finished by him along with the church. So, you see, he built the church away from the standing convento, and connected it to the standing convento with a new, vaulted and arcaded leg of convento building. You see where I’m going with this?
He didn’t do this at the two smaller missions – at Espada, he started the new church at the north end of the already-existing west wing of the convento, and got something like half the sacristy built before he left town. This west wing, though, attached to the second courtyard in the same way that the new convento wing at Concepción attached to the original convento – and for all I know, he intended to make the second courtyard into the actual convento, so that the plan of Espada’s convento would have worked out to look the same as Concepción’s. Same, apparently, with San Juan, although we have way less to work with here, since nobody has uncovered enough of the big foundations in the plaza to see what the plan of the building is, and whether it was the new church.
Now, at Concepción and Valero we have identical church plans, and churches set back from standing convento buildings with the intent to connect them together with a new wing. Doesn’t that sound like an explanation to you?
One additional note: Tello was also not so hot at alignments. Look, for example, at the lack of parallel in his layout of the vaulted convento wing at Concepción – the east and west main walls separate by nearly a foot as they go south. This suggests that it wouldn’t be odd for Tello to have screwed up the layout of the convento wing that was to connect the church to the west wing. The various angles and thickness changes are the results of the attempts of later architects to correct Tello’s error.
Details: note the thicker wall of Valero for the first few feet of the facade, up to the little cornice about thigh-high. Note that inside the church, in the walls of the transepts, there’s a similar thickening that forms a ledge across the recessed arches in the end walls of the transepts. I think this is the top of Tello’s actual construction work, marking the point where he stopped and someone else carried the church on up, and down to which Hieronymo Ibarra removed the stone of the fallen church – down to the dependable foundations built by the master mason himself, removing all the crap wall built by whoever failed to pass the builder’s test – does it stay up?
I think in front of the present church of Valero there are burials in the campo santo, but no first church building. Certainly it’s worth a look, if for no other reason than to resolve this question for good.
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Post by Jake on Jan 3, 2008 13:45:48 GMT -5
Craig: The granary is said to be 19 feet high as of 1793, so a choir loft in the building would be at about 9 feet above the floor. The 1793 inventory says the main convento rooms are 4 varas high, or 11 feet. The 1762 report states specifically that the temporary church was in the building built to be the granary, and that it had a choir loft. The previous reports all indicate that the same building was in use as the temporary church, with its choir loft. As far as I can see, the reports leave no doubt that the granary building was in use as the temporary church from before 1745 until the temporary church was moved to the new sacristy between 1762 and 1772.
As to the stairway – Come on, Craig, you know you can’t say “there was only one set of stairs in the convento [implied: throughout the history of the convento] ... in the southeast part of the convento.” Sure, Labastida and Everett put a staircase here, but you notice that Everett only shows a staircase here in 1848. In 1846, he shows the convento with the center section of the back porch fallen in, and no stairs. So by graphic evidence we would have to assume that the Everett stairs were replacements for the Labastida stairs, that had fallen between 1836 and 1846, not the same stairs. How many stairs were on the building through the previous century is not knowable, although we do have the 1756 statement that there was a set of stairs somewhere on the building.
The point is, the stairs shown by Labastida could have been built at any time. There’s no way to state as fact that this was the only set of stairs ever in the convento, or that there were never stairs at the north end of the convento building, south end of the granary. That, by the way, is the implication of all this, that the choir loft in the granary was in the south end of the building, and the main entrance into the granary/temp. church, always under the choir loft, was therefore through a doorway on its west side at its south end.
Your whole argument depends on the 1756 statement about the staircase that communicates with the choir loft. The report mentions only one choir loft, and that’s the one in the granary/temporary church, so when it says in the discussion of the convento that there’s a staircase that communicates to the choir loft, that’s the only choir loft available to be referred to. Assuming the first permanent church ever got finished enough to have a choir loft (something that isn’t a certainty considering the changing story the statements about it made later tell us) that choir loft was gone in 1756, and I think it unlikely that the staircase description would be referring to that now-vanished choir loft instead of the still-existent one in the granary.
The business about “second story choir loft in a one story building” clearly doesn’t enter in to this, since the choir loft would have been only two feet lower than the second floor of the convento. Note that the description of the staircase says the doorway is in the stairway, not on the second floor, which implies a landing (which would fit with the additional statement that there was a painting hanging on the wall in the stairway, as well – this sounds like the landing decoration in the stairway of the convento at San José, which had a little santo there), or just a doorway in the stairway wall a few steps down from the top.
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Post by Jake on Jan 3, 2008 13:44:10 GMT -5
Summarizing what the reports say:
Temporary church: 1745: The temporary church is a spacious room with a choir loft and sacristy. 1756: The “old church” is serving as the church, and is a room of sufficient size with a little choir loft and a sacristy. In the convento there is a stairway that communicates with the choir loft. 1759: The same room as described in the previous visits continues to serve as the temporary church. 1762: A room is serving as the church that was built to be the granary, and is 35 varas (96 feet) long. It has a choir loft. 1786: Sacristy of the new church becomes the temporary church. 1793: Granary described as 30 v. (82.2 feet) long, 5 v. (13.7 feet) wide, and 7 v. (19.2 feet) high.
Permanent church: 1744: May 8, construction begins on first permanent church – laying of first stone. 1744: August 21, work stops – 3.5 months of work. 1745: The first permanent church is under construction, being built of lime and cut stone. Apparently work continues in the absence of a master mason. 1749 [or 1745]: The church is dedicated for burial – description indicates church has transepts. 1749 [or 1745] - 1756: The first permanent church collapses. 1756: The first permanent church, “being built,” not completed, has collapsed, and the reestablishment of the church is being planned. 1759: Second permanent church is at half its final height.
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Post by Jake on Jan 3, 2008 13:04:31 GMT -5
Tom: "I wonder if the writer of the inventory meant that work on the church was concluded up to the half-way point (with no clear schedule on when work is to resume)?"
Wow -- I like that interpretation, and it matches what I have kept feeling was the intent of the first part of the statement. Thank goodness someone here is comfortable with Spanish -- I'm still a read-only, and grammar is a mystery to me, even in English.
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Post by Jake on Jan 3, 2008 11:49:06 GMT -5
There's some uncertainty in my mind that the first burials in the church were in 1749 -- could have been 1745. I have to check the microfilm of the burial books to be sure.
1772: Description of the church under construction. The granary is listed, but nothing is said about its size. The new sacristy in the new permanent church is in use as the temporary church.
1786: Brief description of granary in use -- no details. Description of church under construction. The sacristy of the new church is in use as the temporary church.
1793: Description of the church under construction. "Unida a la casa del Padre una p[ie]za, con 30 v[ara]s de largo, 5 de ancho, y 7 de alto, con el suelo de adobe pero su techo solo tiene las bigas buenas ..." Attached to the house of the Father a room with 30 varas of length [82.2 feet], 5 of width [13.7 feet], and 7 of height [19.2 feet], with a floor of adobe, but its roof only has good vigas. That is, the building has had most of its roofing removed, with only the vigas left in place, and next to the building is a large stock of boards, beams, and roof drains to be used for repairing the roof. The inventory does not name this building as a granary, but it contains the standard measuring scoops and the like that a granary usually has.
And that's it for reports on the conditions of the buildings of Valero.
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