05/05/2009
Vitoria-Gasteiz, May 5,
2009.- Alfonso Jiménez Martín, architect and construction
foreman of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Seville will be giving a
lecture tomorrow on the appearance in the archive of the Convent of St.
Clarissa of the Holy Trinity of Bidaurreta in Oñate (Guipuzkoa) of the
oldest chart (medieval drawing) of the Sevillian church known until
now. The conference, organised by Fundación Catedral Santa María, will
take place at Aula Fundación Caja Vital (Dendaraba shopping centre) at
8:00 p.m..
Jiménez Martín will be explaining how the discovery and identification
of this valuable document, deposited so unusually in a place so far
from the object it represents, and research into it has become the plot
for a book written together with historian Begoña Alonso Ruiz.
According to the two authors, the discovery in the Basque Country of
one of the few medieval plans existing in Spain - an ancient copy of
the original magna hispalensis chart - endorses the fact that the
Sevillian cathedral served as a laboratory for many other buildings in
the country and the Americas.
The
chart was discovered in 1999 in a publication on the history of the
convent and its founder, which reproduced the graphic as an
illustration, without furnishing any data. Several years later, Begoña
Alonso Ruiz and Alfonso Jiménez Martín launched an in-depth
investigation, the result of which took the shape of the book La Traça
de la Iglesia de Sevilla [The Chart of the Church in Seville] (Cabildo
Metropolitano, Seville 2009)
Together with these charts, five original ancient drawings were also
found, one of which represents part of a building in Alava: Queen
Joanna the Mad’s coat of arms for the Alegría fortress.
Jiménez Martín has worked
on close to one hundred restoration jobs on monuments and sites in the
province of Cadiz, Huelva and Seville and has given classes at three
schools in the University of Seville. He was awarded with the Real
Maestranza Award of Seville for the best academic record at the School
of Advanced Technical Architecture (1971) and other distinctions such
as the first Award from the Association for the Defence and Promotion
of Huelva’s Cultural Heritage and the First FIBES Rehabilitation Award
for work on the Andalusian Parliament. The Spanish Government’s
Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport granted him and Teresa Laguna
Paúl the National Restoration Award for conservation work on the
Cathedral of Seville, of which he became the twenty-sixth main foreman.