Abreviados cielos.Metáforas festivas de los espacios sacros en el barroco andaluz

Abstract

This chapter studies the festive metaphors about the church which appear in descriptions and sermons related with the Andalusian Baroque festival. The church is compared in festive literature to various images, such as the New Jerusalem, the Palace of Sun, or some building of the religious history. We focus on the study of the metaphor of the Temple of Solomon, widely repeated and that will have interesting consequences in the field of the party. In particular, this last image relates the division of the architectural space of the church between presbytery and nave, with that existing in the biblical temple between the Sanctum and the Sancta Sanctorum. In an eloquent way, in certain festival occasions is promoved the dissolution of this separation, according to the idea of the living communion between the terrestrial church and the glory of the triumphal church. That is the reason why the main ephemeral altars arranged for these occasions are sometimes placed separating the presbytery from the area designated for the faithful. Festive relations, in the absence of graphic documentation, allow to identificate this kind of architectonical resource in some sacred celebrations between the sixties of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, in the Sevillian temples of the Carmelite Saint Angel on the occasion of the beatification of Juan de Ia Cruz in 1675, in the house professes Jesuit in the celebrations in honor of San Luis Gonzaga and Estanislao de Koska in 1727, and during the Malaga celebrations of the College of San Sebastian on the occasion of the canonization of Juan F. Regis in 1737.