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Spain  Center  Carlos M. N. Eire Empires and nations are defined as much by their centers as by their boundaries. Centers are definite physical locations, but they are also much more than fixed points on a map: they are points from which authority and order emanate and in which power and the very identity of a dominant culture ostensibly reside. Like monarchs, centers embody authority symbolically: centers, like monarchs, extend their authority through both literal and figurative representation . Centers tend to permeate the larger whole, extending beyond themselves and establishing their presence in the perceived peripheries.When all roads lead to Rome, Rome alsoextends outward through a networkof interlinked subsidiary centers that replicate and reify it on a local level. In the age of the Baroque, however, Rome needs to be taken into account literally rather than figuratively, for that city was theepicenterof the Catholic Church, a clerical empire that claimed spiritual supremacyover the entireworld. This empire not only overlapped with all earthly ones and depended on them for its survival and expansion but often challenged their ultimate authority. All talk of “centers” in the world of the Hispanic Baroque needs to take into account this symbiotic, tension-­ laden relationship between spiritual and temporal authority. In baroque Spain and its colonies, all centers stood in relation to a single epicenter and to one another within a hierarchy on two intertwined spheres or grids: the so-­ called secular and spiritual realms. Religion therefore played a key role in the nature and function of centers, often with very blurry lines between what we might call “church” and “state” or “sacred” and “profane.” In an age when hierarchies reigned supreme, tension between the two spheres was as inevitable as cooperation, especially as monarchs increasingly sought to imbue the throne with sacredness. The complexity of the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies was further complicated because in the spiritual realm all roads led to heaven or to Rome rather than to Madrid or Toledo. Despite the privileges claimed by Spanish monarchs through the Patronato Real, which ostensiblygave them nearly full control of the Church, tension was inevitable. Unlike the secular epicenter of the monarchy, which claimed jurisdiction only within the boundaries of the Crown’s realm, the spiritual epicenter claimed a universal, transnational centrality beyond time and space. The secular epicenter of the Hispanic world during the Baroque was the king’s court. Until 1561, when King Philip II (1556–1598) chose the insignificant Castilian town of Madrid as his principal place of residence, Spanish monarchs had been constantly on the move, residing at various palaces throughout the Iberian peninsula. Philip II’s choice was politically shrewd, given that Madrid was devoid of powerful nobles or ecclesiasts and thus offered something of a tabula rasa on which he could impose his own centralizing blueprints, unchallenged. His choice was also highly symbolic, for Madrid sits smack in the geographical center of the Iberian peninsula. Within one generation, Madrid would become the undisputed epicenter of the first global empire on which the sun never set, subjugating all subsidiarycenters to itself—a truism captured in the refrain “solo Madrid es corte” (Madrid alone is the court). More than any other monarch of his age, Philip II understood the need to centralize the power of the Crown, to imbue it with sacredness, and to represent it symbolically . Aside from moving the court permanently to Madrid and creating an elaborate and efficient bureaucracy, Philip also established definitions of centrality that would govern the Habsburg dynastyand the Hispanicworld throughout the Baroque. These definitions, in and of themselves, reified the often paradoxical relationship between the sacred and the secular. The keystoneof Philip’s centralizing project was a colossal palace complex unlike any other on earth: San Lorenzo de El Escorial. This structure, about a day’s journey from Madrid, enmeshed the sacred and the profane (Fig. 13). Begun in 1563 and completed in 1595, it was the largest building on earth, containing not just a palace but also a monastery, a basilica, a relic collection, a library, and a school for clergy. Constructed near Madrid yet not at all within it, this complex structure helped establish a dual epicenter which affirmed a paradoxical yet very firm union between altar and throne. Within this binary reification of centrality, the proximity of these two royal centers was as essential as the distance between them. Although Madrid and the Escorial were separate locations—one accentuating the monarch’s largely secular power and the other...

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