Iglesia del antiguo convento de San Francisco

C/ San Andrés s/n. 23440, Baeza

In 1538 the Franciscan community of Baeza agreed to carry out the construction of a new temple, due to the poor state of the original one. At that time, Día Sánchez de Quesada, Señor de Garcíez, was the patron of his main chapel, who showed little interest in the new main chapel to be built, which forced the Franciscan monks to look for other patrons.

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The choice fell on the noble Baezan family of Los Benavides. The transfer of the board of trustees took place in Valencia de Benavides, being his descendants and, after solving various lawsuits, the promoters of such an important company, which undoubtedly intended to emulate the funeral chapel of El Salvador de Úbeda, built by the secretary of the Emperor Carlos V, Francisco de los Cobos. In the Valencia de Benavides will, granted in 1538, the endowments are required to complete the factory, obviously destined for burial and descendants. The works of the new church had to begin at the head at the beginning of the 1540s, lasting for many years, since in 1563 the main chapel had not yet been completed.

During the visit of Felipe IV to the city of Baeza in 1624, the chapel was completed, but not the rest of the body of the temple, whose construction lasted well into the seventeenth century. But misfortune is going to haunt this great work, because in the middle of said seventeenth century it already needed repairs. At the beginning of the 19th century, the head was ruined by a seismic movement, which forced what was left of it to be dismantled. In the 1850 Parcerisa engraving, the romantic aspect it presents is one of total ruin and abandonment. The rest of the church and the convent also underwent numerous transformations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to adapt the architectural complex to new uses: flour factory, theater and housing. The restoration and consolidation of the complex was carried out, not without criticism, between 1986 and 1988 for its conditioning as an auditorium, leaving the main chapel uncovered and separated from the rest of the body of the church by a large window. The cloister and other rooms were transferred to the Vandelvira Restaurant in 1990.

The one chosen to build such a monumental chapel was Andrés de Vandelvira, a master stonemason, already well known for his great projects in other towns on the Loma. Although the works contract between the Benavides, the friars of San Francisco and Vandelvira has not yet been discovered, its authorship is given by the testimony of his son Alonso when referring to the “cruçada chapel” in his famous Architecture Treaty: “This This chapel was put into work in San Francisco in the city of Baeza by my lord father and I understand it is the best private chapel and more well ordered and decorated that there is in our Spain, it has sixty feet of gap without the fittings that has 8 feet ”.

In this factory Vandelvira works with complete freedom, outside of impositions as in Salvador de Úbeda. It banishes the Gothic crosses and the grotesques, incorporating the ornament with greater clarity in relation to the architectural elements. In its conception, it also moves away from what is going to be carried out in El Salvador, since it poses a large square space covered by a vaida reinforced by crossways that come to coincide with the pairs of columns of the transverse arches, rising on the sides funerary altarpieces , of which only that of the Gospel has been preserved. These stone altarpieces of Serlian design are framed by large arcosolios and by double columns with elongated canon. At the head the main altar is located high on three boxed arches.

The breadth of the iconographic program developed had to obey a perfectly conceived plan determined by the funerary nature of the complex: Evangelists, Church Fathers, Saints; In the preserved stone altarpiece we have funerary and heraldic symbols, the Epiphany on the left, the Adoration of the Shepherds on the right (with the date 1560), in the center the Resurrection (tympanum) with the Tetramorphs. Also of excellent quality are the heads of the coffered ceilings of the arcosolios of the main altar, as well as its tympanums of mythical inspiration and the semicircle with a Mater Dolorosa with Reclining Christ, recurring with the funerary theme of the project. The fundamental sculptors of this extraordinary iconographic program, in a regular state of conservation, were Esteban Jamete and Juan de Reolid.gen.