"Description
Property
In the building of the Royal Circle of Friendship of Córdoba, the old convent cloister is preserved, although the reforms carried out during the 19th century to adapt it to new uses brought important modifications, such as the façade designed by the municipal architect Manuel García del Álamo , that were not completed, or those carried out shortly after by the master architect of the Academy and member of the Círculo de la Amistad, Juan Rodríguez Sánchez , to whom we owe the reception hall (current Salón Liceo) inaugurated in June 1867, or the major intervention on the façade and its annexes carried out under the direction of the architects Juan de los Reyes and Rafael Jurado Gómezin 1899, to which the main staircase and the press rooms, the small room and the hall are also due. The current façade, from 1928, is the work of Rafael de la Hoz Saldaña and Enrique García Sanz . Among the movable assets it houses, its artistic collection stands out, especially the pictorial one, part of which was made at the express request of those responsible for the decoration of the rooms.
The property, which is located on the site formerly belonging to the convent of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves , a convent of Augustinian Recollect nuns confiscated in 1836 and which has an area of ??4,395 square meters, organizes its rooms around large patios: the patio central, former convent cloister in Mannerist style, a garden patio and a third backyard. The central patio is structured on two floors with galleries on its four fronts. On the ground floor there are arches with semicircular arches on Tuscan columns and on the upper floor carpanel arches on smaller Tuscan columns and stone balustrades decorated with Serlian motifs. The spandrels of the arches and the plinth of the lower gallery are decorated with 19th century Sevillian ceramics . The hat that covers it was made in the 21st century .
The remodeling of the old convent to adapt it to its new use has been carried out on several occasions. Among the rooms that are distributed around the old cloister, the so-called “Salón Liceo” stands out, located where the convent church was. It is a large space that was intended to house nineteenth-century dances, the Floral Games of Córdobaand the great events that were celebrated in the institution. The room has a rectangular floor plan and is profusely decorated in the style of the time with eclectic plaster decoration framing large-format paintings, oil paintings on canvas, with themes alluding to the arts, located on the walls and ceiling. Other areas of the property to highlight are the "English room", located on the eastern side of the cloister, the "red staircase", so named because it is made of red marble, the dining room, the "white staircase" or the "tresillo room". ». On the upper floor are the conference room called "Julio Romero de Torres room", the library and the "meeting room" among other rooms.
Pictorial
The paintings that decorate the Liceo hall were made between 1867 and 1878 by the Sevillian artist José María Rodríguez de Losada commissioned by the leaders of the Círculo de la Amistad through a commission chosen for this purpose to choose the themes in a total of seventeen works. These were initially the portraits of Seneca , the Great Captain , Maimonides and Averroes , the four currently missing, and another thirteen dedicated to telling relevant facts about the city or alluding to events related to the history of Córdoba , such as the martyrdom of Saint Acisclo . and holy victory, the reception of an embassy in Islamic Córdoba, Columbus ' interview with the Catholic Monarchs in the castle of the Christian Monarchs or the conquest of the city by Ferdinand III the Saint in 1236. Eleven of these works are currently still located in the living room.
Among the rooms arranged in the first bay of the building and open to the street through large windows, the "Reading Room" stands out, also called "of the Senses" due to the symbolic paintings alluding to "The Five Senses" by the painter Carlos Ángel . Díaz Huertas (1866-1937) that are located there. Currently, on the walls of the main hall staircase, built in 1899, hangs a series of six allegorical paintings by the Cordovan painter Julio Romero de Torres , made in 1905 commissioned by those responsible for the Círculo de la Amistad for decoration. of their halls. This series, belonging to the symbolist stageby the painter, is composed of four large paintings, oils on canvas, dedicated to the different arts: "Literature", "Painting", "Sculpture" and "Music", and two others called "Song of Love". and "Genius and inspiration." They are works characterized by the simplicity of their composition and the use of pastel tones.
Distributed throughout the different rooms is a set of portraits of the presidents of the Círculo de la Amistad. This is made up of a total of forty-eight canvases, painted in oil, the vast majority of which were made — thirty-three portraits specifically — by the Cordovan painter Rafael Díaz Peno in the 1950s. Another six portraits have been attributed to said artist. author for keeping a certain stylistic and formal homogeneity with the previous ones. The rest of the portraits are by different authors, before and after the date of the Díaz Peno series.
Library
The Library, a room whose furniture is adapted to it, contains a total of 274 works printed between the 16th and 18th centuries, three of them highlighting: a book by the 16th century Benedictine abbot and humanist Juan Tritemio (the oldest preserved ), a luxurious edition of Don Quixote in four volumes from the 19th century (facsimile of the first edition of the novel) and a commemorative album of the Andalusian Regional Assembly of 1933.The Círculo de la Amistad Archive brings together a documentary collection consisting of several folders and boxes that contain documentation relating, fundamentally, to its historical development, as well as documents, although in a smaller number, from other institutions.
status
On May 23, 2017, it was declared an Asset of Cultural Interest , with the typology of Monument, through a decree published on the 31st of that same month in the Official Gazette of the Junta de Andalucía , signed by the president of the autonomous community. , Susana Díaz , and the Minister of Culture, Rosa Aguilar . "
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