"The convent of San Felipe Neri , in Cuenca (Spain) , construction directed by José Martín, on plots given by Felipe Bernardo Mateo, grand master of the diocese of Cuenca.
The Oratory of San Felipe Neri was built in 1739. The project was commissioned by the architect José Martín de Aldehuela and was paid for by the archdeacon of Moya, Don Álvaro Carvajal y Lancáster. It is a church with a single nave, with a Latin cross plan and barrel vaults. Although it is a not very attractive building on the outside, it has a beautiful interior. Among other elements, its magnificent decoration stands out, in the Rococo style, in the side chapels, cornices and capitals. The complex was restored in 1989.
The oratory or church of San Felipe Neri has a very spacious nave, but also very short, as it is divided into two narrow sections, which means that the longitudinal axis is barely marked. It has a crypt . It has small chapels between the buttresses , and above them there are galleries that were once closed with lattices . The stands will become an element frequently used by Don José Martín.
The transept, which has been given the same development as the nave, is very wide, which creates the feeling of a centralized space at the head. The presbytery, curiously, is rectangular, while the feet are closed polygonally. The church is covered with a barrel vault with lunettes , and the transept with a lowered vault topped by a lantern.
At one end of the transept, on the west side, is the Chapel of Las Angustias, which has an elliptical plan, with its walls covered by Corinthian pilasters. This type of floor plan, so characteristic of baroque architecture , appears in this building, for the first time in Cuenca.
In principle, the layout of the church is strange, due to the polygonal wall at the foot, facing south, which would be more in line with the shape of a header. This, together with the variation that occurs in the elevation, in what is the current presbytery , with respect to the nave and the feet, makes us think if there was not a change in the orientation of the building, when taking charge of the work Don José Martín, who, to give a more attractive entrance to his chapel, placed the transept, of ostensibly greater width, on the north side, and, consequently, moved the presbytery to this part. In this way, the arm of the transept designed by Don José Martín becomes the nave of the aforementioned chapel. Even the interior walls of the transept stand out with richer ornamentation.
Don José Martín, through subtle changes in the arrangement of the cornices and the arrangement of the elements, converted a building still immersed in the baroque tradition into something more festive and closer to the Rococo movement; and this not because of the sense of asymmetry and special complication, to which the architecture of central Europe is conducive, but rather because of the delicate arrangement of the ornamentation on the walls; These are dyed, on the other hand, with a weak pastel color, green, etc.
At the foot of the church is the doorway of the crypt . The little plasticity of the composite pilasters that frame the semicircular arch of the door indicates that it is a work from the late Baroque.
The spandrels are decorated with little angels. In the upper body there is a window, framed by projecting pilasters and a slightly curved entablature. The two bodies are linked with fine moldings."
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