Filippo Juvarra in Portugal: unpublished documents on projects of Lisbon and Mafra

Abstract

In the Austrian State Archive in Vienna, there is a collection of letters written by Giuseppe Zignoni, Austrian royal envoy to the court of Lisbon from 1704 to 1724, the year of his death. The relationship between the two courts were intense during the first half of the eighteenth century, thanks to the marriage between the King of Portugal, John V (1689-1750) and the Austrian archduchess Maria Anna of Hapsburg (1683-1754).

In Zignoni’s correspondence, written in Italian, there is much news on the stay of Filippo Juvarra in Lisbon (January-July 1719) and on the projects he drew up for King John V.

As a result, an unknown picture emerges which allows us to further study facts referred to in other sources (mainly the letters of the apostolic nuncio published by Aurora Scotti in 1973), but also to enhance new opinions and evaluations of Juvarra’s stay.

The Sicilian architect re-invented the western part of the city of Lisbon. Indeed, he not only concerned himself with the“patriarchal church”and Royal Palace but also with the customs, the Royal Pleasure-ground Residence outside the city, and with the reformulation of the Mafra project. These unpublished documents confirm the far-reaching intervention of Juvarra, also providing useful information on the organization of the yards and the need to call workers from Lombardy. 

The unpublished material is contextualized in the process of an artistic-cultural opening that characterized the first half of the reign of John V, while in the appendix the complete transcript of the various periods related to the activity of Filippo Juvarra in Portugal is provided.