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Origin and development of Neo-Gothic in the Catholic churches of the city and province of Buenos Aires

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Abstract

The rise of the Gothic Revival in Argentina took place under very particular political, economic and religious circumstances. Soon after Argentine independence in 1810, the country’s authorities promoted immigration. By the late 1820s, English-speaking residents numbered around 7000. Most, as well as a small group of Germans, belonged to various Protestant denominations. In 1834 the Scottish architect Richard Adams designed a funeral chapel for the Protestant cemetery in Buenos Aires. It was Argentina’s first Neo-Gothic edifice. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Gothic style became popular among all Protestant groups. And, by the 1880s, Roman Catholics were beginning to adopt the Gothic mode as well, not only for parish churches, but also for cathedrals and pilgrimage basilicas. Catholics generally looked to Tuscan and French Gothic as sources of inspiration for their Gothic Revival churches.

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Notes

  1. The cemetery occupied a tract of land just a few blocks behind the present Congress building. In 1892 the burial grounds were closed and the remains were subsequently removed. The chapel was demolished in 1915 and the whole area was then converted in to a small park (Corti, 2002a, 40–42).

  2. Most of these are treated in this volume by Buján.

  3. This and the above paragraph I have revised from Francisco Corti’s original presentation (at the 2010 conference of the Society of Architectural Historians) to reflect his new (and I believe correct) thinking concerning the source of the buttressing system employed in the Inmaculado Corazón de María. Sadly, Corti died in 2011, but his new insights were made early enough to appear in his manuscript dealing with Neo-Gothic Catholic churches in Buenos Aires, a work eventually published, in collaboration with O. Manzi and P. Dieckmann (Corti, Dieckmann and Manzi, 2012) [R.A. Sundt, co-editor].

  4. One exception is the Italian architect Broggi (1872–1958), the author of San Agustín, who arrived in Buenos Aires at age eleven in 1883 and did his architectural studies in Argentina (Corti and Manzi, 2012, 64, n. 139).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Teoría e Historia del Arte ‘Julio Payró’, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenes Aires, Argentina

    Francisco Corti

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  1. Francisco Corti
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Corti, F. Origin and development of Neo-Gothic in the Catholic churches of the city and province of Buenos Aires. Postmedieval 6, 304–323 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2015.27

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