Vidrieras en las iglesias de los pueblos de colonización en Extremadura

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, the National Colonization Institute built in Spain around 300 new villages, mainly along river basins. In its extensive building programme churches stand out, with their high bell towers rising up in the rural landscape. The influence of José Luis Fernández del Amo (architect from the INC and director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art between 1952 and 1958) led young artists to join the design of plastic art works that were to complement the buildings, opening the door to modernity. Alongside painting, sculpture, ceramics and mosaic, stained-glass windows are particularly important in churches. They are essential to illuminate the space, adopt different formats and introduce illustrative elements. They alternate the ancient technique of leaded glass with another one from the twentieth century, which uses concrete as a linking element among coloured dallas. These have a greater thickness and more expressive resources. Most of them follow a figurative approach and develop a wide-ranging iconographic program. They are inspired by the Holy Scriptures, with representations of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the tetramorphs or the evangelists, saints, angels, the dove of the Holy Spirit, the commandments, episodes from the Passion, eucharistic elements and naturalistic stylisations. The great novelty is the presence of abstraction, with geometric or informal schemes that run between synthesis and compositional complexity, paying special attention to chromatic games. From the 65 settlement villages erected in Extremadura, this book selects 50 churches, organised in five zones. Each temple has a monographic study and is accompanied by a careful repertoire of images. Notable artists include Ángel Atienza, Arcadio Blasco, Antonio Hernández Carpe, José Luis Sánchez, Ramón Casillas, Juan Ignacio Cárdenas, Julián Gil and Julián Pérez Muñoz, along with the workshop ‘Vidrieras de Arte’ from Bilbao. This individualised analysis is contextualised with a preliminary study on the history of the stained-glass window and its technical process up to the present. It also includes another chapter on the peculiarities of stained-glass windows in Extremadura colonization villages and its original and innovative design. It is the result of 11 years of research on these churches, with an exhaustive field and archive work, which provides new information on a largely unpublished topic.