Giovanni Antonio Medrano

The Medrano family had close ties to the Spanish Monarchs. In fact, the Regency of the Royal Council of Navarre from May 9th 1702 to 1705 under Don Pedro Antonio de Medrano for King Philip V confirms this.[2]

During this Andalusian period, Giovanni Antonio Medrano began to deal with the military and architectural education of the Infante Don Carlos and his brothers; of these tasks, for "instruction and amusement of the Most Serene Prince our Lord and Lords Infantes", there are two plans of a Fort, erected between 1729 and 1730 in Buenavista, on the outskirts of Seville, which included a ravelin dedicated to the Infante don Carlos himself.

In December 1731 he followed Philip V's sixteen-year-old son, Charles of Bourbon, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, to Livorno, as an ordinary engineer and with the rank of lieutenant. From 1732 to 1734 he remained in the service of the Infante, teaching him geography, history and mathematics, as well as military art and architecture during his stay in the cities of Florence, Parma and Piacenza.[1]

The fact that Giovanni Antonio Medrano was promoted in 1733 to lieutenant and ordinary engineer and, later and already in Naples, in 1737, to brigadier and chief engineer, testifies to his efforts and work. After the coronation of Charles as king of Naples and Sicily in 1734, probably due to his close bond with the young sovereign, but more generally for reasons related to the need for the government to have more direct control over the entire local system of public works, Medrano was invested with some of the most prestigious and strategic positions of a public nature initiated by the Bourbons in the capital.

While still a teenager, he moved with his family to Spain, where he embarked on a military career within the royal corps of engineers created in 1711 by King Philip V of Bourbon. Giovanni had entered the service of Spain in 1719 as a Military Architect, although it is probable that Giovanni had already joined the army of the Marquess of Verboom Jorge Próspero de Verboom in the Sicilian campaign of 1718, since in December of that same year he appeared as extraordinary engineer and sub-lieutenant of this body. The Marquess of Verboom was one of the best students to come out of the Royal Military and Mathematics Academy of Brussels (1675 - 1706), personally taught by the sole director and Master of Mathematics Don Sebastián Fernández de Medrano in order to train the most distinguished officers in the peninsula in the Art of War.[3] As an extraordinary engineer and with the rank of second lieutenant Giovanni Antonio Medrano participated in the Spanish campaign to reconquer Sicily in December 1718 and two years later he was assigned to the garrisons of Catalonia, Valencia and Murcia, specializing in the design of large territorial infrastructures and plants for the military defence, such as Montjuïc Castle in Barcelona which he drew up in 1730.

Giovanni reappears in 1729, when Medrano was commissioned to organize the roads for the journey of the royal family, headed by Philip V and Isabel de Farnese, from Madrid to Seville.[4]

Medrano also appears as "Major Regius Praefectus Mathematicis Regni Neapolitani"(Major Royal Governor of Mathematics of the Kingdom of Naples) even apparently a year before he was named chief engineer of the kingdom, a title he did not receive until 1735.[1]

Commemorative Obelisk of Bitonto by Giovanni Antonio Medrano

Medrano became a brigadier in the army of Charles of Bourbon, while he was king of Naples and Sicily. Among the first professional commitments undertaken by Medrano in the Kingdom of Naples was the project of an obelisk to be built in Bitonto to celebrate the victorious outcome of the Bourbons over the Habsburgs in the battle of May 1734. Located in the current square, the Carolinian obelisk, begun in 1736, was conceived by Giovanni Antonio Medrano in a truncated pyramid shape with inscriptions on the four sides attributed to B. Tanucci, for a vertical development of about 18 metres. Outside the capital, in that same period, Medrano was also in charge of the construction on the Volturno, at the royal site of Venafro, of an imposing factory bridge, called di Torcino, which, destroyed by a flood of the river, was rebuilt around to 1750 by the engineer F. Gasperi.

Palace of the Viceroys of Naples

Back in Naples, Medrano was employed in 1734, without knowing the scope of his work, on the Royal Palace of Naples built by Domenico Fontana. In January 1735, he accompanied the King, already as Senior Engineer of the Kingdom and Lieutenant Colonel, on his trip to Sicily, in the company of Michelangelo de Blasio, also an engineer, who was, however, arrested on charges of treason in the month February.

Exterior of the Teatro di San Carlo

In 1737, Charles commissioned Giovanni Antonio Medrano to design the new San Carlo opera house in Naples.[1] The Teatro Reale di San Carlo, as originally named by the Bourbon monarchy but today known simply as the Teatro di San Carlo, is an opera house in Naples, Italy, connected to the Royal Palace of Capodimonte and adjacent to the Piazza del Plebiscito. The San Carlo theater, designed in 1737, was completed after only eight months, in October of the same year. Giovanni Antonio Medrano took charge with Angelo Carasale. Characterized by a typical "horseshoe" layout, with a semicircular profile towards the back of the stalls and straight connections towards the proscenium, the complex was also reproduced in the Recueil de planches of the Encyclopédie,[5] on the basis of surveys previously produced and published by GPM Dumont. The world's oldest opera house, the Teatro di San Carlo in Italy, has survived wars, fires and the Neapolitan revolution.

Palace of Capodimonte designed by Giovanni Antonio Medrano

King Carlos understood the need to create a system of self-representation capable of manifesting his new political identity in the context of the highly competitive Neapolitan society. According to the specific idea of majesty they meant to highlight, old and new images, ceremonies and spaces for the new Neapolitan monarchy were created or, at least, reshaped from 1734 onwards. Giovanni Antonio Medrano was employed to design the palaces necessary to enact Don Carlos’s new status, while a royal household and court etiquette were also established.[6] Giovanni Antonio Medrano went on to design the Palace of Capodimonte, Charles's new palace in Naples. Medrano started work on this in 1738, but the building was not finally completed until 1840. First promoted to brigadier and then major engineer of the kingdom, in the short span of time between 1734 and 1738 he supervised the renovation and expansion works of the viceregal palace (1734), he worked on restoration projects on the Palazzo dei Regi Studi (1735 ), designed the San Carlo theater (1737) and started the planning and the first phase of the construction sites of the Royal Palace of Portici (1737-38). In later years he took over from Antonio Canevari as sole architect of the new palace of Capodimonte.

King Charles, still unrecognized as a legitimate monarch by some European courts, knew that the Bourbon hold on Southern Italy depended on his ability to give birth to an heir and dynasty. Producing a son was no inconsequential matter: two major wars of the eighteenth century erupted after the failure of the Habsburg dynasty to do so. So while Medrano was at the draftsman’s table, it was far from certain that Charles’s reign would endure. Capodimonte therefore boldly anticipated the permanence of the royal family by spatially solidifying a place for it. Other aspects of the plan confirm the broader political importance of the palace.

Its cubic regularity, divided into thirds by the two courtyards and stair hall, reflects the king’s consistent insistence on geometric clarity in his architectural commissions. The gridded layout related buildings in Naples to the Herrerian style of Spanish royal retreats, such as the rectilinear cube of El Pardo and the multiple courts of El Escorial, drawing upon the austere authority and permanence that those structures provided. The projecting corners replicated, in form and function, the royal bedroom suite of Fontana’s Palazzo Reale. The stairs are grander elaborations of the staircase of the Teatro di San Carlo, which had been designed by Medrano as an extension of the Palazzo Reale. The theater had one central monumental staircase linked by two smaller ones, whereas the palace was to have two principal ones. Like the palace, the theater’s central steps embraced an open hall with lights formed in a C shape. At Capodimonte this form was doubled, so that two C-shaped staircases face each other across an open hall.

The features drawn from Spain, the Teatro di San Carlo, and the Palazzo Reale indicate that Medrano oversaw the design. He knew Spanish monuments well, renovated the Palazzo Reale, and built the theater. Medrano probably designed the stairs, for their distinctive C-shaped lights resemble the one he designed for San Carlo. Medrano was the most important designer in the palace’s history. The king showed the utmost interest in the building, demanding weekly updates on its progress and even insisting on changes.

Though it took a century to complete, royal enthusiasm for the project did not fade because of its design. What undermined the project was that the palace was built over a series of ancient chasms, requiring more work and expense than anticipated. Their enormous cost prompted the inquest that lead to Medrano’s imprisonment. His trial, the great distance from quarries, and an insufficient supply of fresh water led the court to refocus efforts at Portici, and later, Royal Palace of Caserta. Though only the parts of the building to the south and east were complete by the time Charles left Naples to become King of Spain in 1759, the palace set important precedents. Its geometric simplicity was admired, and would guide similar planning at Caserta. Its plan also appears to have served as a model for Charles’s expansion of El Pardo, near Madrid, in the 1770s.[7]

Charles III commissioned Medrano to excavate Herculaneum

In 1738, with the engineer from Zaragoza, Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre, Giovanni Antonio Medrano was commissioned by King Charles to begin the excavations of Herculaneum, giving rise to a new type of activity.[8]

Starting from the summer of 1741 Giovanni Antonio Medrano began to lose control and supervision of the numerous construction sites that had been entrusted to him: from the works for the quay of the new port of Naples (1740) which continued under the expert direction of the military engineer G. Bompiede to those of the new cavalry district on the Riviera di Chiaia (1740), up to the continuation of the projects and works for the new palace of Portici, which were definitively entrusted to Canevari. The well-documented forensic allegations produced by the Neapolitan lawyer N.M. Pirelli for the defense of Medrano, who, after eighteen months in prison and on charges of collusion and omission of official documents, on 25 September 1743 he was dismissed from all positions, demoted and sentenced to five years of closed garrison. Giovanni Antonio Medrano served his sentence at the military garrison of Peñon, where he was engaged in 1746 in the project for the plan of the fortress and the bay of Gibraltar.[9]

He obtained a pardon with the respective reduction of the sentence and returned to Italy in 1746, but his professional figure was severely attacked by fierce criticism from the Neapolitan engineers of the time. With these heavy criticisms he was marginalized from public offices.