Juan de Herrera
Juan de Herrera completed El Escorial and gave his name to an austere, almost undecorated classicism, the Herrerian style. He was also a mathematician and founded an academy of mathematics in Madrid.
Juan de Herrera was born around 1530 in Cantabria in northern Spain. He studied the humanities in Valladolid and served in the Spanish army in Italy and Flanders under Charles V. He was interested in mathematics, astronomy and mechanics, and he collected books on science. In 1563 he came to El Escorial as assistant to the architect Juan Bautista de Toledo, and when Toledo died in 1567 Herrera took over the work.
Under Herrera’s direction El Escorial was completed in 1584. He designed the church with its dome and gave the whole complex its austere appearance, with granite façades almost without decoration. He also designed the south front of the palace at Aranjuez, the exchange in Seville, which today houses the Archive of the Indies, and plans for Valladolid Cathedral, which was never completed. He designed lifting machines and instruments, and in 1582 he founded an academy of mathematics in Madrid at the king’s behest.
Herrera died in Madrid in 1597. His austere classicism, in which mass, proportion and bare stone do the talking, is called estilo herreriano and shaped Spanish architecture for a long time, including in the colonies in America. The style is associated with Philip II’s piety and power and with the gravity of the Counter-Reformation. In the 20th century it was revived in Spain under Franco as a national style. Herrera shows that the Renaissance in Spain took on a distinctive, austere form, far from Italian playfulness.