The Royal monastery of San Lorenzo at El Escorial

Abstract

In his well-known Dichos y hechos del rey D. Felipe II (1632), Baltasar Porreño wrote that the monarch liad built a temple at El Escorial "wich alongside the seven wonders of the world is one of them and merits first place". In other words, very early on the great work rivalled the great architecture of Antiquity as the eighth wonder, for Porreño's wishes not wi th standing this was the place that fell to it. Others were more uncompromising. Father Francisco de los Santos for example in his Descripción breve del Monasterio de San Lorenzo (1657) had no hesitation in cutting short the argument by describing the work of Philip II as Opus miraculumorbis and the only wonder of the world, thus ruling out all others. This means that in the view of both contemporaries and later generations, one had to go right back in history to find, in the Pyramids of Egypt or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, anything to compare with the stunning grandeur of the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial