The Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, a Wonder of Equilibrium. Rubio i Bellver's Equilibrium Analysis of 1912

Resumen

The cathedral of Palma de Mallorca is the chef
d'~uvre of Catalan or Mediterranean Gothic.
However it has not received the attention it deserves
and in the classical works on Gothic architecture it
is only briefly mentioned. There is only one architectural
monograph by Cram, published in 1932,
which is, from a historical point of view, completely
outdated. It includes, however, the only published
detailed survey and plans of the cathedral to datea
new survey by Fuentes is included in the present
book, and a detailed structural survey has been
made recently by Fuentes and Guerra.1 The history
of the cathedral's construction was first correctly
described by Durliat in 1960 thanks to his study of
the acc~unt books. Indeed a large quantity of original
sources is kept in the Chapter Archive of the
Cathedral. Several partial publications have dwelt
on this treasure of information. In 1999, Domenge
summarised his work of two decades in the Archive
and gave a detailed history of the construction in
the 14th century; the bibliography of this book
gathers all the contributions up to that date. The
same author has contributed extensively to further
parts of the history in unpublished reports of
the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and several
other publications.2 In these works Domenge
also studied the history of the numerous intervention~
after the completion of the cathedral in the
16th century, transcribing the expertises written by
different masters over three centuries.