The influence wielded by the Royal Academy of fine arts of St. Femando over local govemment decisions in the Ancien Regime: Police Ordinances in Cádiz (1792) and the struggle for the authority to confer the degree of master builder

Abstract

In Spain the giving of degree or qualification of Architect or Master Builder had become the prerogative of the Academy of St. Fernando as retlected in its Statutes of 1757. Nonetheless over the following years there were still bitter disputes with those other institutions, such as Town Halls, which had previously had this privilege. This article shows how the City of Cádiz attempted -through its Town Council- to recover the authority to power to confer these degrees, by proposing in its Local Police Ordinances of 1792 that this privilege should belong to the local Fine Arts School. This claim was to be opposed by the Academy. The legal case which ensued affords sorne of the most interesting evidence of the debates at the end of the 1 8th century on the means of control of architecture and public building works in the cities of the Enlightenrnent. The present article is also intended as a contribution to the commemoration of the founding in 1744 of the Preparatory Junta, an organization which was to function in an interim manner until the Academy was definitively established in 1752.