On the night of July 18, 1936, after the coup that sparked the Spanish Civil War, militants of anarchist and republican ideology ignited a terrifying fire that reduced most of the city to ashes. Saints Church … Joannes. A true emblem of the city of Valencia, located in the nerve center next to La Llonga and the Central Market, which has already suffered the vicissitudes of fire on two previous occasions and which today, after 90 years, has regained its beauty and splendor.
That morning, the fire spread so quickly, fanned by the wooden covering, that it turned the interior of the temple into a burning furnace for days. The fire destroyed everything: the main altarpiece, the pictures, the archives, the pictorial decoration, and the works of the brilliant painter. Antonio Palomino. Its murals, cracked by the heat, smoke and water with which the fire was extinguished, remain practically unrecognizable, even today.
the Hortensia Herrero Foundation It developed a comprehensive restoration of the church through structural intervention supervised by the team of architect Carlos Campos and figurative ornamental reform led by Pilar Roig and the University Institute for Heritage Restoration (IRP) of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. A poem that culminates with traditional and digital procedures, adding new bio-cleaning techniques with bacteria and introducing audio-visual elements. The art collector and vice president of Mercadona, Hortensia Herrero, paid nearly ten million euros for the work, which lasted five years.
The history of Santos Juanes, located in a privileged place in the center of Valencia where important guilds settled, begins in 1238 with the conquest of the Kingdom of Valencia. King James IWho donated all the mosques and cemeteries to the church except for the mayor, whose land was used as a market. Two years later, the parish was founded and its connection with the merchants led to the unification of the church with the works of the city.
was in 1311 When it was exposed to the first fire, the temple was subsequently rebuilt in a Gothic perspective, with cross vaults, sober decoration and lighting through windows in the chapels. In fact, it is believed that it was here that Saint Vincent Ferrer preached his first sermon in Valencia. The second fire occurred in 1592Where the main altarpiece and the headboard wall were destroyed. The architectural reform lasted for 22 years and helped expand the church and rebuild the apse in a polygonal plan.
Between 1693 and 1710, it underwent a Baroque transformation, covering the Gothic vault with a barrel vault with crescents, and in parallel, the painter Palomino decorated the interior while Bertici and Alibrandi made sculptures of tribes, icons and stucco using Italian techniques. In 1858 the church received The title “Royal”.granted by Queen Elizabeth II and in 1936 it was exposed to its last fire, after the beginning of the Civil War, in the context of anti-clerical violence that caused irreparable damage to the decoration.
Photo of the restoration of Santos Juanes in Valencia
At the end of the war, work began to rebuild the cult and in 1947, thanks to the intervention of the Marquis of Lozoya, General Director of Fine Arts, the temple was declared National Monument. During the following decades, more than half of the vault panels were removed using the “stabo” technique on 90 plywood panels, restored in Barcelona and then reinstalled. The apse was also interfered with, but its paintings never appeared again, and their whereabouts remain an unsolved mystery today.
New technologies
Now, the pictorial recombination process has combined traditional retouching and reconstruction of significant losses through the transfer of printed virtual images, obtained from the digital correction and colorization of J. Alcon’s photograph before the fire of 1936, allowing the aesthetics and clarity of the collection to be accurately restored.
The most notable technical achievements were reflected in the replacement of inadequate wooden supports with carbon fiber and aluminum structures, cleaning and pictorial reconstruction. According to Pilar Roig, “Cleaning has combined innovative and respectable alternatives, e.g Surfactant-free gel emulsions, laser and bacteria-free bio-cleaningwhich provided technical efficiency with a sustainable, non-invasive approach, and is in line with contemporary conservation principles.
As a culmination of the restoration, Hortensia Herrero wanted to present Valencia with an additional gift: an immersive projections project. “Immersive Baroque”Which transforms the temple into a space of light, sound and audio-visual narration. It is an audio-visual journey that uses the latest technology to immerse you in the history of the Santos Juanes Church from a symbolic perspective.