Manuel Reguera González’s 1778 Design Project for Completing the Façade of the Church of the Monastery of Nuestra Señora del Rosario (Order of Preachers) in Oviedo

Abstract

The unearthing of a photograph of the definitive design project for the façade of the church of the Dominican monastery of Oviedo (1778), partially raised in 1768, reveals the ideas of the architect Manuel Reguera González (1731-1798) for this sixteenth-century church. Similarities with the classicism of Juan de Herrera and the Baroque tradition of Rome bear out Reguera’s apprenticeship with Ventura Rodríguez under the aegis of enlightened academicism, as well as the cosmopolitan outlook of the client and prior of the monastery, the Asturian monk Gabriel Bernaldo de Quirós.