Anne Clifford's El Escorial, Brussels
The architectural work of Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1675) has received increasing attention in recent years. Through projects of architectural renovatio, Clifford rebuilt ancestral castles, beautified local churches, established charitable foundations and erected monuments across the dramatic seventeenth-century landscape that surrounded her family estates in north-west England. These works were seen as both connected and exemplary by contemporaries. “Represent all these before you [and] you would imagine … something greater than an Escurial: an eighth Wonder”, her valedictory sermon proclaimed. What prompted this comparison? El Escorial, completed for Philip II of Spain in the 1580s, was a monumental composition, a single mountain of building where Anne’s works were dispersed. But it incorporated a similar range of functions – palace, church, religious foundation, monument. And the etymology of its name resonated under cloudier English skies. “Escorial” had geological, material and extractive associations, derived from escoria, for the slagg deposits from antique iron mines that characterised Phillip’s chosen site; from escouro or aesculus for the dark oaks that characterised that country and which provided staple building materials; from conchylia, the scallop shells associated with pilgrimage, translation and religious symbolism in Phillip’s foundation. This paper considers Anne Clifford’s architectural works in terms of a similar set of extractive, landscape and material characteristics. Glass for Anne’s windowpanes was locally sourced: she inscribed her initials into it, netting the landscape with her name. Timber roof beams came from her woods. Coal for her fires came from mines she claimed, as did the lead that covered her roofs. If she mined the hills around her for fuel and materials, she also mined more abstract, legal deposits to find ancient precedents by which she could claim and hold land. In this Northern “Wonder”, as in El Escorial, extractive strategies, local materials and strategic transposition formed the architectural project.
Tim Anstey Presented "Anne Clifford's El Escorial" at the International Symposium on Embodied Culture in Brussels, organized in the framework of the Scientific Research Network “READ.ADAPT.REUSE. Reading and transforming the As Found”.
Mari Lending served on the scientific committee.
