Diego de Riaño and the transition to the Renaissance at the Collegiate Church of Osuna

Abstract

The collegiate church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, the dynastic emblem and pantheon of the Téllez de Girón family, counts of Ureña, was built during the second quarter of the 16th century in the town of Osuna, in the old kingdom of Seville. The town had been incorporated into the family’s jurisdiction in 1464 (Viña Brito 1990: 279) and a century later, in 1562, Philip II granted the duchy of Osuna to the descendants, consolidating one of the most important noble houses in Spain. At decisive moments in its history, the family’s ambitious project was bolstered by the immense symbolism of the new church that looked down upon an ennobled and rapidly expanding town. In 1534, with the works well underway, the former parish of Osuna was elevated to the status of a collegiate congregation by virtue of a papal bull of Paul III (Rodríguez Buzón 1982: 14). As the church acquired its shape and form, Spanish architecture was quickly transitioning to the Renaissance, which in the kingdoms of Granada and Seville was driven by the presence of Emperor Charles V, throughout 1526, for his marriage to Isabella of Portugal. In Granada in 1528, Diego Siloé presented his design for the new Renaissance cathedral (Ampliato and Acosta 2020b). In Seville, Diego de Riaño was appointed master builder of the city hall in 1527 and of the cathedral in 1528, both milestones in a brilliant career that contains significant documentary lacunae and has caused a certain amount of historiographical controversy (Rodríguez and Ampliato 2022). The master appears to have begun his apprenticeship with Juan Gil de Hontañón, one of the great figures of the Spanish Late Gothic. From the mid1520s, after a few years in Portugal, he became very active in Seville, experiencing a rapid and profound evolution in the latter years that was abruptly interrupted by his untimely death at the end of 1534. He only managed to oversee the beginning of his first Renaissance works, among which we must include the nave and aisles section in Osuna, a hitherto undocumented attribution for which we provide new evidence. The nave and aisles of the collegiate church constitute an exceptional testament to the time in which a young master, with sound training in the Gothic style, began to tentatively experiment with the new Renaissance forms.