A War Drawing for Visualizing Madrid’s Counter-Façade

Abstract

The Cornisa de Madrid has become a city icon thanks to the graphic heritage that depitcs it in drawings, prints, and paintings. In contrast, the opposite side of the Manzanares River, the counter-facade, as Cano Lasso named it, has hardly been graphically represented. An anonymous and unknown panoramic perspective, traced during the Spanish Civil War, shows an accurate view of the landscape towards the south. This work aims to study its characteristics, qualities, contributions to understand the city development and its importance for the history of representations of the city of Madrid. Thanks to the drawing analysis, it has been possible to track the place and time of its making: the south tower of the Virgen de la Paloma church and the first half of 1937. Despite the absence of signs of an accurate geometric projection system for the drawing construction, it is possible to find some connections between this drawing and the panoramas and dioramas that were frequent those years. However, its main interest is to consider it as a snapshot of the south of Madrid, just in a crucial moment of the urban development: when the rural land was turning into the city.