PhD Program in Historical studies
Medinaceli (Soria)
The ducal palace of the Medinaceli occupies an entire side of the Plaza Mayor of the city with the same name. A building from the seventeenth century, it was initiated in 1625 under the orders of the Duke of Medinaceli. The architect was Juan Gómez de Mora, the nephew of Francisco de Mora, with whom he worked on the ducal palace of Lerma. The obvious similarities between both buildings are not coincidental. The palace of Medinaceli displays Renaissance influences and was built in the seventeenth-century as the worthy residence of the house of Medina, whose emblems are present in the outward part of the façade. It fell into disuse during the nineteenth century and into almost complete ruin until restoration work was undertaken at the end of the nineties of the past century. In December 2008 a museum was opened for cultural exhibits with ten rooms which occupy almost the whole of the ground floor. The building was constructed around a courtyard with two floors, with a symmetrical sobriety of great elegance. The façade is composed of a series of balconies on top of which there are curved tympana. On top of the central one there is a coat of arms of the house of Medinaceli, in correspondence with the entrance, which is protected by a cornice. The upper covering was to be covered in slate like in the Lerma palace, the Plaza Mayor and the Casa de la Villa in Madrid. The towers, eliminated in the nineteenth century and reconstructed in a subsequent restoration, were supposed to be surmounted by spires, thus making them higher. Inside one can see various Roman mosaics such as the one from the fourth century which was found in the Plaza Mayor, with the goddess Ceres in the centre, surrounded by geometrical and animal motifs or the small one, found in San Gil, with geometrical motifs and fantastic creatures.