Iglesia de San Antonio de los Alemanes

The church of San Antonio de los Alemanes, founded as the church of San Antonio de los Portugueses, is a church situated in the Centro district of Madrid (Spain), at the junction of the calle de la Puebla and the corredera Baja de San Pablo. A clear example of Madrid Baroque, low-cost materials such as brick and plaster were used in its construction, with a sober façade and spire. The church's main novelty is its elliptical floor plan, one of the few of its kind in Spain, as well as the fact that it is entirely painted in fresco, both the dome and the walls. Its main façade, crowned by a statue of the titular saint, is in a sober post-Herrerian style.

The establishment of the capital of the Spanish Monarchy in Madrid in 1561, during the reign of Philip II (1556-1598), gave an enormous boost to the development of architecture and other arts in the city. The bustling political and cultural life of the villa and court (where the spread of treatises on artistic subjects and the Chair of Architecture were of great importance) brought the arrival and encounter of new artistic currents, to which was added the multiplication of new ecclesiastical buildings as a consequence of the Counter-Reformation climate. During the seventeenth century, Baroque in Madrid took shape in a large number of new churches (to the detriment of civil architecture), small in size, rather ornate, and with a fondness for the drum dome. Despite a certain uniformity in the new designs, the constricting Classicist canons and the long shadow of the architecture of Juan de Herrera (1530-1597) were gradually left behind. The case of San Antonio de los Alemanes is a good example of these phenomena, as it combines the main features of this Baroque while also presenting other particular ones (elliptical plan, superficial pictorial decoration).