José Marín-Baldo designed completely new buildings of different typologies, intervened in historic buildings, planned commemorative monuments and carried out urban planning at the time as developed an important activity as a painter and writer. His work is the object of a study in an article published by Professor Emilio Ángel Villanueva Muñoz in the number 35 of Cuadernos de Arte of the University of Granada under the title “José Martín-Baldo: artistic facets of a nineteenth-century architect.”
He was born in Murcia in 1828 and studied in the School of Architecture of Madrid; afterwards he went to Paris, where he broadened his studies and completed his education.
He did his first professional works in the middle of the fifties, in Murcia. He went to Almería in 1859, where he worked as provincial architect. Later, in 1869, he went to Murcia, where he held the post of municipal architect. Afterwards, at the beginning of the Restoration period, this multi-faceted architect moved to Madrid. It was 1876, and José Marín-Baldo was preparing the Project of the Monument to Columbus for the Philately World Fair with which he obtained the Gold Medal.
José Marín-Baldo was architect at the Treasury Department, carried out intervention projects in public buildings of civil nature, collaborated actively in architectonic and urban designs to build houses or towns affected by natural disasters (floods in the Spanish east coast in 1879 and earthquakes in Andalusia in 1884), and he devoted part of his time to writing and painting, two important aspects, together with architecture, of the creative work of this versatile Murcian.
According to the author of the study, Professor Emilio Ángel Villanueva Muñoz: “He intervened in numerous religious buildings of the dioceses of Almería, Guadix-Baza, Granada and Murcia”. And he adds: “José Marín-Baldo expounded in writing his theoretical point of view on monument restoration, taking part in the debate on this subject of the second half of the XIX century. He did it with an article titled “The artistic criteria”, published in 1884.”
Reference: Prof Emilio Ángel Villanueva Muñoz. Dpt. of Art History. University of Granada.
Phone number: 958 243621.
E-mail: eavm@platon.ugr.es
