El convent de Sant Francesc d'Assís de Palma. Diagnòstic i potencialitats del seu valor patrimonial

Abstract

The complex formed by the church, the cloister and the convent of Saint Francis of Assisi in Palma is one of the most important religious monuments in the Balearic Islands. Since its establishment in Mallorca, in the Middle Ages, the franciscan order, and mainly its mother house located in the town of Palma, has exercised a notable influence on the society and culture of the island. From the very beginning, the synergies that the franciscans created with Majorcan society turned the Palma convent into a repository of socio-cultural values of paramount importance. For this reason, the study of the cultural heritage of the convent becomes essential to understand an important part of our history. From the thirteenth century, above all thanks to the fact that the franciscans enjoyed the favour of the monarchy and the nobility, the franciscan community of Palma was able to gather an important patrimony, both immovable and movable, which has been transformed over seven centuries. The influence of different artistic styles, the changes in the devotional practices and the course of historical events themselves constituted the factors that have been shaping the cultural heritage of the Franciscans of Palma until reaching the configuration that we can admire today. Even though this heritage has been the subject of some studies, it lacks a thorough investigation that deals with the subject in more depth and elaborates an updated status of the issue. In this essay we would like to cover both the study of the immovable heritage and the movable heritage from an interdisciplinary point of view. The backbone of this research has been the documentation of all this heritage through the collection and analysis of data provided by the bibliographical and graphical documentation as well as the information found in different archives. On the other hand, exhaustive field work has been carried out to document and study of the preserved material sources. This field work has also taken into consideration the heritage that, originally located in the franciscan convent, it is currently, for some reason, dispersed in other locations. Taking all these aspects into consideration, the main objective of this thesis is to diagnose the current state of conservation of the cultural heritage of the convent of Saint Francis of Assisi in Palma and its historical outlining, this is, the evolution of this heritage to the present day.