Túmulos y jeroglíficos en Pamplona por la muerte de Isabel de Farnesio

Abstract

In 1766 the funeral rites in memory of Queen Isabel de Farnesio were celebrated in the Cathedral of Pamplona, where all the social classes of the town assisted leaded by the Viceroy of Navarra, Count of Riela. The Cathedral received a decorative covering in which sticked out the catafalque, a huge tower-shaped machine of decreasing bodies that covered the main part of the transept, in ground plan as well as in elevations. Numerous hieroglyphics, some of which have arrived to us, made the funerary monument «talk» about the deceased queen's virtues. Their mentor, the mercedarian father Asarta, is an expert of the Holy Scriptures, the classical, renaissance and baroque literature, and the emblems books, well known in the intellectual circles of Pamplona in the middle of 18th century.