Ephemeral architecture had a special relevance in the Spanish Baroque, as it fulfilled diverse aesthetic, political, religious and social functions. On the one hand, it was an indispensable component of support for architectural achievements, carried out in a perishable and transitory way, which allowed a cheapening of materials and a way to capture new designs and more daring and original solutions of the new Baroque style, which could not be done in conventional constructions. On the other hand, its volubility made possible the creation of a wide range of productions designed according to their diverse functionality: triumphal arches for the reception of kings and aristocratic personages, catafalques for religious ceremonies, burial mounds for funerary ceremonies and diverse scenarios for social or religious events, such as the feast of Corpus Christi or Holy Week.
These works were usually profusely decorated and developed an iconographic program that emphasized the power of the ruling classes of the time, both political and religious: in the political sphere it exalted the omnipotent power of the absolutist monarchy, while in the religious sphere it praised the spiritual dominion of the Counter-Reformation Church. They used to have a high propagandistic component, as vehicles of ostentation of these ruling classes, so they were mainly addressed to the people—that were the recipients of these grand ceremonies and spectacles.
Although there are no material remains of this type of performance, they are known thanks to drawings and engravings, as well as literary accounts of the time, which described them in great detail. Many writers and chroniclers devoted themselves to this type of descriptions, even giving rise to a new literary genre, the "Chronicle."
The Baroque: a culture of image
Architecture is the art and technique of constructing buildings, of designing spaces and volumes with a utilitarian purpose, mainly housing, but also various constructions of a social, civil or religious nature. Space, when modified by human beings, is transmuted, acquires a new meaning, a new perception, thus acquiring a cultural dimension, while taking on an aesthetic significance, as it is perceived in an intellectualized and artistic way, as an expression of socio-cultural values inherent to each people and culture. This aesthetic character can give the space an ephemeral component, as it is used in public acts and celebrations, rituals, festivals, markets, shows, religious ceremonies, official acts, political events, etc.
In the Baroque, the arts converged to create a total work of art, with a theatrical aesthetic, scenography, a mise-en-scène that highlighted the splendor of the dominant power (Church or State). The interaction of all the arts expressed the use of visual language as a means of mass communication, embodied in a dynamic conception of nature and surrounding space, in a culture of the image.
One of the main characteristics of Baroque art is its illusory and contrived character: "ingenuity and design are the magic art through which one manages to deceive the eye to the point of astonishment". The visual and ephemeral were especially valued, so the theater and the various genres of performing arts and shows were booming: dance, pantomime, musical drama (oratorio and melodrama), puppet shows, acrobatics, circuses, etc. There was a feeling that the world is a theater (theatrum mundi) and life a theatrical performance: "all the world is a stage, and all men and women mere actors" (As You Like It, William Shakespeare, 1599). Similarly there was a tendency to theatricalize the other arts, especially architecture. It was an art based on the inversion of reality: on "simulation", on turning the false into the true, and on "dissimulation", passing off the true as false. Things are not shown as they are, but as one would like them to be, especially in the Catholic world, where the Counter-Reformation had a meager success, since half of Europe turned to Protestantism. In literature, it manifested itself by giving free rein to rhetorical artifice, as a means of propagandistic expression in which the sumptuousness of language sought to reflect reality in a sweetened form, resorting to rhetorical figures such as metaphor, paradox, hyperbole, antithesis, hyperbaton, ellipsis, etc. This transposition of reality, which is distorted and magnified, altered in its proportions and subjected to the subjective criterion of fiction, was also applied to painting, where foreshortening and illusionist perspective are abused for the sake of greater, striking and surprising effects.