Hygiene and beauty. Two decisive subjects in Montevideo ́s funerary architecture in the 19th century

Abstract

The important debates in the Spanish context of the eighteenth century concerning the prohibition of burials in churches and chapels, as well as the creation of new cemeteries distant from the urban fabric, had their inevitable American correlates. Very early, in the city of Montevideo, these deliberations were organized as from the Enlightenment’s new ideas and, particularly, as from a deep assessment of the concept of hygiene. The result was the creation of its first cemetery outside the city walls in 1808, during the last years of the Colonial period. The political and cultural changes – two decades later – also required changes as from the architecture of death: the sense of beauty was incorporated to the value of hygiene as an essential element in the conception of the new modern necropolises. Such change operated in Montevideo on two binding facts: on the one hand, the attempt to transform the old colonial cemetery with an aestheticist approach and, on the other, the design and construction of a larger necropolis –the New Cemetery– following the new beauty guidelines in Europe, particularly in France.