Logia

Etymologically, a loggia is a gallery or succession of arches.

From the loggia before us we can say that after the culmination of the Renaissance Garden of the Palacio de los Ribera, the lords of Bornos built an open-air art gallery; private museum where they could intimately recreate or show their guests, with the pride of their owners, those jewels that were Roman statues from the 1st century, restored by Giuliano Meniquini, or the new ones, sculpted by him, with the purest and most perfect forms of the 15th century Italian.

Years later, when some of the Ribera infants were educated in Bornos, it would be useful for their tutors to put beautiful examples of Greek and Latin mythology giving life to the cold forms of marble and alabaster.

When we say that this loggia is the only 16th-century Pompeian imafront in Andalusia, we are referring to a balanced and brilliant architectural composition by Benvenuto Tortello: a composition of arches topped with a classical Roman frieze (although clearly Greek-inspired), whose decoration alternate triglyphs and metopes.

Tortello came to Spain from Italy called by the Riberas to build new buildings in their possessions, as well as to improve or restore existing ones: with a very clear objective; import the most recent currents of the Italian Renaissance.

The Riberas helped create a growing interest in art and letters among the nobility. The architect Tortello became highly regarded in Spain among his contemporaries; and among his works, apart from those carried out in Bornos, he highlighted the construction of the facade of the Seville City Hall in the Plaza de San Francisco.

At present, the statues that were displayed in this lodge are kept by their legitimate owners in the Casa de Pilatos in Seville and have been declared Artistic Heritage of Andalusia.

Therefore, this lodge is offered to us as an evocative place in a designated environment of great historical and artistic value, such as the Gardens of the Ribera de Bornos Castle-Palace.