ABSTRACT
This chapter sets several of Ramon Mesonero's urban reform initiatives within some of the contexts of Madrid's visual cultures in the period spanning roughly the 1830s and 1840s, and considers the twinned ideologies of sight and modernity opened to audiences by illustrated papers such as the Semanario Pintoresco Español. Signal personages, historic episodes and cultural values were purveyed in a variety of visual media, from paintings to photographs to lithographs. Readers comfortable with the conventions of academic painting regularly subscribed to print collections of royal and religious themes advertised in periodicals such as the Gaceta de Madrid and El Diario de Madrid, and made possible a steady secondhand market in fine-art grabados as advertised in the papers' classified columns. The recuperation of dibujos and replication of layouts served to create a traveling archive or library of imagery shared across Europe by consumers of illustrated periodicals and of prints.
