The Imperial College of Madrid’s Library, temple of the muses Ad maiorem gloriam Dei

Abstract

The Imperial College of Madrid had, from its beginnings, a library adapted to its educational and devotional needs. But, coinciding with the foundation of Royal Studies at its headquarters, the Jesuit Claude Clément wrote a treatise on library science that, through the iconography of its cover, the dedication and the introduction, requested King Philip IV of Spain to create its headquarters of the great library of the Counter-Reformation, similar to the one that his grandfather Philip II founded in the Monastery of El Escorial. Although the library imagined by Claude Clément could not be carried out, numerous Clementine elements can be traced in its operation, organization of the collection, catalogs or pictorial decoration. Throughout its history, the Imperial College of Madrid managed to gather a very important collection of books, to the point that it was valued by the Jesuit Andrés Marcos Burriel as the most important in Madrid, after the Royal Library.