Plaza de la Platería de Martínez

Antonio Martínez learned his craft in London and Paris before returning to Madrid to set up something the city lacked: a school-workshop where Spanish silverwork caught up with the neoclassical taste sweeping Europe. The workshop prospered into a Royal Works under the Crown’s protection, and the square that opened in front of its façade ended up bearing its name. The story might have ended in 1918, when the building was ordered demolished. The painter Joaquín Sorolla stopped it: he raised money among his friends, bought the neoclassical doorway piece by piece and took it to Valencia, where it survives, dismantled, in the local Círculo de Bellas Artes — hundreds of kilometres from the square that still remembers the workshop that inspired it.