La Casa de Pilatos (Pilate's House) is an Andalusian palace in Seville, Spain, which serves as the permanent residence of the Dukes of Medinaceli. The building is a mixture of Renaissance Italian and Mudéjar Spanish styles. It is considered the prototype of the Andalusian palace.
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The construction of this palace, adorned with precious azulejos tiles and gardens, was begun by Pedro Enriquez de Quiñones (Adelantado Mayor of Andalucía) and his wife Catalina de Rivera, founder of the Casa de Alcalá. Construction was completed by Pedro's son Fadrique Enriquez de Ribera (first Marquis of Tarifa), who pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1519 led to the modern name of the home "Pilate's house". Upon his return, tradition he discovered that the distance between the ruins of the home of Pontius Pilate and Golgotha was the same as that between his palace with a temple located outside the walls known as the Cross of field. Popular imagination has thus identified and considered a copy of the house of Pilate. As such, the rooms were named along the theme of the Passion of Christ; "Hall of Praetorian", "Chapel of the Flagellation", etc.,.
The palace is accessed through a Renaissance style marble gate, designed by the Genoese Antonio Maria Aprile in 1529, surmounted by a Gothic crest possibly brought from the palace that developers were building in Bornos. The gate leads to a typical Andalusian courtyard where a fountain surrounded by twenty-four busts of Spanish kings, Roman emperors and other relevant characters collected from the ruins of Italica are distributed along the lower galleries of the courtyard. The courtyard, in turn, leads to two gardens with plateresque adornements.
A staircase to the top floor is decorated with azulejos tiling and a ceiling of Mudéjar honeycomb, made by Cristobal Sanchez. The rooms on this floor include major paintings dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, including the Pietà by Sebastiano del Piombo.
In the room to the left wing of the Tower the ceiling displays frescoes painted by Francisco Pacheco between 1603 and 1604 that enhance the apotheosis of Hercules, and in the room that follows the Tower is a tiny series of works by Francisco Goya of a Bullfightand a still life by Giuseppe Recco (in the dining room) and a table representing Mary Magdalene painted in the sixteenth century, in the library are three works by painter Luca Giordano. As with most palaces of the period, Casa de Pilatos also has a chapel, designed in Gothic Mudéjar style with antique decor and numerous manuscripts. Casa de Pilatos is considered one of the finest examples of Andalusian architecture of sixteenth century Seville.
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