The Valencian Community Light of Images Foundation has published the book entitled "The enlightened renovation of Segorbe cathedral: from bishop Alonso Cano to architect Vicente Gascó", by Art History Professor Joaquín Bérchez.

The facsimile includes the plans for the project of renewing the cathedral and a study of the people involved in the construction of the temple, representative of the cultural and religious climate materialised in the Spanish architecture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Bérchez provides some hitherto unknown details, such as the connection of bishop Alonso Cano with the architecture of Rome thanks to his management of the church of the Trinitarians. Cano wrote the prologue to the discourse on architecture manuscript by José de Hermosilla, published for the first time in this facsimile of The Light of Images as an appendix to the book

Vicente Gascó is the second key figure in the renovation of Segorbe Cathedral. Gascó, architect and director of the Royal San Carlos Academy in Valencia, was the mind behind the enlightened reformation. Over the last two decades of the 18th century he designed councils, barracks, schools, slaughterhouses, bread factories, bridges, waterwheels, aqueducts, conduits or cemeteries.

In his plans and building work on Segorbe cathedral (1791-95), Vicente Gascó forged one of the most genuine expressions of Valencian neo-classicism, inspired in an interiorised religious sensitivity which implied, in architectural terms, the return to the patterns of ancient Christianity, completely different to the baroque. "The cathedral conceived by Vicente Gascó in its sought-after basilica pattern and well-structured articulation gave a new lesson in classical language, making use, on the threshold of the 19th century, of the operative and brilliant qualities of classicism to convey ideals of culture of his own time and place in the architectural event", Bérchez concludes.