Categories of abstract smooth models and their singular envelopes

We define the categories of (abstract) smooth models (Definition 1.2) and, in the additive case, their singular envelopes (Definition 1.5). The first main result is a relative version of the Yoneda representation theorem (Theorem 1.6), and the second one is an existence and uniqueness theorem for the singular envelope (Theorem 1.7). In fact we prove the existence of a canonical process which associates with each additive smooth-model categoryS a singular envelopeS-an ofS, whose objects are calledS-analytic spaces (Definition 5.1). We notice that most of the fundamental categories of geometry are of the formS-an (up to equivalence). As an application we introduce here two such categories: Banach differentiable spaces and Banach mixed spaces.The author is indebted to the Department of Mathematics of the University of Rome (La Sapienza) for hospitality and financial support and to the referees for their critical comments on the first version of this paper.