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Macao's Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China
by Cesar Guillen Nunez
Reviewed by Tim O'Connell
Each year, thousands of tourists climb the 66 finely-carved granite steps of the Ruins of St. Paul, to be photographed before the mount's striking church facade, the Eiffel Tower of Macao. But other than its vague Jesuit origins, what do most visitors really know about the site, its architectural significance and the ecclesiastical message of its elaborate facade? Macao's Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China tackles this under-researched subject.
The Church and attached College of Madre de Deus were constructed by the Jesuits from the late 16th-century as a "safe harbour" for their increasingly persecuted young Japanese converts. ("St. Paul's" is in fact a popular misnomer used from that time in echo of the renowned Jesuit college and Asia headquarters in Portuguese Goa). The complex originally included neighbouring Monte Fort, and remained a centre of Jesuit scholarship and administration until the order's expulsion from Macao in the mid-18th century. In 1835, it accidentally burned to the ground while barracking Portuguese troops. Left to the run of vermin and vandals, by recent decades "of the collegiate church there remained only a skeleton somber hollow shrouded by a beautiful facade."
Cesar Guillen Nunez, a Research Fellow at the Macao Ricci Institute and expert on Spanish and Portuguese colonial art history, looks "through the glass darkly" of freshly unearthed archival materials in Macao and Europe to painstakingly reconstruct the floor plan, exterior appearance, decoration and internal life of the vanished compound. Using dozens of illustrations, he contrasts the Church of Madre de Deus with other examples of Jesuit church architecture in Europe, Latin America, Portuguese India and Japan, and places it clearly within the overall art-historical context of the Baroque period.
The poverty-vowing Jesuits initially adopted an architectural philosophy of mediocrita religiosa (plain decoration), but in battling those pesky Protestants, soon made an exception of churches and embraced the "theatrical and propagandistic possibilities that the Baroque style offered" (churches being after all houses of God, not man). That a ruined church facade continues to command Macao from its theatrical mount is a testament to that aesthetic power; it remains the only example of western Baroque art in China.
The author was the first to identify that surviving remnant as a retable-facade, an unusual form of Iberian church architecture designed to resemble an altarpiece. In perhaps the book's most interesting chapter, he explains how to "read" its complex mix of mystical Catholic symbols, Chinese epigrams ("Remember Death and do not sin!"), strange monsters and saintly bronze figures (their hands and faces once painted red and robes gilded). The work of Japanese artisans, an example of the cultural collaboration for which the Society of Jesus is famous, this exterior "altarpiece" linked intimately with its interior counterpart, and expressed several major Jesuit themes: the Eucharist, the Assumption of Mary (to whom the church was dedicated) and the cult of passive martyrdom. In that last respect, the church once housed a veritable cornucopia of related paintings, statues and holy relics:
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Tim O'Connell is a China trader turned writer and historian who has lived in Hong Kong and Beijing since 1981.
by Cesar Guillen Nunez
Reviewed by Tim O'Connell
Each year, thousands of tourists climb the 66 finely-carved granite steps of the Ruins of St. Paul, to be photographed before the mount's striking church facade, the Eiffel Tower of Macao. But other than its vague Jesuit origins, what do most visitors really know about the site, its architectural significance and the ecclesiastical message of its elaborate facade? Macao's Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China tackles this under-researched subject.
The Church and attached College of Madre de Deus were constructed by the Jesuits from the late 16th-century as a "safe harbour" for their increasingly persecuted young Japanese converts. ("St. Paul's" is in fact a popular misnomer used from that time in echo of the renowned Jesuit college and Asia headquarters in Portuguese Goa). The complex originally included neighbouring Monte Fort, and remained a centre of Jesuit scholarship and administration until the order's expulsion from Macao in the mid-18th century. In 1835, it accidentally burned to the ground while barracking Portuguese troops. Left to the run of vermin and vandals, by recent decades "of the collegiate church there remained only a skeleton somber hollow shrouded by a beautiful facade."
Cesar Guillen Nunez, a Research Fellow at the Macao Ricci Institute and expert on Spanish and Portuguese colonial art history, looks "through the glass darkly" of freshly unearthed archival materials in Macao and Europe to painstakingly reconstruct the floor plan, exterior appearance, decoration and internal life of the vanished compound. Using dozens of illustrations, he contrasts the Church of Madre de Deus with other examples of Jesuit church architecture in Europe, Latin America, Portuguese India and Japan, and places it clearly within the overall art-historical context of the Baroque period.
The poverty-vowing Jesuits initially adopted an architectural philosophy of mediocrita religiosa (plain decoration), but in battling those pesky Protestants, soon made an exception of churches and embraced the "theatrical and propagandistic possibilities that the Baroque style offered" (churches being after all houses of God, not man). That a ruined church facade continues to command Macao from its theatrical mount is a testament to that aesthetic power; it remains the only example of western Baroque art in China.
The author was the first to identify that surviving remnant as a retable-facade, an unusual form of Iberian church architecture designed to resemble an altarpiece. In perhaps the book's most interesting chapter, he explains how to "read" its complex mix of mystical Catholic symbols, Chinese epigrams ("Remember Death and do not sin!"), strange monsters and saintly bronze figures (their hands and faces once painted red and robes gilded). The work of Japanese artisans, an example of the cultural collaboration for which the Society of Jesus is famous, this exterior "altarpiece" linked intimately with its interior counterpart, and expressed several major Jesuit themes: the Eucharist, the Assumption of Mary (to whom the church was dedicated) and the cult of passive martyrdom. In that last respect, the church once housed a veritable cornucopia of related paintings, statues and holy relics:
- The silver cross... was believed to house not only a chip from the Cross at its top, but a relic of Christ's garment as well as of the lance that had pierced His side during the Crucifixion. There was also a small piece of the sponge of Christ's Passion, a bit of bone belonging to St. Joseph and a hair of the Virgin Mary. Apart from a chip of bone belonging to St. Lawrence there were also three of the heads of the Eleven Thousand Virgin martyrs...
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Tim O'Connell is a China trader turned writer and historian who has lived in Hong Kong and Beijing since 1981.
Available in Asia from Paddyfield.com
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