Belleville hailed from Rouen and joined the Jesuit novitiate in Bordeaux in 1680 at the age of 23.10 As a professionally trained sculptor (probably
8 See, in particular, J.R. Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil: influências, marcas, ecos e sobrevivências chinesas na sociedade e na arte brasileiras (Campinas: Unicamp, 1999).
9 J.W. Witek, ‘Belleville, Charles de’, in C.E. O’Neill and J.M. Domínguez (eds.), Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I. and Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001), p. 404.
10 Witek, ‘Belleville’, p. 404; J.P. Duteil, Le mandat du ciel: Le role des jésuites en Chine (Paris:
AP editions - Arguments, 1994), p. 42; D.E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 67; J. Dehergne,
specialising in architectural sculpture such as retables, or altarpieces), Belleville would first have undergone a three-year education as a young boy followed by a three-year apprenticeship in a master’s workshop, after which he would have
Répertoire des jésuites de Chine de 1552 à 1800 (Rome and Paris : Institutum Historicum S.I., 1973), p. 30; Beurdeley and Beurdeley, Giuseppe Castiglione, p. 194; S. Leite, Artes e ofícios dos jesuítas no Brasil 1549–1760 (Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro: Broteria, 1953), pp. 129–30; L.
Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les Jésuites de l’ancienne Mission de Chine:
1552–1773 (Shanghai: Chang-Hai, Mission Catholique, 1932–34), pp. 536–7.
Figure 1.3. Charles de Belleville, altar of the Assumption, before 1688. Oak.
Cathédrale Saint-Front, Périgueux, France. (Photo: author).
THE JESUITS AND CHINESE STYLE 17 achieved the rank of journeyman (compagnon).11 Throughout Europe Jesuits typically sought out promising young boy artists and artisans to join the society as brothers (temporal coadjutors) and often sent them to the overseas missions to build and decorate their churches.12 After he entered the novitiate Belleville served the Society in France for the better part of two decades, sculpting and building statues and retables for Jesuit churches in places like La Rochelle (c.
1680–83) and Poitiers (1683–88 or 1689); his personnel records identified him as a ‘carpenter’ (faber lignarius) and ‘sculptor’ (sculptor).13 He even carved a bust of Louis XIV for a manufactory in Périgueux in July 1686 which drew enough attention for it to be discussed in the newspaper Mercure Galant and to be processed through town to the accompaniment of fireworks and theatrical performances.14 Two of his works in France are known, both of them massive structures of oak. In 1698 he sculpted and built the monumental unpainted altarpiece of the Assumption for the Jesuit church in Périgueux (Dordogne), now moved to the Cathédrale Saint-Front (fig. 1.3); and around the same time he constructed the giant gilded-oak tabernacle at the chapel of the Collège Henri IV at Poitiers (c.1690–97) with gilt-bronze appendages and fine marquetry work.15
These bulky, high-relief constructions gave no hint that the sculptor would be capable of the kind of intricate Chinese-style painting he undertook in China and Brazil – in fact, there is no evidence that he trained as a painter in France, although he certainly would have had knowledge of draughtsmanship and a possible relative with the same name worked as a peintre ordinaire du Roi in Paris at the time.16 The triptych is framed by bulky Solomonic columns, a decorative entablature and balustrade, crowded figural panels of the Assumption of the Virgin and God the Father in Glory and freestanding sculptures of the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin forming an Annunciation on the wings. Jesuit
11 P. Maffre, Construire Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle: les frères Laclotte, architectes en société (Bordeaux:
Société Archéologique de Bordeaux, 2013), pp. 55–71.
12 For an example in 18th-century Central Europe, where an unusually large number of young painters, architects and sculptors were recruited, see G.A. Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo: Décor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Patagonia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp.
242–50.
13 Leite, Artes e oficios, p. 129.
14 P. Clauer, L’Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux: questions et réponses, communications diverses à l’usage de tous, littérateurs et gens du monde III, 30 (1894): 161–2; Mercure galant (Aug.
1686): 282–7. Unfortunately, the article does not provide the material of the sculpture.
15 M. Burgues, ‘Aspects techniques du tabernacle de la chapelle du collège Henri IV de Poitiers’, Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de l’Ouest et des musées de Poitiers, 5th ser., 3 (Oct. 1989), p. 324.
16 As was traditional with artists in early modern France, Belleville probably came from an artistic family. He may have been related to a painter also called Charles Belleville (1651–1716), who died in Paris in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques and was a peintre ordinaire du Roi (H. Herluison, Actes d’état-civil d’artistes français, peintres, graveurs, architectes, etc. (Paris: Baur, 1873), pp.
34–5).
personnel records from the time he was in France also describe Belleville as an
‘eminent sculptor’ (sculptor egregius),17 suggesting that the Jesuits were already eyeing him out as a potential mission artist because of his exceptional talent;
in the end he was chosen as one of only a pair of artists (along with the Italian painter Giovanni Gherardini) to accompany the first French maritime mission to China on the ship Amphitrite – the first ship ever to sail directly from France to China – from the Atlantic port of La Rochelle in 1698.18 Directly sponsored by Louis XIV, this high-profile mission – it was an embassy in all but name – was led by Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730) and also included Jesuit scholars from the French Academy of Sciences and trunk-loads of luxury goods, from mirrors to firearms.
The Amphitrite reached Guangzhou in November 1698, where Belleville started work with extraordinary speed. As the only European architect or artist in the city he must have built and decorated the ‘beautiful’ and ‘exalted’ new Jesuit church (c. 1699–before 1701) commissioned by Carlo Giovanni Turcotti (1643–1706), the Jesuit visitor to the province of Japan and vice-province of China, which one Jesuit went so far as to call the ‘most beautiful building that there is’ in the whole city.19 Belleville proceeded rapidly to Beijing to oversee the construction of the first church for the French Jesuit mission, officially the Church of the Saviour but popularly known as the Beitang (or Northern Hall).
Belleville, described as ‘one of our brothers’ and ‘a very capable architect’, is directly credited as its architect by Père de Tartre in a 1701 letter to his father which describes it as already being complete and ‘in the European style’.20 The Beitang was built on land donated in 1693 by the Kangxi Emperor in gratitude after the Jesuits cured him of malaria with quinine extracted from the Peruvian cinchona plant, known as ‘Jesuit’s bark’ – another outcome of the Society’s worldwide mission network (see chapter 11). Built partly of marble,
17 Leite, Artes e oficios, p. 129.
18 M. Keevak, Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (Singapore: Springer, 2017), pp. 151–2; Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, p. 172.
19 Witek states categorically that Belleville built the Guangzhou complex (Witek, ‘Belleville’, p.
404). On Turcotti, see L. Brockley, Journey to the East: the Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 178–9; J.W. Witek, ‘Turcotti, Carlo Giovanni’, in C.E. O’Neill and J.M. Domínguez (eds.), Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús (Rome:
Institutum Historicum S.I. and Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001), pp. 46–7. The descriptions ‘beautiful’ (schöne), from the 1703 Jesuit Annual Letter, and ‘exalted’ (exhaussée) from a 1704 letter by Père de Fontaney to Père de la Chaise, are typical of the frustrating lack of detail lavished upon Jesuit architectural projects by commentators (J. Stöcklein, Allerhand so Lehr- als Geist-reiche Brief, Schrifften und Reis-Beschreibungen (Augsburg and Graz: Philipp, Martin and heirs of Johann Veith, 1726), p. 17; Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangeres XVII (Paris, 1781), p. 357). Père de Tartre’s remark that the church was ‘le plus superbe edifice qu’il y ait’ is from a 1701 letter to his father (Lettres édifiantes, p. 74).
20 His exact words are: ‘L’édifice est à l’Européen. Un de nos Freres qui est très-habile architecte, a conduit tout l’ouvrage’. Père de Tartre identifies him as ‘Le Frere de Belleville’ in a footnote (Lettres édifiantes, p. 75).
THE JESUITS AND CHINESE STYLE 19
it contained illusionistic mural paintings in the style of Andrea Pozzo executed by Gherardini, including a false dome, as at the Roman church of Sant’Ignazio (1685), and a ceiling painting showing St Michael and the angels descending through a cloudburst. Belleville also contributed to the decorations, as was noted in a personnel record from 1704 which states that he ‘made beautiful paintings for our churches’.21 The Beitang also housed the Beijing Jesuits’
formidable library, in an adjacent building which was the former residence of a demoted member of the imperial court. Housing around 5,000 volumes, this collection boasted numerous books on architecture, perspective, hydraulics, fortification, fountain design and gardens, including two editions of Vitruvius,
21 Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, p. 173.
Figure 1.4. Anonymous Chinese painter. Façade of the Beitang church of the French Jesuit mission, c. 1701–3 (detail). Gouache on canvas. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Photo: author).
Italian and German books on fountains and three books of views of Versailles and its gardens and other French palaces.22
The appearance of the Beitang façade is preserved in a scroll painting of the period, which shows it to be a partial simulacrum of the façade of the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis (now Saint-Louis-Saint-Paul) in Paris, built by Jesuit architect Étienne Martellange (1627–41) (fig. 1.4).23 The church’s nationalist flavour is not surprising, given that it was paid for by Louis XIV and that the original idea of a French Jesuit mission in China had been the brainchild of the King’s ultra-nationalist minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83). Especially noteworthy is the façade’s oculus window with its sunrays, the paired columns and pilasters and the division into three bays with a high arch in the centre.
By contrast, the Portuguese-run Nantang, rebuilt at precisely the same time and completed in 1733, was constructed in an emphatically Portuguese style, although with the adjustments to Chinese taste in the forecourt already noted above (Fig. 1.2). These facades show that patriotic feelings ran high even among rival groups of Jesuits: indeed, few mission episodes better illustrate this sentiment than that of 18th-century Beijing. It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that Belleville ended up spending the rest of his life decorating churches for the Portuguese Jesuits in Brazil.
Although many scholars have maintained that Belleville served the Kangxi Emperor at court in the Forbidden City, as did so many of his colleagues, and even that he trained eunuch artists there, I have yet to find definite proof that he contributed to anything outside the Jesuit compound.24 If he did train Chinese painters he would have done so either in the xianfa mode of perspective painting or in the naturalistic depictions of birds and flowers so beloved at court. At any rate, Kangxi treated Belleville with courtesy and even had him sent to the Qing imperial summer mountain resort in Chengde to recover from the illness, no doubt brought on by sheer exhaustion, which led to his removal from China in 1707 or 1708.25 En route to France Belleville left the ship at Salvador de Bahia for what was to be a short medical leave but which ended up lasting the rest of his life.
22 Pirazzoli, Le Yuanmingyuan, p. 8. For a list of the works in the Jesuit library in Beijing, which include French and Italian architectural treatises, see H. Zou, ‘Appendix: Books on architecture and gardens in the Jesuit libraries in Beijing’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 22 (2002): 317–20; G.A. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 93. On diplomatic gifts of French engravings to Qianlong see M. Reed, ‘Imperial impressions: the Qianlong Emperor’s print suites,’ in P. ten-Doesschate Chu and N. Ding (eds.), Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute Los Angeles, 2015), pp. 124–39.
23 Luengo, ‘Identidad y globalización’, pp. 284–6.
24 Mungello, The Great Encounter, pp. 174–5; Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, p. 173.
25 The Jesuit personnel records are unclear about the exact dates as the 1709 edition lists him as being en route from China to France and only in 1710 is he listed among those living in Bahia. It is most likely that he reached Bahia sometime in 1708 (Dehergne, Répertoire, p. 30).
THE JESUITS AND CHINESE STYLE 21