I. Jesuit art, architecture and material culture
1. The Jesuits and Chinese style in the arts of colonial Brazil (1719–79)
Gauvin Alexander Bailey
T
he Jesuit mission to China, founded outside Guangzhou in 1583 by the Italian polymath Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), rapidly became the Society’s most celebrated global enterprise, owing principally to the Jesuits’ own prodigious publication campaign; and was hailed around the world as a harbinger of Christian victory from Manila to Lima.1 Its cultural dimensions were particularly lauded, notably Ricci’s and his successors’contributions to Chinese literature, mnemonics and science, as well as the mission’s promotion of the fine arts, which began in Ricci’s lifetime but reached its apex under the 17th- and 18th-century Qing Dynasty, especially under the Kangxi (r. 1661–1722) and Qianlong (r. 1735–96) emperors. During this time about 25 missionary painters worked at court or for the four main Catholic foundations in Beijing, alongside colleagues who specialised in clock making, cartography, mathematics and hydraulics.2 This international corps of painters, sculptors and architects included several Italians, Frenchmen and Germans and operated under the auspices of both the Portuguese and French Jesuit missions in Beijing, as well as for other Catholic orders such as the Augustinians or Lazarists. Jesuit artists such as the Neapolitan Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) generated an acculturative style of painting which
1 On Ricci see: R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); M. Fontana, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Plymouth, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); J. Sebes, ‘Ricci, Matteo’, 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. 51–3; F. D’Arelli (ed.), Le marche e l’oriente (Rome: Instituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’oriente, 1998); J. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin, 1985).
2 M. Musillo, The Shining Inheritance: Italian Painters at the Qing Court, 1699–1812 (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2016); E. Corsi, La fábrica de las ilusiones: los jesuitas y la difusión de la perspectiva lineal en China, 1698–1766 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2004); D. Fu, ‘Western missionary painters and Imperial architectural paintings of the Qing dynasty’, in H.S. Chan (ed.), The Golden Exile: Pictorial Expressions of the School of Western Missionaries’ Artworks of the Qing Dynasty Court (Macau: Macau Museum of Art, 2002), pp. 261–4; C. Beurdeley and M. Beurdeley, Giuseppe Castiglione: a Jesuit Painter at the Court of the Chinese Emperors (London: Lund Humphries, 1972).
combined Chinese aesthetics and compositions with baroque perspective and shading, especially depictions of the emperor’s horses, battles and treasures – a style favoured by the emperor for its illusionistic effects and known at court simply as xianfa or ‘line method’. Jesuit artists also oversaw the construction of fantasy European fountain pavilions for Qianlong at the imperial summer palace gardens at Yuanming Yuan, or ‘Garden of Perfect Clarity’, north-east of Beijing (1747–83) (fig. 1.1).
Known as the Xiyanglou (literally ‘Western Multi-storeyed Buildings’), they were built in a combination of Italian baroque, Franco-German rococo and traditional Chinese styles.3 The pavilions were the talk of Europe thanks to
3 G.A. Bailey, ‘Rococo in eighteenth-century Beijing: ornament prints and the design of the European palaces of the Yuanming Yuan’, The Burlington Magazine, 159 (Oct. 2017): 778–88;
P. Luengo, ‘Yuánmíng Yuán en el siglo XVIII: arte entre la diplomacia y la filosofía; entre Europa y Pekin’, Araucaria, 18 (Jan.–June 2016): 193–216; K. Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions:
Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015); G.M. Thomas, ‘Yuanming Yuan/Versailles: intercultural interactions between Chinese and European palace cultures’, Art History, 32 (2009): 115–43; C.Y. Liu, ‘Architects and builders of the Qing Dynasty Yuanming Yuan Imperial Garden Palace’, University of Hong Kong Museum Journal, 1 (2002): 38–59, 151–61; H. Zou, ‘The jing of a Perspective Garden’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 22 (2002): 293–326; R. Thiriez, Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor’s European Palaces (Amsterdam:
Gordon and Breach, 1998); V. Droguet, ‘Les Palais européens de l’empereur Qianlong et leurs sources italiennes’, Histoire de l’art 25/26 (1994): 15–28; M. Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens (ed.), Le Figure 1.1. Dashuifa (Great Fountain) Xiyanglou, Yuanming Yuan, China (completed 1759) (Photo: author).
THE JESUITS AND CHINESE STYLE 13
published Jesuit descriptions and a series of luxury engravings commissioned by the emperor in 1783 – the first appearance of this European technique in China. Although the Western features of the pavilions encouraged Jesuit commentators to refer to the Xiyanglou as the ‘Versailles of Beijing’, they were in fact little more than a veneer of columns, pilasters and entablatures of grey stone and white marble over a Chinese-style wooden post-and-lintel frame with hip roofs. They also included grey brick walls covered in a red plaster similar to those in the Forbidden City and decorative polychrome tile revetments in low relief.
The four churches in the capital surrounding the Forbidden City – three of them Jesuit and one Lazarist – were built in styles which also combined European modes with Chinese techniques and forms such as the hip-and-gable roof and complex wooden bracketing systems. Such was the case with the oldest, the Nantang (Southern Hall) (fig. 1.2), built in 1650 by Jesuits under Portuguese auspices and rebuilt in 1703–33 by Fernando Buonaventura Moggi (it was later restored after an earthquake in 1775).4
Yuanmingyuan: jeux d’eau et palais européens de XVIIIe siècle à la cour de Chine (Paris: Editions Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1987).
4 P. Luengo, ‘Identidad y globalización en las fachadas jesuitas de Pekín en el siglo XVIII’, in A.
Zamora and J. Ibáñez Fernández (eds.), La Compañía de Jesús y las artes. Nuevas perspectivas de investigación (Zaragoza: Universidad Zaragoza, 2014), pp. 279–99; E. Corsi, ‘Pozzo’s Treatise as a workshop for the construction of a sacred Catholic space in Beijing’, in R. Bösel Figure 1.2. Southern Cathedral (Nan Tang) in Beijing. Photo by Adolf Erazmovich Boiarskii, 1874. (Courtesy of the National Library of Brazil).
The Chinese-style gate and pavilions in the courtyard make the approach to the church resemble that of a Daoist or Buddhist temple; and it even boasted two carved guardian temple lions on either side of the gate to the inner courtyard. In fact, as with all the Catholic churches in Beijing, the Nantang complex quite intentionally used such courtyards and pavilions to fit into the cityscape despite the obviously foreign style of its church – this can still be seen in the outbuildings of the site today, although the baroque-style church there now was only built in 1904.5
However, one of the most immediate yet least familiar consequences of the Jesuits’ artistic activities in Beijing took place in distant Brazil, in the churches of Bahia, Minas Gerais and the backcountry of São Paulo over a sixty-year period from around 1719, but probably a decade earlier. Unlike the rest of Latin America, where Asian-inspired decorative styles appeared in strictly secular settings, architects and designers incorporated imitation Chinese artworks and styles into the decoration of their churches, chapels and oratories.6 Artworks such as Japanese-inspired folding screens (biombos) or imitation blue-and-white porcelain had been manufactured in Spanish America (primarily New Spain) from as early as the mid 17th century, although arguably the most sophisticated product of this cultural exchange was a kind of tapestry made by Andean weavers in southern Peru in the 17th century in imitation of a Ming dynasty Chinese imperial costume accessory known as a rank badge or Mandarin square.7 Brazil was unique in using such ornamentation in an ecclesiastical setting: there churches included imitation-lacquer painted panels – featuring both landscapes and floral designs – on sacristy and chancel ceilings, choirstalls, organ cases and often quite extravagant private oratories, as well as
and L. Salviucci Insolera (eds.), Artifizi della matafora: diciotto saggi su Andrea Pozzo (Rome:
Artemide, 2012), pp. 233–43; L. Wang, ‘Church, a “sacred event” and the visual perspective of an “etic viewer”: an 18th century western-style Chinese painting held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’, in R. Oliveira Lopes (ed.), Face to Face: the Transcendence of the Arts in China and Beyond – Historical Perspectives (Lisbon: CEIBA, 2014), pp. 370–99.
5 S. Naquin comments that ‘Christian churches also enclosed their differences within a Chinese-style compound. The layout of the North Church (Beitang) … followed Chinese principles for the gate and exterior wall, but inside, the tall façade of a single, massive Western-style church rose above the surrounding buildings. Within the courtyards, formal European plantings created a distinctly foreign garden’ (S. Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–
1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 34–5).
6 M.Á. Fernández (ed.), Return Voyage: the China Galleon and the Baroque in Mexico, 1565–
1815 (Puebla and Mexico City: Gobierno de Estado de Puebla, 2016); D. Carr (ed.), Made in the Americas: the New World Discovers Asia (Boston, MA: MFA Publications, 2015); G.A.
Bailey, ‘Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America’, in J.J. Rishel (ed.), The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 (Philadelphia, PA and New Haven, CT: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 57–69.
7 E. Phipps, J. Hecht and C. Esteras Martín (eds.), The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530–1830 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), pp. 250–4; S. Cammann,
‘Chinese influence in colonial Peruvian tapestries’, Textile Museum Journal, 1 (Dec. 1964):
21–34.
THE JESUITS AND CHINESE STYLE 15 stone, wooden and ceramic sculptures forming part of the interior and exterior decoration of churches.8 The fashion enjoyed an extraordinarily long lifespan across a remarkable geographic range, lasting until the end of the 1770s, when it began to be ushered out by French neoclassicism. However, unlike in Spanish America, where Asian styles arrived via trade goods, this Brazilian vogue for ecclesiastical Chinese style was inspired at first directly from Beijing around 1708 and by one man: the little-known French Jesuit brother sculptor Charles de Belleville (1657–1730), known in China as Wei Jialu.9
Although Chinese style in Brazilian churches occurred first in a pair of Jesuit complexes, one a combination novitiate and mission in Bahia and the other a mission in Tupi-Guaraní territory south-west of São Paulo, it was quickly adopted by non-Jesuits, including Franciscans, regular and secular clergy, lay confraternities (irmandades) and a cathedral chapter. Frustratingly, almost no documentation survives which might shed light on the commissioning, chronology or ideologies behind these works and the majority of such interiors may, in fact, have been lost to the vagaries of time. We can rely on only a few scraps of information from Jesuit archival sources and – as will be explored below – a single book printed by the Jesuits around the time these works were being executed. The book supports the idea that Asiatic imagery served as a reminder of what was perceived as Christian victory over paganism, publicising in Brazil the Jesuits’ missionary exploits in China and elsewhere in Asia. The Franciscans, who had been working in China for centuries longer than the Jesuits, used Chinese forms for the same reason – and not without a hint of rivalry with their co-religionists – and, indeed, the implicit triumphalism of Asian ornament made it attractive to colonial Catholics in general in locations occupied by Amerindians and with a growing population of African slaves.
Unlike the cultural hybridisation of Spanish America, the artistic exchange represented by Asian-style décor in Brazil left these marginalised people out of the equation, even if in a single case a native plant was incorporated into the design and in others Brazilian-style churches and bell towers appear in the Chinese landscapes.