Monastery of Jesus of Setúbal
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The Monastery of Jesus (Portuguese: Mosteiro de Jesus) of the city of Setúbal, in Portugal, is the main historical monument of the city. It is one of the first buildings in the Manueline style, the Portuguese version of late Gothic. It was damaged by the Great Earthquake of 1755. The Gothic cloister of the convent houses the museum of the Monastery (Museu de Jesus).
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[edit] History
The Monastery of Jesus was founded by Justa Rodrigues Pereira outside of the city walls and sponsored by King John II, who in 1490 commissioned the building of the church of the Monastery to Master Diogo de Boitaca (or Boytac), an architect of unknown origin, possibly French. Most of the church was built between 1490 and 1495, and in 1496 the nuns of Order of Poor Clares were already living in the Monastery. The nave of the church was covered with stone vaulting after 1495, substituting the wooden ceiling originally planned.
In the 1500s, King Manuel I ordered the apse of the church to be rebuilt, since the original one was considered to be too small. The Monastery gained a cloister, later decorated with a 17th century fountain.
The church has been severely damaged by the 1755 earthquake. The earthquakes of 1531, 1858, 1909 and 1969 have inflicted minor damage.
[edit] Art and architecture
The church of the Monastery of Jesus, built between 1490 and 1510, is a very significant monument of Portuguese architecture, since it is the earliest known building in which aspects of the Manueline style of decoration were employed.
The crenellated southern façade of the rectangular church was built in flamboyant Gothic style. It has a series of stepped buttresses decorated with gargoyles and twisted pinnacles. The pointed-arched portal has several archivolts and empty niches and two smaller, twin ogee-arched portals. The main chapel of the apse, with an octagonal base, is decorated by a beautiful, large window with a mullion and late gothic tracery.
The church is rather narrow and consists of a nave and two side aisles of the same height, unifying inner space as in a hall church, a characteristic that would be found in later Manueline spaces like the nave of the Jerónimos Monastery of Lisbon. Each pillar of the nave, supporting a pointed arch, is composed of three intertwined subcolumns in rough granite. These spiralling columns would also be a typical theme in later Manueline buildings, like the Guarda Cathedral. The side aisles are supported by semi-barrel vaults.
The main chapel of the church has a square shape. It is covered by an exuberant late Gothic star-ribbed vaulting with decorative bosses. Some of the ribs of the vault have the shape of a twisted rope, again anticipating a common theme in Manueline vaultings throughout the country. The main altar and the pulpit date from the 18th century.
The inner walls of the apse are decorated with 17th century blue and white tiles (azulejos) with geometric patterns, while the azulejos on the side walls of the church depict scenes from the life of Maria, bordered by colourful frames.
[edit] Museu de Jesus
The adjacent convent (Mosteiro de Jesus) has been turned into an art museum with a top collection of Flemish and Portuguese Primitive painters from the 15th and 16th centuries. Under King Manuel I (around 1520), the church was decorated with a 14-panel, painted altarpiece by one of Portugal's main Renaissance artists, Jorge Afonso. The altarpiece, one of the best in Portugal, was removed from the apse of the church in the 18th century but can still be seen in this Art Museum of the Monastery.
The rest of the collection consists of archaeological finds, historical coins, old documents and books. Another part of the museum is dedicated to Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, a famous 18th century poet born in Setúbal.
[edit] References
- Portuguese Institute for Architectural Heritage [1]
- General Bureau for National Buildings and Monuments (Portugal) [2]
- Rentes de Carvalho, J. - Portugal, um guia para amigos (in Dutch translation : Portugal); de Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam; 9th ed., August 1999; ISBN 90-295-3466-4
- Description
