São Roque Church (Lisbon)
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The Church of São Roque (Portuguese: Igreja de São Roque) is located in Lisbon and used to be the Jesuit church of the city. Due to its rich inner decoration dating from the 16th through the 18th centuries, it is one of the main artistic treasures of Lisbon and a major touristic attraction.
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[edit] History
The original Chapel of São Roque was built outside the city walls between 1506 and 1515, in Manueline style. Saint Roch was believed to protect the faithfull against the plague, and King John III ordered the building of a cemetery for plague victims beside the São Roque Church in 1523. In 1525 the religious brotherhood of St Roch was created in the chapel.
In 1540 the first priests of the Society of Jesus arrived in Portugal, including the future missionary to the Far East, St. Francis Xavier. The Jesuits took possession of the Chapel of São Roque in 1553, and soon decided to expand the small chapel into a larger church. The current building was erected between 1565 and 1587 in a plain Mannerist style and served as architectonic model for other Jesuit churches in Portugal and its colonies.
During the centuries, the interior of the Jesuit Church of São Roque was richly decorated with works of art in Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo styles. Among the riches of the church the Chapel of Saint John the Baptist is the most notable and curious: King John V, who loved Roman Baroque and had huge sums of gold from the mines of colonial Brazil at his disposal, commissioned the whole chapel to Roman artists Luigi Vanvitelli and Nicola Salvi in 1740. After being consacrated by the Pope in Rome, the magnificent chapel was disassembled and sent to Lisbon, where it was reassembled in the Church of São Roque between 1747 and 1752.
The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1758 by the Marquis of Pombal, Prime-Minister of King José I, and all of their possessions were taken over by the State. In 1768, the King gave the Church of São Roque and other former Jesuit buildings nearby to the Brotherhood of the Mercy (Irmandade da Misericórida), a Portuguese religious charity founded in 1498 that has occupied the site since then.
[edit] Art
[edit] Architecture
The Jesuits took possession of the Chapel of São Roque in 1553 and, after some hesitation, adopted a very modern floorplan for the new church: a single-aisled building with a main chapel and eight lateral chapels along the nave. The new church, in a plain Mannerist (late Renaissance) style, was began around 1565 and completed around 1587. The first architect was the Portuguese Afonso Álvares, followed by Baltazar Álvares after 1577. During the Iberian Union (after 1580) the works were completed by King Philip II's official architect, the Italian Filipo Terzi, who finalised the façade and the interior of the church. The design of the building served as prototype for many churches built by the Jesuits in Portugal and its colonies in Brazil and Asia.
[edit] Interior
During the centuries, the interior of the Jesuit Church of São Roque was richly decorated with works of art in Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo styles. The flat wooden ceiling was painted in perspective around 1588 by Francisco Venegas. Also from the late 16th century date tile compositions covering some of the walls of the nave, as well as polychromed tiles by Francisco de Matos (around 1584) inside the Chapel of São Roque. The same chapel has a good example of Portuguese Mannerist painting, a "St Roch and the Angel" by Gaspar Dias. The wooden altarpiece of the main chapel, built between 1625 and 1628, is another notable piece of Mannerist art and carries the statues of the four main Jesuit saints: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Francis Borgia, and Aloysius Gonzaga, as well as a statue of the Holy Mary.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, many of the chapels of the nave gained decoration in Baroque style. The most important are the Chapel of Nossa Senhora da Piedade (Our Lady of Piety) and the Chapel of the Santíssimo, both with exuberant Baroque decoration in the Portuguese Baroque style. The Chapel of Saint John the Baptist, in contrast, is an Italian work commissioned by King John V to Roman artists Luigi Vanvitelli and Nicola Salvi in 1740. The chapel, in a neoclassic-rococo style, is richly decorated with paintings, bronze reliefs, statues, mosaics and marble of various colours.
