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exploit for the decoration of the façades of some of their Indian churches of the last third of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the next. The theme would later be adapted to the more ornate decoration of the façades of the churches of their Casa Professa in Velha Goa and of the Jesuit College in Diu.
Minor Basilica of Bom Jesus and the Diu Collegiate Church
Not only the Bom Jesús, but, as we shall see, the façades of the collegiate churches in Diu and of Madre de Deus in Macao point to a further stylistic development of the architecture of the Society of Jesus in Asia.
It could be argued that the façade decoration of the three mentioned buildings reveals a transitional phase, one in which a Late Mannerist decorative idiom is elaborated to the utmost. Moreover, in the Church of Madre de Deus in Macao this idiom already heralds the Baroque style.
In India even before Jules Simão's appointment as chief of the cathedral works the Jesuits had begun work on what was to be their finest building project in India. This was their Casa Professa, or Profess House, begun in 1583-85, whose cloisters were also designed by Simão (Figs. 9,10).
Today the church of the Profess House, originally dedicated to the Child Jesus, is better known as the Minor Basilica of Bom Jesus. It was started on the 24 November 1594 to the plans of G.B. Cairatti, an Italian architect from Milan, and completed about twelve years later. Perhaps its chief attraction today is the so-called incorrupt body of St. Francis Xavier and its magnificent 1690s funerary monument by Giovanbattista Foggini.17
The design of the front of the Bom Jesús, if not of its ground plan, indicates that the architect followed the general lines of the façade of St. Paul as reconstructed by M. Chicó (Fig. 9). There is the same division into three storeys and three bays, plus attic and pediment joined to the storeys below by gracefully curved brackets. Not only the façade but the whole building is crowned by numerous Herreresque spheres on bases placed as accents to the line of rising unifying pilasters. The Arch