[
    {
        "id": 215423,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2001",
        "page_number": 200,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "149\n\neach one in his niche, over stone bases with their names carved on them in the same order as we have them on the main altar, all in bronze with their foundry signs: hands and faces painted red; vestments gilded throughout the length of the body, with no other colour. On the second frieze and third storey with columns that rest on the middle window the Image of Our Lady of the Assumption, titular saint of the Church, has its niche, which image steps on a large gilded moon; over her head two Angels in the round of the same metal appear to be holding a closed crown, each one of which holds out his arm on the side where he is. Below these another pair seem to go through the air giving a hand in favour of Our Lady's ascent.\n\nThe third frieze, which runs underneath the last storey, gave place to the last niche. It has on its base the Image of the infant Jesus with a cross on the globe of the world on his hand and which does not differ from the others in anything, except that it is of lesser height than them. Inside the field of the pointed summit which makes a straight triangle - on which rests the stone pedestal on which is to be fixed the iron cross with rod arms that is the crown of the whole work, for which alms were given this year as I said above - from the middle of rays carved in the stone, a kind of image of a dove goes fourth, representing the Holy Spirit with its wings wide open, in gilded bronze and of significant size. Note: for all of this magnificent and sumptuous work expenses were met with alms ....' (italics mine).\n\nThere are several quite remarkable points here. Apart from their gilded garments, the first is that the faces and hands of the images of the Jesuit saints were painted red. That these bronzes were painted is highly unusual. If the faces and hands were actually painted red is perhaps arguable. But the gilded garments of the four bronzes could well have been intended to imitate the technique of gilding practised on carved statues since Late Gothic retables.\n\nBrightly painted images are known in medieval Spanish portals, an obsolete practice in the seventeenth century. It was, however, still in use in the case of some Latin American retable-façades, as the researches of Humberto Rodríguez-Camilloni on the façade of San Francisco, Lima, Peru, have disclosed.21\n\nWhat has equally remained unknown because it is missing in José",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215431,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2001",
        "page_number": 208,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "157\n\nOther Images\n\nA salutation in St. Alfonso's Office praises the palma patientiae and the cedrus castitatis. This allusion to both cedar and palm trees derives from Ecclesiasticus, 24, 17-18. When it comes to the date palms of the second storey, it is very much a part of the stock-in-trade immaculist symbols, particularly dear to southern Spanish poets and painters and also known from early prints, all praising Mary's Immaculate Conception. But these may equally refer to the triumph of the Society of Jesus, with the canonisation of its main protagonists, Sts. Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier in 1622 and the recent beatification of Francis Borgia and Luis Gonzaga.\n\nIn the fourth storey or attic The Child Jesus raises his right hand and holds an empty left hand forward. The latter undoubtedly held the lost orb mentioned in the 1644 Annua. It is a pose and attribute typical of the kind of devotional religious image known as an infant Salvator Mundi, that is, Infant Jesus Saviour of the World. The type of \"Menino Jesus\" as Salvator Mundi was well disseminated in Portuguese colonies in the East during the seventeenth-century, as a large number of Indo-Portuguese and Chinese ivory statuettes, usually nude, tend to confirm. Here the Child Jesus is framed by reliefs of angels displaying the Arma Christi, or symbols of Christ's suffering on the Cross. According to Christian theology, the ironically named arma are the “weapons” Christ used in his earthly battle against evil in order to redeem humankind. They were profoundly mystical symbols popularised in devotional literature and images since Medieval times in Europe.\n\nThe pediment is decorated with the large bronze of the Holy Spirit, originally gilded and emerging from rays, with four stars framing it. Next to it are square slabs of the sun and moon, with which the iconography of the main image of the Assumption is finally brought to full completion.\n\nThe dove of the Holy Spirit hovers over both Mother and Child with wings far outspread in an image that seems uncannily like a visual illustration of the Holy Spirit in the opening lines of John Milton's Paradise Lost. As bronze sculpture it is impressive enough today; with its original gilding it must have appeared awe-inspiring to the citizens of Macao and to seventeenth-century and later visitors before the fire.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]