[ { "id": 205058, "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-1966", "page_number": 14, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "A PLEA FOR A REGIONAL APPROACH TO CHINESE HISTORY:\n\nTHE CASE OF THE SOUTH CHINA COAST Based on A Lecture Delivered on 4th April, 1966\n\nJOHN J. NOLDE\n\nEver since men such as Thucydides, or Ssu-ma Ch'ien, began to collect, analyze, and interpret historical documents, they have been, from time to time, vexed by a series of nagging questions: How valid and authentic are the documents I have used? How closely does the portrait I have painted of the past correspond to the real world of the people who lived in that past? Have I, in fact, really described what was \"going on\"?\n\nOr to put the question the other way: Is there not always a danger that the historian may be led by his documents to create a picture of the past that is far too broad and general to have any relevance for the people living at that place and at that time? I wonder, for example, whether the studies of the coming of the Varangians to Russia in the ninth century have much to do with the lives and loves of the people then living along the Russian river system; or whether detailed analyses of the political structure of Renaissance Italy have much to do with the way the average Italian really lived. In short, if \"history is man's memory of what men have said and done\", to use Carl Becker's phrase, with what accuracy does the historian's tale reflect what was actually said and done? Is not the historian's view of the past not always in danger of being distorted by the zeitgeist of his own era (as Becker again would have it), and that what he may think important was of little consequence to those living at the time?\n\nI don't doubt that the certain Big Events are important, especially in terms of the extent to which they explain the general course of history, why the stream of history seemed to run in one direction and not another. Furthermore, I would be the first to agree that such events as the Pelopponesian Wars or the French Revolution did dominate the life and thoughts of the peoples living in those places at that time. But is this always, or even usually, the case?\n\nThe author is Dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Maine.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215416, "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": 193, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "142\n\nhimself, as well as the whole of their missionary activity in Asia and the Far East, including Macao, accounts for this. Sadly, as in Macao's Madre de Deus (which apparently was popularly called St. Paul's because of the Goa college and church), today only a pitiful ruin remains of this artistic and historic treasure, with merely a section of the entrance façade with its stone portal standing (Fig. 8).\n\nThe entangled history of the church's abandonment and final decay need not concern us here. But conveniently for my main arguments, the small section that does survive displays an Arch of Triumph integrated to the wall. Here engaged Corinthian columns, paired and elegantly fluted, standing on bases decorated with diamond-shaped reliefs and carrying a broken entablature frame the half-circular entrance arch. Artistically and technically this feature is close to the sophistication of Italian Renaissance architecture.\n\nSince neither the famous college nor its church survives, Mário Chicó attempted to reconstruct the latter by means of drawings based on contemporary descriptions. He believed it to be the prototype for one of two types of Indo-Portuguese churches. He also convincingly argued that of the two types that of the façade of São Paulo is the closer to Serlio and Italian Renaissance architecture.\n\nIn Chicó's published drawing the façade of the church is shown as having three storeys, plus a pedimented attic. The three storeys are divided into three bays by projecting pilasters with entablatures, with openings for entrances and square and round windows. There is a niche for a titular image in the attic, which is joined to the floors below by the pilasters of the middle bay and by volutes.\n\nIt's an imaginative reconstruction, especially the fact that the façade has comparatively little decoration. It relies for effect on the more purely abstract lines of the design and on the main feature of its decoration, its Arch of Triumph.\n\nThe artistic and symbolic potency of the motif and its application as decoration to the façades of religious architecture was one that was not actually initiated by either the architects or the religious members of the Society of Jesus in Italy, Spain, Portugal or India. Rather it was one that the Jesuits had readily accepted and were able to effectively", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215424, "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": 201, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "150\n\nMontanha's transcripts, is the fact that the main altar of Madre de Deus, long lost after the 1835 fire (if not before), had statues of the four Jesuit saints in an order that echoed that of the façade. This third point implies that the design of the façade of Madre de Deus may have been conceived in relationship to that of the main retable inside. The religious and artistic interaction between a retable-façade and a main retable is a development known in some Latin American retable-façades at a later date, of which that of the Jesuit College in Tepozotlán, outside Mexico City, may be the most remarkable example.\n\nThe Architectural Structure of the Façade\n\nOne of the most remarkable features of this work's design is the use of projecting classical orders as main structural elements. However, it is not the use of the orders per se that relates this design to contemporary retables.\n\nFrom the point of view of architecture, what the use of the Ionic order for the first storey, the Corinthian order for the second and the Composite for the third and fourth reveals is a rather sophisticated knowledge of the canons of ancient Roman architecture (Fig. 16). This is perfectly compatible with contemporary architectural practice. At the time Renaissance and Mannerist theorists had made these canons accessible to architects throughout Europe in a number of illustrated publications.\n\nWhoever designed the façade of St. Paul's had evidently had a thorough grounding on these canons. How did he get such knowledge? Most likely from the sixteenth-century illustrated books by Serlio, Palladio or Vignola. Editions of their books circulated not only in Italy but also in the Iberian Peninsula. As the researches of Sylvie Deswarte show, knowledge of the Vitruvian orders had reached Lisbon, Portugal, quite likely around 1549 via Da Pintura Antigua by the Portuguese Francisco de Holanda. Holanda had underhandedly appropriated his main ideas from Serlio and published them in a luxurious edition as his own.22 In Spain, Francisco de Villalpando had already translated Books III and IV a few years before Holanda's book appeared, and his translation was known in Portugal.\n\nThese classical columns are important for my arguments because", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]