[
    {
        "id": 215408,
        "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": 185,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "134\n\nthat bore an uncanny resemblance to retables. In fact, many look like stone altarpieces carved in high relief applied to the façades of churches. Although the phrase retable-façade is not actually found in contemporary sources, a number of accounts from the seventeenth century and later supported the findings of modern specialists by alluding to retables when describing some of these façades.\n\nThese rather puzzling structures had actually first appeared towards the end of the fifteenth century embellishing the front of several Late Gothic churches in Spain, and have apparently no counterpart in Europe or anywhere else. What is equally surprising is the fact that most of the artists who helped invent the type were not themselves Spanish. They often came from countries beyond the Pyrenees, such as Holland, Germany or France, and had been attracted to northern Spanish kingdoms by the patronage of kings, the church or the nobility. If they actually invented retable-façades is a mystery that has yet to be solved.\n\nRetable-façades come in all shapes and sizes. Stylistically they range from the Late Gothic to the Late Baroque and beyond. Artistically they go from the sublime to the prosaic. Some of the finest examples of the genre were created in Spanish Latin America and in Portugal, though, as mentioned, they are practically unknown in Brazil and other Portuguese colonies. In fact, Reynaldo dos Santos and R.C. Smith have argued that retable-façades in Portuguese architecture only occur due to Spanish influence.\n\n6\n\nSanta Maria A Grande\n\nOne of the masterpieces of this type of façade is that of the church of Santa Maria A Grande (St Mary Major), in Pontevedra, Galicia, in the Northwest coast of Spain (Fig. 2).\n\nI could equally well have chosen from amongst several works to demonstrate the more distinctive features of retable-façades. But I have selected Santa Maria A Grande because I believe it has unique features in common with the façade of St. Paul in Macao. To begin with, like St. Paul's, Santa Maria a Grande's fantastically ornate façade faces the river below from an imposing promontory.\n\nEqually relevant are the economic and cultural reasons that brought",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215434,
        "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": 211,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "160\n\nM. Hugo-Brunt, \"An Architectural Survey of the Jesuit Seminary Church of St. Paul's, Macao\", Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. 1, No.2, July 1954, University of Hong Kong, pp.1-21. J.B. Bury, \"A Jesuit Façade in China\", The Architectural Review, VI. CXXIV, No. 743, London, Dec. 1958, pp. 412-3.\n\n\"Macao's St. Paul”, in Actas do III Colóquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros, II, Lisbon, 1960, pp. 30-6. A version of the latter, first delivered in 1957, is found in J.B. Bury, \"A Igreja de São Paulo”, Arquitectura e Arte no Brasil Colonial, São Paulo, 1991, pp. 154-61. With few exceptions Chinese gazetteers of the Ming and Ching Dynasties seem to have ignored the façade altogether.\n\n3 Guillen-Núñez, Cesar, \"Some observations on the architecture of the Jesuits in the Orient\", in St. Paul's Ruins. A Monument towards the Future, (bilingual Portuguese-English exh. catalogue, directed by F.A. Baptista Pereira), Lisbon-Macau, September-December, 1994, pp.49-53. Unfortunately, in this catalogue part of the original English text is corrupted by numerous typographical errors. There is however an excellent Portuguese translation, although a few lines of the original have been misinterpreted.\n\n+ For the dimensions of St. Paul's façade vid. Hugo-Brunt, op. cit., p. 9. plates 2-10, and plate 13.\n\n5 The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608-1667, Hakluyt Soc., London, 1919, III, Part I, pp. 162-3.\n\n6\n\nReynaldo dos Santos, Historia da Arte em Portugal, III, pp. 34-6. R.C. Smith, The Art of Portugal, p. 86.\n\nThe literature on Spanish and Portuguese retable-façades is extensive but often only found piecemeal in more general works on Spanish and Portuguese architecture. Two pioneering researchers were B. Bevan, History of Spanish Architecture, London, 1938, p. 135; and G. Kubler, in Kubler and Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominions, 1500-1800, Penguin Books, 1959, p. 1. It should be noted that in the latter San Gregorio's façade is wrongly described as that of the chapel, rather than the College of San Gregorio.\n\nThe following is a selected sample of other important writing on these structures. A. Rodriguez G. de Ceballos, La Iglesia y el Convento de San Esteban de Salamanca, Salamanca, 1987. F.Checa, Pintura y Escultura del Renacimiento",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]