RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g
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the town of Pontevedra into prominence during the first half of the sixteenth century. They provide interesting insights into the social factors that favoured the development of this kind of structure, and remind us of Macao's pre-eminence in the region due to the trade with Japan.

From Late Gothic times the town became the centre of a cofraria or confraternity of Pontevedra seamen in the southern region of Galicia. Its wealthy trading ships sailed to Portugal, France and Italy and the church's construction by the cofraria was a direct result of the city's commercial prosperity.7

Cornelis of Holland and Juan Nobre, probably a Portuguese, started work on the façade of the church in 1541. These master masons and their team of artists actually superimposed their large carved Late Gothic decoration onto the front of an early sixteenth-century church.

This highly decorative "stone altarpiece" is in fact fitted, in imitation of a real main altarpiece, into the apse-like space created by the wall of the church and the two large plain buttresses framing it. Apart from its function as a refined embellishment to the church and city, the sole reason that such a large decorative work should be erected outdoors on top of a high hill was evidently that it could be seen for miles around and from the river below, especially by seamen and traders aboard ship.

It is divided into five bays, comprised of a large central bay and two adjoining narrow ones at either side, divided horizontally into five storeys. The three lower storeys are sculptured and stand forward, away from the two upper ones executed in lower relief. Stone steps lead to a sumptuous terrace and to an equally sumptuous façade (Fig. 3).

In spite of its 1541 date, rather outmoded Early Plateresque baluster columns are used throughout. But there is little one can say against the delightful Netherlandish fantasy of these columns and their carving (Fig. 4).

More important to my arguments are the reliefs of its central bay. They have as focus a depicting the Dormition of Mary, which in style recalls Gothic retables of the School of Cologne and others (Fig. 5).8
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g
136

In imitation of a real altarpiece the Dormition of Mary is followed higher up by an image above a rose window representing the Assumpta, or the Assumption of Mary into heaven, a favourite theme of Iberian retables, often combined with the theme of the Dormition. Above her there is a high relief of the Trinity with a Golgotha group at the summit. These images are quite typical of the iconography of contemporary retables and follow the sometimes-convoluted theological arguments of the Christian art of the period.

As the intricacies of the Late Gothic style gave way to the Italian Renaissance, the artistic potency of retable-façades persisted under different forms, dimensions and styles, and in different places. It spread to Southern Spain after the Reconquista, where it developed its own Renaissance characteristics. Later, mainly in a Mannerist style, it appeared in Portugal. Finally some of the most amazing examples of the genre sprouted in Spanish colonies in Mexico and Peru in a Baroque and Rococo style, sometimes displaying the artistry, or otherwise, of indigenous craftsmen.

Although such structures are not usually found in Portuguese colonies, there are nonetheless unusual developments in the decoration of some Jesuit church façades in Portuguese India, which can give insights to later developments in their Macao church. The study of these Indian examples is also useful in another respect. Instead of studying the Macao church in isolation, as is usually done, a comparison with these and a selected number of buildings in India can help us obtain a more coherent chronological and stylistic perspective for the façade of Madre de Deus.

To trace back some of these developments in Jesuit architecture the city of Goa, today known as Velha Goa, is an obvious starting point because of its importance within the Portuguese empire in Asia. In fact, soon after Afonso de Albuquerque captured it from Yusuf Adil Khan in 1510, it came to be considered by the Portuguese as the capital of the whole Portuguese Empire in the East. It eventually became not only the seat of the vice-royalty, but equally of a huge Bishopric, which encompassed the entire region from the Cape of Good Hope to China. In the seventeenth century it counted some seventy religious establishments, including thirty-one churches.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g
169

Fig.5 Santa Maria A Grande, detail of upper storeys above main entrance, with central bay reliefs of Dormition of Mary in second storey, and Assumption higher up.
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