RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g
153

True, the originality and beauty of carvings and images constituted an aesthetic experience aimed at everyone in the city. But one cannot help thinking that this complex text, with its erudite cross-referencing, was partly conceived with the more literate and bookish administrative and literati class in mind. After all, attracting the upper and educated classes had recently evolved as a novel Jesuit method of missionization that had borne rich fruit for Matteo Ricci and his confreres in the Chinese mainland.

One of the Chinese inscriptions states: 'The Holy Mother tramples on the dragon's head,' a reference to the Book of Genesis (Fig. 19). Both the left and the right scrolls have carved inscriptions in relief (as opposed to those explaining the dragon, which are incised), consisting of six large vertical characters. Like those on the dragon, they explain the two images spreading horizontally across the scroll inside a frame. The ones on the left, before the claws of another strange monster, with tail, short antlers, a snout, large bat's wings, breasts and shot through with an arrow, read: "The Devil tempts mankind to do evil things" (Fig. 20).

On the right we read: 'Remember Death and do not sin,' a kind of memento mori epigram at the bony feet of a grimacing skeleton also shot through with an arrow (Fig. 19).

Main Image

References to the Devil, who tempts humanity to sin (whose wages is death), form part of the complicated iconography of the façade. Directly or indirectly the entire iconographic programme revolves around its titular image depicting the Assumption of Mary (Fig. 21).

It is the largest bronze in the frontispiece, measuring practically six feet in height, and like all the bronzes of the façade of rather shallow 3-D casting and flat at the base. It is surrounded by reliefs of music-playing and incense-burning angels, amongst the finest in colonial religious imagery by East Asian artists (Fig. 22). The Assumption is combined with an Infant Salvator Mundi in the attic above, and with the Dove of the Holy Spirit in the pediment (Fig. 23).

The Virgin's Assumption in bodily form into heaven is one of the
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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
157

Other Images

A 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.

In 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.

The 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.

The 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.
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