1. The Jesuits and Chinese style in the arts of colonial Brazil (1719–79)

Gauvin Alexander Bailey

The Jesuit mission to China, founded outside Guangzhou in 1583 by the Italian polymath Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), rapidly became the Society’s most celebrated global enterprise, owing principally to the Jesuits’ own prodigious publication campaign; and was hailed around the world as a harbinger of Christian victory from Manila to Lima.¹ Its cultural dimensions were particularly lauded, notably Ricci’s and his successors’ contributions to Chinese literature, mnemonics and science, as well as the mission’s promotion of the fine arts, which began in Ricci’s lifetime but reached its apex under the 17th- and 18th-century Qing Dynasty, especially under the Kangxi (r. 1661–1722) and Qianlong (r. 1735–96) emperors. During this time about 25 missionary painters worked at court or for the four main Catholic foundations in Beijing, alongside colleagues who specialised in clock making, cartography, mathematics and hydraulics.² This international corps of painters, sculptors and architects included several Italians, Frenchmen and Germans and operated under the auspices of both the Portuguese and French Jesuit missions in Beijing, as well as for other Catholic orders such as the Augustinians or Lazarists. Jesuit artists such as the Neapolitan Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) generated an acculturative style of painting which combined Chinese aesthetics and compositions with baroque perspective and shading, especially depictions of the emperor’s horses, battles and treasures – a style favoured by the emperor for its illusionistic effects and known at court simply as xianfa or ‘line method’. Jesuit artists also oversaw the construction of fantasy European fountain pavilions for Qianlong at the imperial summer palace gardens at Yuanming Yuan, or ‘Garden of Perfect Clarity’, north-east of Beijing (1747–83) (fig. 1.1).

Figure 1.1. Dashuifa (Great Fountain) Xiyanglou, Yuanming Yuan, China (completed 1759) (Photo: author).

Known as the Xiyanglou (literally ‘Western Multi-storeyed Buildings’), they were built in a combination of Italian baroque, Franco-German rococo and traditional Chinese styles.³ The pavilions were the talk of Europe thanks to published Jesuit descriptions and a series of luxury engravings commissioned by the emperor in 1783 – the first appearance of this European technique in China. Although the Western features of the pavilions encouraged Jesuit commentators to refer to the Xiyanglou as the ‘Versailles of Beijing’, they were in fact little more than a veneer of columns, pilasters and entablatures of grey stone and white marble over a Chinese-style wooden post-and-lintel frame with hip roofs. They also included grey brick walls covered in a red plaster similar to those in the Forbidden City and decorative polychrome tile revetments in low relief.

Figure 1.2. Southern Cathedral (Nan Tang) in Beijing. Photo by Adolf Erazmovich Boiarskii, 1874. (Courtesy of the National Library of Brazil).

The four churches in the capital surrounding the Forbidden City – three of them Jesuit and one Lazarist – were built in styles which also combined European modes with Chinese techniques and forms such as the hip-and-gable roof and complex wooden bracketing systems. Such was the case with the oldest, the Nantang (Southern Hall) (fig. 1.2), built in 1650 by Jesuits under Portuguese auspices and rebuilt in 1703–33 by Fernando Buonaventura Moggi (it was later restored after an earthquake in 1775).⁴

The Chinese-style gate and pavilions in the courtyard make the approach to the church resemble that of a Daoist or Buddhist temple; and it even boasted two carved guardian temple lions on either side of the gate to the inner courtyard. In fact, as with all the Catholic churches in Beijing, the Nantang complex quite intentionally used such courtyards and pavilions to fit into the cityscape despite the obviously foreign style of its church – this can still be seen in the outbuildings of the site today, although the baroque-style church there now was only built in 1904.⁵

However, one of the most immediate yet least familiar consequences of the Jesuits’ artistic activities in Beijing took place in distant Brazil, in the churches of Bahia, Minas Gerais and the backcountry of São Paulo over a sixty-year period from around 1719, but probably a decade earlier. Unlike the rest of Latin America, where Asian-inspired decorative styles appeared in strictly secular settings, architects and designers incorporated imitation Chinese artworks and styles into the decoration of their churches, chapels and oratories.⁶ Artworks such as Japanese-inspired folding screens (biombos) or imitation blue-and-white porcelain had been manufactured in Spanish America (primarily New Spain) from as early as the mid 17th century, although arguably the most sophisticated product of this cultural exchange was a kind of tapestry made by Andean weavers in southern Peru in the 17th century in imitation of a Ming dynasty Chinese imperial costume accessory known as a rank badge or Mandarin square.⁷ Brazil was unique in using such ornamentation in an ecclesiastical setting: there churches included imitation-lacquer painted panels – featuring both landscapes and floral designs – on sacristy and chancel ceilings, choirstalls, organ cases and often quite extravagant private oratories, as well as stone, wooden and ceramic sculptures forming part of the interior and exterior decoration of churches.⁸ The fashion enjoyed an extraordinarily long lifespan across a remarkable geographic range, lasting until the end of the 1770s, when it began to be ushered out by French neoclassicism. However, unlike in Spanish America, where Asian styles arrived via trade goods, this Brazilian vogue for ecclesiastical Chinese style was inspired at first directly from Beijing around 1708 and by one man: the little-known French Jesuit brother sculptor Charles de Belleville (1657–1730), known in China as Wei Jialu.⁹

Although Chinese style in Brazilian churches occurred first in a pair of Jesuit complexes, one a combination novitiate and mission in Bahia and the other a mission in Tupi-Guaraní territory south-west of São Paulo, it was quickly adopted by non-Jesuits, including Franciscans, regular and secular clergy, lay confraternities (irmandades) and a cathedral chapter. Frustratingly, almost no documentation survives which might shed light on the commissioning, chronology or ideologies behind these works and the majority of such interiors may, in fact, have been lost to the vagaries of time. We can rely on only a few scraps of information from Jesuit archival sources and – as will be explored below – a single book printed by the Jesuits around the time these works were being executed. The book supports the idea that Asiatic imagery served as a reminder of what was perceived as Christian victory over paganism, publicising in Brazil the Jesuits’ missionary exploits in China and elsewhere in Asia. The Franciscans, who had been working in China for centuries longer than the Jesuits, used Chinese forms for the same reason – and not without a hint of rivalry with their co-religionists – and, indeed, the implicit triumphalism of Asian ornament made it attractive to colonial Catholics in general in locations occupied by Amerindians and with a growing population of African slaves. Unlike the cultural hybridisation of Spanish America, the artistic exchange represented by Asian-style décor in Brazil left these marginalised people out of the equation, even if in a single case a native plant was incorporated into the design and in others Brazilian-style churches and bell towers appear in the Chinese landscapes.

Belleville in China

Belleville hailed from Rouen and joined the Jesuit novitiate in Bordeaux in 1680 at the age of 23.¹⁰ As a professionally trained sculptor (probably specialising in architectural sculpture such as retables, or altarpieces), Belleville would first have undergone a three-year education as a young boy followed by a three-year apprenticeship in a master’s workshop, after which he would have achieved the rank of journeyman (compagnon).¹¹ Throughout Europe Jesuits typically sought out promising young boy artists and artisans to join the society as brothers (temporal coadjutors) and often sent them to the overseas missions to build and decorate their churches.¹² After he entered the novitiate Belleville served the Society in France for the better part of two decades, sculpting and building statues and retables for Jesuit churches in places like La Rochelle (c. 1680–83) and Poitiers (1683–88 or 1689); his personnel records identified him as a ‘carpenter’ (faber lignarius) and ‘sculptor’ (sculptor).¹³ He even carved a bust of Louis XIV for a manufactory in Périgueux in July 1686 which drew enough attention for it to be discussed in the newspaper Mercure Galant and to be processed through town to the accompaniment of fireworks and theatrical performances.¹⁴ Two of his works in France are known, both of them massive structures of oak. In 1698 he sculpted and built the monumental unpainted altarpiece of the Assumption for the Jesuit church in Périgueux (Dordogne), now moved to the Cathédrale Saint-Front (fig. 1.3); and around the same time he constructed the giant gilded-oak tabernacle at the chapel of the Collège Henri IV at Poitiers (c.1690–97) with gilt-bronze appendages and fine marquetry work.¹⁵

Figure 1.3. Charles de Belleville, altar of the Assumption, before 1688. Oak. Cathédrale Saint-Front, Périgueux, France. (Photo: author).

These bulky, high-relief constructions gave no hint that the sculptor would be capable of the kind of intricate Chinese-style painting he undertook in China and Brazil – in fact, there is no evidence that he trained as a painter in France, although he certainly would have had knowledge of draughtsmanship and a possible relative with the same name worked as a peintre ordinaire du Roi in Paris at the time.¹⁶ The triptych is framed by bulky Solomonic columns, a decorative entablature and balustrade, crowded figural panels of the Assumption of the Virgin and God the Father in Glory and freestanding sculptures of the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin forming an Annunciation on the wings. Jesuit personnel records from the time he was in France also describe Belleville as an ‘eminent sculptor’ (sculptor egregius),¹⁷ suggesting that the Jesuits were already eyeing him out as a potential mission artist because of his exceptional talent; in the end he was chosen as one of only a pair of artists (along with the Italian painter Giovanni Gherardini) to accompany the first French maritime mission to China on the ship Amphitrite – the first ship ever to sail directly from France to China – from the Atlantic port of La Rochelle in 1698.¹⁸ Directly sponsored by Louis XIV, this high-profile mission – it was an embassy in all but name – was led by Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730) and also included Jesuit scholars from the French Academy of Sciences and trunk-loads of luxury goods, from mirrors to firearms.

The Amphitrite reached Guangzhou in November 1698, where Belleville started work with extraordinary speed. As the only European architect or artist in the city he must have built and decorated the ‘beautiful’ and ‘exalted’ new Jesuit church (c. 1699–before 1701) commissioned by Carlo Giovanni Turcotti (1643–1706), the Jesuit visitor to the province of Japan and vice-province of China, which one Jesuit went so far as to call the ‘most beautiful building that there is’ in the whole city.¹⁹ Belleville proceeded rapidly to Beijing to oversee the construction of the first church for the French Jesuit mission, officially the Church of the Saviour but popularly known as the Beitang (or Northern Hall). Belleville, described as ‘one of our brothers’ and ‘a very capable architect’, is directly credited as its architect by Père de Tartre in a 1701 letter to his father which describes it as already being complete and ‘in the European style’.²⁰ The Beitang was built on land donated in 1693 by the Kangxi Emperor in gratitude after the Jesuits cured him of malaria with quinine extracted from the Peruvian cinchona plant, known as ‘Jesuit’s bark’ – another outcome of the Society’s worldwide mission network (see chapter 11). Built partly of marble, it contained illusionistic mural paintings in the style of Andrea Pozzo executed by Gherardini, including a false dome, as at the Roman church of Sant’Ignazio (1685), and a ceiling painting showing St Michael and the angels descending through a cloudburst. Belleville also contributed to the decorations, as was noted in a personnel record from 1704 which states that he ‘made beautiful paintings for our churches’.²¹ The Beitang also housed the Beijing Jesuits’ formidable library, in an adjacent building which was the former residence of a demoted member of the imperial court. Housing around 5,000 volumes, this collection boasted numerous books on architecture, perspective, hydraulics, fortification, fountain design and gardens, including two editions of Vitruvius, Italian and German books on fountains and three books of views of Versailles and its gardens and other French palaces.²²

Figure 1.4. Anonymous Chinese painter. Façade of the Beitang church of the French Jesuit mission, c. 1701–3 (detail). Gouache on canvas. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Photo: author).

The appearance of the Beitang façade is preserved in a scroll painting of the period, which shows it to be a partial simulacrum of the façade of the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis (now Saint-Louis-Saint-Paul) in Paris, built by Jesuit architect Étienne Martellange (1627–41) (fig. 1.4).²³ The church’s nationalist flavour is not surprising, given that it was paid for by Louis XIV and that the original idea of a French Jesuit mission in China had been the brainchild of the King’s ultra-nationalist minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83). Especially noteworthy is the façade’s oculus window with its sunrays, the paired columns and pilasters and the division into three bays with a high arch in the centre. By contrast, the Portuguese-run Nantang, rebuilt at precisely the same time and completed in 1733, was constructed in an emphatically Portuguese style, although with the adjustments to Chinese taste in the forecourt already noted above (Fig. 1.2). These facades show that patriotic feelings ran high even among rival groups of Jesuits: indeed, few mission episodes better illustrate this sentiment than that of 18th-century Beijing. It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that Belleville ended up spending the rest of his life decorating churches for the Portuguese Jesuits in Brazil.

Although many scholars have maintained that Belleville served the Kangxi Emperor at court in the Forbidden City, as did so many of his colleagues, and even that he trained eunuch artists there, I have yet to find definite proof that he contributed to anything outside the Jesuit compound.²⁴ If he did train Chinese painters he would have done so either in the xianfa mode of perspective painting or in the naturalistic depictions of birds and flowers so beloved at court. At any rate, Kangxi treated Belleville with courtesy and even had him sent to the Qing imperial summer mountain resort in Chengde to recover from the illness, no doubt brought on by sheer exhaustion, which led to his removal from China in 1707 or 1708.²⁵ En route to France Belleville left the ship at Salvador de Bahia for what was to be a short medical leave but which ended up lasting the rest of his life.

Belleville in Brazil and his legacy

In contrast to his relatively well-documented sojourn in China, we know almost nothing about Belleville’s 22 years in Brazil except for what can be gleaned from the Jesuit triennial reports, which are frustratingly unspecific about artists and architects. Among the four surviving personnel catalogues from Bahia during his lifetime – those for the first and last eight years of his stay are missing – most just call him an associator, which means a person who accompanies a priest when he goes on a journey. Nevertheless in 1719 he is specifically called a ‘painter and sculptor’ (pintor e estatuário); and the catalogues of 1720 and 1722 call him a ‘painter’ (pintor).²⁶ He lived at the Jesuits’ headquarters in Salvador, of which the church (begun 1657) is now the cathedral. Its celebrated sacristy ceiling – it was finished in 1694 and therefore Belleville would have known it well – served as motivational propaganda for Jesuits working in the mission field, as it was adorned with portraits of Jesuit saints and martyrs around the world, including Asia. Belleville must have recovered quickly from his illness as he was already reviewing and correcting the plan of the new Jesuit Novitiate at Jiquitaia (Bahia) and was on hand to witness the laying of the foundation stone there on 9 March 1709.²⁷ Belleville is also thought to have contributed to the ornamental paintings in the Salvador church, but nothing survives there which can be attributed to him with any certitude – there is certainly no Chinese-style ornament of any kind. Referring to his death, on 29 September 1730, the Jesuit Annual Letter notes that he was well known for his architecture and was a paragon of humility in deflecting praise for his architectural work.

Although it, too, lacks documentation, only one surviving artwork has convincingly been attributed to the French Jesuit because of its extraordinarily accurate Chinese ornamentation and because it was executed just over a decade after his arrival in Bahia.²⁸ This work is the sacristy ceiling at the novitiate and college church of Nossa Senhora in Belém da Cachoeira, an Amerindian village about 130 kilometres to the north-west of Salvador, built between 1687 and 1701 (fig. 1.5).²⁹

The church, the last remaining building in the complex, originally occupied the middle of one of the smaller sides of a rectangular cloister. It has a single nave, Capela–Mor (chancel) and sacristy flanked by lateral corridors and clerestories with balconies opening onto the chancel. As was traditional in the region, the bell tower is covered with blue-and-white tiles and broken crockery. As these ceramics were inspired by Chinese porcelain – some may, in fact, be Chinese – the tower serves as another reflection of the taste for Chinese decorative arts. The church underwent three major renovations during Belleville’s time in Brazil: one in 1707 involving the ornamentation of the church and sacristy – very probably too early for him to have been there; and then in 1719, when two pulpits were installed; and finally in 1726, when humidity had so damaged the church that its façade and towers were rebuilt in stone.³⁰ The most probable date for Belleville’s ceiling is 1719, since the renovations that year involved the interior of the building and there are traces of Chinese-style floral ornament on the underside of the pulpit.

Figure 1.5. Charles de Belleville, Ceiling in the sacristy of the Jesuit church of Nossa Senhora de Belén de Cachoeira, Bahia, Brazil ( c.1719) (Photo courtesy of Dennis Carr).

The wooden ceiling takes the form of six sunken panels, organised into two rows of three and bordered with a grid of raised frames and with gilded lotus-blossom bosses at the junctures. The entire ceiling is painted on a black background in imitation of Chinese lacquers. The most colourful part is the floral wreath around the central medallions, containing luxurious, three-dimensional flowers, including peonies, roses and morning glory executed in pink, red, white and green oil pigments. The central medallion, painted in gold, centres on a foliate arabesque within a bold outline and the boundaries of the panel are delineated in a golden border and bear another abstracted floral and foliate band in white with pink roses at the corners. The raised grid of frames is painted with gilded foliate motifs and outlined in seal red and blue. The only departure from Chinese iconography is the addition of passionflower blossoms with their distinctive pinwheel shape and radial filaments. Although, as their name indicates, they were considered a symbol of Christ’s Passion, they are also native to Brazil and demonstrate that the French painter was keen to integrate his local surroundings. The same flower, incidentally, appears in the carved decoration of the churches of the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay around the same period.³¹

Figure 1.6. Detail of a ceiling from the Chang Ling tomb of Ming emperor Yongle, 1424 (Photo: author).

The most interesting thing about this ceiling is that it is neither an example of Chinoiserie – European fantasy Asian ornament – nor does it imitate Chinese luxury goods made exclusively for export trade. As can be seen here in a detail of the ceiling in the Chang Ling Tomb of Ming Emperor Yongle from 1424, coffer-like wooden ceilings with floral wreaths surrounding medallions and with painted bosses at the junctures of the grid have long been typical of Chinese imperial palaces, halls and temples (fig. 1.6). This kind of ceiling can also be found throughout the halls and pavilions of the Imperial Palace in Beijing, including an 18th-century example in the northern sector gardens. Since Belleville would have been familiar with this form from his probable visits to the Forbidden City and the Chengde villa, it is perfectly conceivable that he based his ceiling on those structures. Belleville’s frames with arabesques in gold and white also recall imperial lacquered screen panels. The richness and realism in the flower wreath in Belleville’s panels also resemble the kind of so-called ‘bird and flower paintings’ produced by his Jesuit colleagues and their Chinese apprentices at court. In addition to his sacristy ceiling, Belleville also painted a frieze of painted peonies, roses and possibly tulips in oil on plaster around the upper part of the wall of the Capela–Mor and under the choir – these were rediscovered during the recent renovation. This is significant as Chinese-style decoration in later Brazilian churches also tended to be concentrated in the sacristy and chancel. By contrast, the illusionistic painted wooden vault of the Capela–Mor is executed in the traditional Luso-Italian manner with false cornices, plinths and cartouches, as well as putti (cherubs) and floral garlands.

Belleville’s example was followed within a decade in two ceilings in a Jesuit missionary church 2,000 kilometres to the south, in a Tupi-Guaraní aldea called Embu, now a crafts community on the outskirts of São Paulo known as Embu das Artes. The mission church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário in Embu, a strikingly plain structure with opulent altarpieces, was built by local Amerindians on a former cattle ranch under the leadership of father Belchior Pontes around 1694–1700.³² At the time it was a remote location, since the present state of São Paulo was sparsely settled by whites and black slaves in comparison with the cities of the north-east. His successor Domingos Machado (in office 1720–51) built the adjacent residence and rebuilt the Capela-Mor (inscribed 1735), the side altars (which Germain Bazin dates to 1720) and the sacristy, which, given its stylistic similarity to the Capela-Mor, must also date from the 1735 campaign.³³ The ceiling of the Capela-Mor is divided into nine rectangular panels with large acanthus leaf grotesques framed by a Chinese-style interior band of stylised chrysanthemums and foliage painted in white against a field of seal red. Wider bands in a similar style surround each panel, now red-on-white with flowering branches like magnolias. Both types of band reappear along the frieze at the top of the chancel walls, the wider one above and the narrower one below. Unlike the designs at Belém da Cachoeira these patterns are quite generic and only vaguely Chinese in style, as if recalling a half-remembered pattern from an imported silk.

The sacristy features a similar, although flat, roof with nine large rectangular panels adorned with acanthus grotesques around symbols of Christ’s Passion (Fig. 1.7). Here the wider band is painted with prunus and rose scrolls in green, pink, red and blue on a white ground and the interior ones with Chinese landscapes featuring pagodas, hills, trees and birds, but also tiny churches in white on red. Unlike the floral scrolls, which are again somewhat generically reminiscent of Chinese textiles or perhaps wallpaper, the landscapes are characteristic enough to be traced to specific models. However, with the death about five years earlier of the only Jesuit painter with direct knowledge of the arts of imperial China, this new painter turned to something more familiar and readily available in colonial Brazil: the Chinoiserie false-lacquered furnishings painted in a technique known in English as ‘japanning’. As D. Carr has shown, japanned furniture was very popular in western Europe in the first decades of the 18th century and spread throughout the colonial world – including to the Thirteen Colonies, Jamaica, New Spain and the viceroyalty of Peru – thanks to itinerant artisans as well as printed manuals. One of these manuals was by a Jesuit: Filippo Buonanni’s Trattato sopra la vernice detta comunemente cinese (Rome, 1720), to which this chapter will return in due course.³⁴ Although the Embu painter paints his scenes in white instead of gold, the designs are very similar to those of European japanned desks and cabinets of the same period, such as a bureau made c. 1735 either in England or Germany, with discreet little scenes with pavilions, fences, pagodas and small human figures and birds alternating with floral motifs, all against a red background, although human figures are less prominent in the Embu ceiling (Fig. 1.8). Also unlike European japanned furniture is the inclusion of churches in the Embu ceiling, little buildings crowned with crosses and high, pitched roofs, porches at the front and on the sides of the Capela-Mor and twin bell towers.

Figure 1.7. Anonymous, ceiling of the sacristy, Jesuit Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário in Embu, São Paulo, Brazil ( c.1735–40) (Photo: author).

Figure 1.8. Bureau cabinet, German or English, c.1735. Wood, japanned, with engraved brass mounts. (Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum).

Embu is the last known Jesuit foundation in Brazil to include Chinese-inspired motifs in its chancel and sacristy. Paradoxically, the region with the highest concentration of surviving Chinoiserie church interiors was a place where religious orders had been forbidden entry by royal decree since 1711: the gold and diamond mining region of Minas Gerais, considered to be one of the cradles of Brazilian baroque and rococo.³⁵ As has been the case with the Embu paintings, scholars have traditionally attributed these Chinoiserie decorations to either Belleville or Chinese immigrant artists, but they are clearly made by Portuguese or Brazilian-born painters as they are no more authentically Chinese than the japanned furniture of Europe. The earliest and most famous example – in fact it predates Embu by ten years – is a series of seven false-lacquer landscape panels in gold on blue surrounding the traditionally baroque high altarpiece in the tiny wayside church of Nossa Senhora do Ó in Sabará (dedicated to the pregnant Virgin). This was begun sometime after 1717 but only decorated around 1725, after Belleville’s ceiling had been completed.³⁶ This tiny chapel even takes on a pseudo-Chinese appearance on the exterior, its pagoda-like tower and curving eaves resembling one of the spindly pagodas on the Embu friezes. Such towers became commonplace in Minas Gerais.

At Sabará the nine Chinoiserie panels are not on the ceiling but surround the entrance to the Capela-Mor, with its vigorous baroque gilded altarpiece, in the part of the church known since early Christian times as the ‘triumphal arch’ since it separates the mortal world of the congregation from the heavenly Jerusalem represented by the chancel and celebrates the triumph of Christianity over paganism.³⁷ Therefore, by placing these panels around this opening the designer of the church has conceivably made a quite explicit statement of Christian conquest, using the Asian style as a metaphor for paganism. The panels, painted in gold on blue backgrounds, include one or two small architectural motifs, notably pagodas and multi-storeyed temples, as well as phoenixes and other birds, craggy rocks, hillocks, prunus trees, Confucian scholars, boats and fishermen. Unlike at Embu, however, none of them depict churches – in fact, lofty pagoda towers like the one at Kew Botanic Gardens in England are the most prominent motifs on the panels. The blue colour on the main panels is unusual as a background for Brazilian examples, but certain European japanned pieces were executed in blue or green. It is clear when comparing the Sabará panels to those on contemporary furniture that the latter are the most likely models. Indeed, Sabará and the rest of Minas Gerais were inundated with such luxury furnishings since its mines made it one of the richest places on earth at the time. Thus, at Sabará the motivation behind such Asiatic imagery was not merely spiritual but had a decidedly profane resonance: these churches, like the people who commissioned them, were concerned with being stylish.

The church with the largest concentration of Chinoiserie décor is the cathedral of Nossa Senhora da Assunção in Mariana (1714–35), also in Minas Gerais, constructed by Jacinto Barbara Lopes and António Coelho da Fonseca and elevated to a cathedral in 1745.³⁸ Like the Sabará chapel it also has pagoda-like belfries, as does the nearby Capela do dos Anjos de Nossa Senhora (c. 1784), thereby turning the townscape itself into a kind of fantasy Chinese village. The chinoiseries, commissioned by the first bishop, Don Frei Manuel da Cruz (d. 1764), date from around 1748 to 1751 – a full three decades after those at Belém da Cachoiera. In this church the Chinese motifs appear on wooden panels adorning not the ceiling or the triumphal arch but exclusively places associated with music. The largest are a set of panels along the back of both the choirstalls (fig. 1.9). Painted in gold and black against a background of seal red, the panels are adorned with five layers of landscapes, including flowers, blossoming prunus trees, willows, birds, fountains and garden pavilions with trelliswork, but also churches. The human figures – some are promenading under the shade of a parasol while others hunt with rifles or are on horseback – are Europeans instead of Chinese. Camels, elephants and panthers, exotic animals from beyond China, round out the motifs and demonstrate that the imagery has become a pan-Asian fantasy. Another series of Chinoiserie panels form the front of the choir stall, this time painted with floral posies on a black background framed in red. In the main panels the black pigment is used for the landscapes which also serve to separate the scenes, while the silver is used for details such as faces and the putto atop the very European-looking fountains. The layout of the panels recalls folding screens, a popular format both for European japanned furniture and Chinese export screens of a sort known in Europe as a ‘Coromandel screen’ because they were shipped to western markets via European entrepots on the Coromandel Coast of south-east India such as Madras or Pondicherry.³⁹ Coromandel screens or European japanned screens made in imitation of them were often mounted on walls in Europe or colonial America.

Figure 1.9. Chinoiserie panels, choirstall of the Cathedral of Nossa Senhora da Assunção, Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil ( c.1753). (Photo author).

The most unusual location for chinoiseries in the church is on the base of the monumental pipe organ, constructed by the German organ-maker Arp Schnitger (1701) and originally in the Franciscan church in Lisbon. The organ was moved to Mariana in 1752 as a gift from Dom João V of Portugal; and the chinesices were probably painted over the original panels of the organ at this time, which would make them contemporary with those of the choir stalls and probably by the same painters.⁴⁰ When its doors are shut the whole exterior is painted with gilded decoration on a red background: in the two main panels above the keyboard with landscape scenes similar to those on the choirstalls; and on the sides with lighter floral and bird motifs. By contrast, the insides of the doors are painted in gold on black with a red frame, again with small architectural and landscape scenes. As at Belém da Cachoeira, Embu and Sabará, these Chinese-style motifs are limited to marginal regions of the church’s interior, which otherwise remains resolutely Luso-Brazilian in style, with bulky Solomonic retables and Italianate, illusionistic ceiling paintings in the Capela-Mor. It is as if these exotic elements needed to be kept to a minimum so as not to make the interior appear like a pagan temple. They would also have been seen primarily by insiders: canons of the cathedral, choristers, the bishop and the organist.

The association between Chinoiserie and religion went beyond public places of worship and into the home. Particularly in Bahia and Minas Gerais, Asian fantasy cabinets were manufactured expressly to be used as household shrines, such as an elaborate wooden oratory made in Minas Gerais sometime in the mid or later 18th century and now in the Museu de Arte Sacra in São Paulo.⁴¹ Two of its four doors are painted with landscapes in blue and white, in imitation of Chinese porcelain, against a seal-red background; the inside of the statue niche is painted to resemble Chinese silks with multicoloured posies and blue foliate motifs on a bluish ground, and – most extraordinarily – the crown of the cabinet takes the form of a fantasy pagoda roof with turned-up eaves, the sort of building which appears in Chinoiserie landscapes. Sometimes even saints are dressed à la chinoise, as in the case of an 18th-century sculpture of St Cecilia playing her harp in the sacristy at Mariana cathedral but dressed in Chinese imperial robes and with a Mandarin-style topknot.⁴²

Figure 1.10. Anonymous, wooden temple lion, Jesuit residence of Nossa Senhora do Rosário in Embu, São Paulo, Brazil (early 18th century). (Photo author).

An important Chinese-inspired form of probably Jesuit origin to be found in Brazilian churches is the temple lion, made either of wood, stone or fired clay. In this case, as with Belleville’s ceiling, they are modelled after authentic Chinese examples rather than Chinoiserie forms. In China such lions served as symbolic guardians at the entrances to temples, palaces, imperial tombs, government offices and the larger homes. They are generally squat and muscular with pug-like noses and a mane formed of scrolls or topknots; and their mouths open up into wide snarls baring fangs. They were produced in pairs, the female shown playing with a cub and the male holding a sphere under his paw. We know from ships’ manifests that Chinese temple lions, probably ceramic ones, were shipped to Brazil from Macau in this period. By this time Chinese imports had become quite common in Brazil: so common, in fact, that most great houses had impressive collections of polychrome porcelain from the Jingdezhen kilns, many from the Kangxi and Qianlong periods. The Museu de Arte in Bahia even preserves a fine pair of 18th-century temple lions, painted under the glaze in archaic yellow and green, which would originally have come from a private residence or perhaps a church foundation.⁴³

Temple lions appear in three known churches in Brazil: in Embu and in two Franciscan foundations in the far north-east, a monastery in João Pessoa and a Third Order chapel in Recife.⁴⁴ The wooden Embu lions, probably from around the same period as the sacristy ceiling, form a quartet meant to support a wooden bier for a statue of the Dead Christ (fig. 1.10).

The ensemble was brought out into the streets to feature in Holy Week processions and then rested in the church until Easter morning. Seated on their haunches, the lions look skyward with wide grins and almond eyes and their manes are formed of tight scrolls. They are traditionally thought to be Chinese but they are unlikely to have been made in China as they do not have the typical twisting torso or snarling lips of Chinese lions, nor do they have the orb or lion cub under their paws. While it might seem odd at first that Daoist lions would have been employed to carry the bier of Christ during a religious procession, their supportive role might have served as a metaphor for the support Chinese converts brought to the Catholic church – or even for that hoped-for end goal of a Christian China ruled from the Forbidden City by a benevolent Catholic monarch. They could also simply represent Christ’s victory over paganism. I. Zupanov has recently suggested that a similar message lay behind the tradition in Portuguese Goa of carving Hindu naga snake deities on the pedestals supporting church pulpits, in which the position of the priestly orator on top of the nagas demonstrates Christianity’s triumph over Hinduism and also the support given to Christianity by the Brahmin converts who formed the Christian upper class in the colony.⁴⁵

As it happens, the tradition of incorporating Chinese lions into church decoration did not begin in Brazil – as we have already seen – but in Catholic Asia, where they appeared in front of church forecourts, flanking doors, or on their facades. This practice most probably began with the Jesuits, as with the two lions flanking the entrance to the Beitang in Beijing. The oldest set is probably the suite of six lions clambering atop the massive granite façade of the church of Our Lady, better known as Saint Paul’s, in Macau, carved between the 1620s and 1644.⁴⁶ These lions look authentic because they were carved by Chinese sculptors who were probably accustomed to carving them for temples. Especially noteworthy in this case are the way the lips are pulled back in a scowl and the stylised curvature of the manes, which recall the way clouds are carved in Chinese sculpture. Two other pairs – females with a cub and males with an orb – guard the main entry and flank the patio of the Augustinian church of San Agustín in Manila (completed 1607) and are believed by scholars to date at least from the 18th century; and others can be found in the Philippines at the shrine of Our Lady of Caysasay in Taal (Batangas) and in churches in Vigan (Ilocos Sur), Morong (Rizal) and the cathedral of the Santo Niño in Cebu.⁴⁷ The San Agustín quartet, too, were clearly carved by Chinese sculptors, of whom there was a large community just north of the Pasig River from Spanish Manila: the piece has the typical lips pulled back into a scowl, the four canine teeth, the stylised scrolling mane, and – above all – the cub.

The other two surviving Brazilian examples are Franciscan. The Friars Minor had their own reasons for touting Christian victory in Asia. Although the Franciscan missions in Qing China were lower-profile than those of the Jesuits, concentrating on ordinary people rather than the elites, they more than made up for it with their antiquity. In fact, the Franciscans sent the first Catholic missionaries to Mongolia and Yuan Dynasty China centuries before the European era of overseas exploration. This mission began with Giovanni di Piano Carpini, who walked barefoot from Umbria to the Mongol court in Karakorum in 1245, initiating a sporadic mission that lasted until about 1370 and involved some 240 friar missionaries.⁴⁸ One of them, Giovanni da Montecorvino, established an active mission in Khanbaliq, present-day Beijing and the Yuan capital; and he acquired the lofty title of Archbishop of Khanbaliq and Patriarch of the East in 1307 and translated the Psalms and New Testament into the Mongol language, Uighur. Very few visual remains survive of this mission today: only a handful of tombstones of Italian Christians living in China, such as those of Andrea di Perugia, Franciscan bishop of Quanzhou from 1332, and Caterina Vilioni, daughter of an Italian merchant living in Yangzhou in 1342.⁴⁹ Whatever jealousy the Franciscans may have felt toward the Jesuits in contemporary China – not to mention in 16th- and 17th-century Japan, where the two orders were constantly at loggerheads – they made up for with their history. Less than 20 years after the death of Francis of Assisi, in the fervent era of the crusades, the Friars Minor had claimed China for their own.

Both these pairs of Brazilian Franciscan lions date from the 1770s, which happen to be the decade of the worldwide suppression of the Jesuit Order. Is it not possible that these symbols of Christian victory might also be intended as a celebration of the Franciscans’ recent triumph over their bitterest rival in the missionary field? One is a ceramic pair of recumbent lions flanking the side entrance at the Third Order Franciscan church of São Francisco in Recife, made around 1770 and now in very poor condition – indeed, they are almost unrecognisable as lions.⁵⁰ The other is a pair of stone rampant lions at the Franciscan monastery of Santo António (popularly known as São Francisco) in João Pessoa further to the north-east, carved around 1779 (fig. 1.11).

Figure 1.11. Stone temple lion, forecourt of the Franciscan church of Santo António (popularly known as São Francisco), João Pessoa ( c.1734 or 1779). (Photo author).

In both cases the pair of lions guard the entry to the forecourt; in the case of Santo António they are perched on the outer extremities of the perimeter walls, welcoming visitors into the monastery enclosure, just as their counterparts did at the Jesuit Beitang in Beijing. These two lions are the most striking in Brazil, with their pushed-in nose, menacingly raised eyebrows, fierce grin with prominent canine teeth, luxuriously scrolling mane and volute-like tail. They were probably carved by the same people who executed the upper part of the façade in 1779, which is known precisely for the bulkiness and three-dimensional quality of its stonework, with two of the most prominent volutes in Brazilian architecture. The lions look very Brazilian: they are more rigid and frontal than Chinese examples, lacking the latter’s sinuous line and taut musculature but possessing a blunt power and creative treatment of line which make them unique in Latin America. Despite these differences, the closeness to Chinese prototypes in their stance, the position of the tail and shape of the nose indicates that the João Pessoa carver had access to an original.

The artists who painted and carved these Chinese-inspired artworks in Brazilian churches have left us no record of their motivation. As a temporal coadjutor Belleville was unlikely to have been a literary man and no writings of any kind by him survive. As for the artists who executed the chinesices in Embu, Sabará and Mariana, we do not even know their names. The same goes for the sculptors of the churches at João Pessoa and Recife. It would be quite reasonable to dismiss these Chinese-style church decorations as merely decorative, since they participate in a worldwide fashion for things Asian, whether it be actual export-ware ceramics and lacquers or imitation ones such as the japanned furniture of England or the porcelain of Meissen or Spode. Some, as in Minas Gerais, echoed the stylish interiors of the great houses of the region and spoke as much about the church patrons’ material wealth as they did about the Heavenly Jerusalem. However, as noted throughout this chapter, one of the main motivations seems to have been a desire to use Asiatic styles to communicate messages of Christian, specifically missionary, triumph. While this theory must remain conjectural in the case of the Brazilian works discussed above, there is, fortunately, at least one source which makes this association quite explicit: Filippo Buonanni and his deceptively humble little book on varnishing (first published in 1720), which is one of the earliest and most influential treatises on the subject, translated immediately into multiple languages.

Buonanni’s book is a curious blend. A practical guide to japanning furniture, with illustrations of the tools of the trade (but, curiously, no decorative motifs), this book, published one year after Belleville’s ceiling, is a religious tract disguised as a DIY manual. Buonanni (1638–1723) was no mere furniture maker: a professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano, he was also well-known for his experimental work with microscope lenses and, after 1698, was the curator of Athanasius Kircher’s famed curiosity cabinet or museum at the college, for which he published the first catalogue in 1709.⁵¹ The patriotic dedication in Buonanni’s book to the Marquis of Abrantes, Portuguese ambassador to the Holy See – and by extension to João V of Portugal – explicitly associates japanning with Portuguese military conquest and Catholic (specifically Jesuit) spiritual victory in the Americas and Asia, using a kind of ostentatious language which seems out of place in a modest guide to making furniture. It opens:

Buonanni reminds the monarch of Portugal’s support of the Jesuits’ campaign to introduce the Catholic Faith into those regions and hopes his book could help to commemorate this Christian victory. He then cites the first two books to introduce the art of varnishing into Europe, both, of course, by Jesuits: Martino Martini’s 1655 Novus Atlas Sinesis [New Atlas of China] and Kircher’s 1667 China Illustrata.⁵³ In Buonanni’s generous rewriting of history, by bringing Chinese lacquer-work to the world’s attention the Jesuits, therefore, not only invented Chinoiserie, but also employed the style as a symbol and reminder of Christian, and specifically Jesuit, missionary victory in Asia. For a religious order long credited with devious methods of using culture for propagandistic purposes, this was very devious indeed.

It is clear from the Jesuits’ 17th-century publication campaign and from Jesuit churches in Asia and Brazil that the Society of Jesus felt proprietary about China; and that for them its arts – even decorative arts such as furniture – could be employed as a visual reminder of Jesuit victory in what was considered the most ancient and formidable non-Christian power in the world. As such, these decorative schemes, like the sacristy ceiling in Salvador, also served as motivational art to inspire missionaries towards similar work in the Americas. The Jesuits were the first to introduce Chinese or Chinese-inspired styles into the churches and private oratories of Brazil, ensuring a lasting association between this secular style and sacred space which was not just unique in Latin America but also unknown in Europe. Certainly, individual churchmen in Europe were enthusiastic about Chinese goods –as C. Johns has recently noted, Pope Benedict XIII (r. 1724–30) even built a gallery at Castelgandolfo to house his collection of Chinese paintings of beautiful women – but even the pope did not decorate churches with them.⁵⁴ Paradoxically, the Brazilian association between China and the Church outlasted the Jesuits themselves, perpetuated by their Franciscan rivals as a symbol of their own Asian exploits and perhaps even their victory over the Society. However, for most colonial Brazilians and patrons such as secular clergy, lay confraternities and private citizens, ecclesiastical Chinoiserie had simply become a tradition, one which was encouraged in no small way by what people considered to be its stylishness and avant-garde quality, like the latest Paris fashions which also took elite Brazil by storm at the end of the century.⁵⁵

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1 On Ricci see: R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); M. Fontana, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Plymouth, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); J. Sebes, ‘Ricci, Matteo’, in C.E. O’Neill and J.M. Domínguez (eds.), Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I. and Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001), pp. 51–3; F. D’Arelli (ed.), Le marche e l’oriente (Rome: Instituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’oriente, 1998); J. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin, 1985).

2 M. Musillo, The Shining Inheritance: Italian Painters at the Qing Court, 1699–1812 (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2016); E. Corsi, La fábrica de las ilusiones: los jesuitas y la difusión de la perspectiva lineal en China, 1698–1766 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2004); D. Fu, ‘Western missionary painters and Imperial architectural paintings of the Qing dynasty’, in H.S. Chan (ed.), The Golden Exile: Pictorial Expressions of the School of Western Missionaries’ Artworks of the Qing Dynasty Court (Macau: Macau Museum of Art, 2002), pp. 261–4; C. Beurdeley and M. Beurdeley, Giuseppe Castiglione: a Jesuit Painter at the Court of the Chinese Emperors (London: Lund Humphries, 1972).

3 G.A. Bailey, ‘Rococo in eighteenth-century Beijing: ornament prints and the design of the European palaces of the Yuanming Yuan’, The Burlington Magazine, 159 (Oct. 2017): 778–88; P. Luengo, ‘Yuánmíng Yuán en el siglo XVIII: arte entre la diplomacia y la filosofía; entre Europa y Pekin’, Araucaria, 18 (Jan.–June 2016): 193–216; K. Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015); G.M. Thomas, ‘Yuanming Yuan/Versailles: intercultural interactions between Chinese and European palace cultures’, Art History, 32 (2009): 115–43; C.Y. Liu, ‘Architects and builders of the Qing Dynasty Yuanming Yuan Imperial Garden Palace’, University of Hong Kong Museum Journal, 1 (2002): 38–59, 151–61; H. Zou, ‘The jing of a Perspective Garden’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 22 (2002): 293–326; R. Thiriez, Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor’s European Palaces (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998); V. Droguet, ‘Les Palais européens de l’empereur Qianlong et leurs sources italiennes’, Histoire de l’art 25/26 (1994): 15–28; M. Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens (ed.), Le Yuanmingyuan: jeux d’eau et palais européens de XVIIIe siècle à la cour de Chine (Paris: Editions Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1987).

4 P. Luengo, ‘Identidad y globalización en las fachadas jesuitas de Pekín en el siglo XVIII’, in A. Zamora and J. Ibáñez Fernández (eds.), La Compañía de Jesús y las artes. Nuevas perspectivas de investigación (Zaragoza: Universidad Zaragoza, 2014), pp. 279–99; E. Corsi, ‘Pozzo’s Treatise as a workshop for the construction of a sacred Catholic space in Beijing’, in R. Bösel and L. Salviucci Insolera (eds.), Artifizi della matafora: diciotto saggi su Andrea Pozzo (Rome: Artemide, 2012), pp. 233–43; L. Wang, ‘Church, a “sacred event” and the visual perspective of an “etic viewer”: an 18th century western-style Chinese painting held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’, in R. Oliveira Lopes (ed.), Face to Face: the Transcendence of the Arts in China and Beyond – Historical Perspectives (Lisbon: CEIBA, 2014), pp. 370–99.

5 S. Naquin comments that ‘Christian churches also enclosed their differences within a Chinese-style compound. The layout of the North Church (Beitang) … followed Chinese principles for the gate and exterior wall, but inside, the tall façade of a single, massive Western-style church rose above the surrounding buildings. Within the courtyards, formal European plantings created a distinctly foreign garden’ (S. Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400– 1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 34–5).

6 M.Á. Fernández (ed.), Return Voyage: the China Galleon and the Baroque in Mexico, 1565– 1815 (Puebla and Mexico City: Gobierno de Estado de Puebla, 2016); D. Carr (ed.), Made in the Americas: the New World Discovers Asia (Boston, MA: MFA Publications, 2015); G.A. Bailey, ‘Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America’, in J.J. Rishel (ed.), The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 (Philadelphia, PA and New Haven, CT: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 57–69.

7 E. Phipps, J. Hecht and C. Esteras Martín (eds.), The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530–1830 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), pp. 250–4; S. Cammann, ‘Chinese influence in colonial Peruvian tapestries’, Textile Museum Journal, 1 (Dec. 1964): 21–34.

8 See, in particular, J.R. Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil: influências, marcas, ecos e sobrevivências chinesas na sociedade e na arte brasileiras (Campinas: Unicamp, 1999).

9 J.W. Witek, ‘Belleville, Charles de’, in C.E. O’Neill and J.M. Domínguez (eds.), Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I. and Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001), p. 404.

10 Witek, ‘Belleville’, p. 404; J.P. Duteil, Le mandat du ciel: Le role des jésuites en Chine (Paris: AP editions - Arguments, 1994), p. 42; D.E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 67; J. Dehergne, Répertoire des jésuites de Chine de 1552 à 1800 (Rome and Paris : Institutum Historicum S.I., 1973), p. 30; Beurdeley and Beurdeley, Giuseppe Castiglione, p. 194; S. Leite, Artes e ofícios dos jesuítas no Brasil 1549–1760 (Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro: Broteria, 1953), pp. 129–30; L. Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les Jésuites de l’ancienne Mission de Chine: 1552–1773 (Shanghai: Chang-Hai, Mission Catholique, 1932–34), pp. 536–7.

11 P. Maffre, Construire Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle: les frères Laclotte, architectes en société (Bordeaux: Société Archéologique de Bordeaux, 2013), pp. 55–71.

12 For an example in 18th-century Central Europe, where an unusually large number of young painters, architects and sculptors were recruited, see G.A. Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo: Décor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Patagonia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 242–50.

13 Leite, Artes e oficios, p. 129.

14 P. Clauer, L’Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux: questions et réponses, communications diverses à l’usage de tous, littérateurs et gens du monde III, 30 (1894): 161–2; Mercure galant (Aug. 1686): 282–7. Unfortunately, the article does not provide the material of the sculpture.

15 M. Burgues, ‘Aspects techniques du tabernacle de la chapelle du collège Henri IV de Poitiers’, Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de l’Ouest et des musées de Poitiers, 5th ser., 3 (Oct. 1989), p. 324.

16 As was traditional with artists in early modern France, Belleville probably came from an artistic family. He may have been related to a painter also called Charles Belleville (1651–1716), who died in Paris in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques and was a peintre ordinaire du Roi (H. Herluison, Actes d’état-civil d’artistes français, peintres, graveurs, architectes, etc. (Paris: Baur, 1873), pp. 34–5).

17 Leite, Artes e oficios, p. 129.

18 M. Keevak, Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (Singapore: Springer, 2017), pp. 151–2; Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, p. 172.

19 Witek states categorically that Belleville built the Guangzhou complex (Witek, ‘Belleville’, p. 404). On Turcotti, see L. Brockley, Journey to the East: the Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 178–9; J.W. Witek, ‘Turcotti, Carlo Giovanni’, in C.E. O’Neill and J.M. Domínguez (eds.), Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I. and Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001), pp. 46–7. The descriptions ‘beautiful’ (schöne), from the 1703 Jesuit Annual Letter, and ‘exalted’ (exhaussée) from a 1704 letter by Père de Fontaney to Père de la Chaise, are typical of the frustrating lack of detail lavished upon Jesuit architectural projects by commentators (J. Stöcklein, Allerhand so Lehr-als Geist-reiche Brief, Schrifften und Reis-Beschreibungen (Augsburg and Graz: Philipp, Martin and heirs of Johann Veith, 1726), p. 17; Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangeres XVII (Paris, 1781), p. 357). Père de Tartre’s remark that the church was ‘le plus superbe edifice qu’il y ait’ is from a 1701 letter to his father (Lettres édifiantes, p. 74).

20 His exact words are: ‘L’édifice est à l’Européen. Un de nos Freres qui est très-habile architecte, a conduit tout l’ouvrage’. Père de Tartre identifies him as ‘Le Frere de Belleville’ in a footnote (Lettres édifiantes, p. 75).

21 Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, p. 173.

22 Pirazzoli, Le Yuanmingyuan, p. 8. For a list of the works in the Jesuit library in Beijing, which include French and Italian architectural treatises, see H. Zou, ‘Appendix: Books on architecture and gardens in the Jesuit libraries in Beijing’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 22 (2002): 317–20; G.A. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 93. On diplomatic gifts of French engravings to Qianlong see M. Reed, ‘Imperial impressions: the Qianlong Emperor’s print suites,’ in P. ten-Doesschate Chu and N. Ding (eds.), Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute Los Angeles, 2015), pp. 124–39.

23 Luengo, ‘Identidad y globalización’, pp. 284–6.

24 Mungello, The Great Encounter, pp. 174–5; Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, p. 173.

25 The Jesuit personnel records are unclear about the exact dates as the 1709 edition lists him as being en route from China to France and only in 1710 is he listed among those living in Bahia. It is most likely that he reached Bahia sometime in 1708 (Dehergne, Répertoire, p. 30).

26 Leite, Artes e oficios, p. 130.

27 Leite, Artes e oficios, p. 130.

28 The first scholar to make the attribution was G. Bazin, in L’Architecture religieuse baroque au Brésil (São Paulo and Paris: Libraire Plon, 1958), vol. 2, p. 12. See also Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, pp. 171–8, 125–250; S.M. Fonseca, ‘Orientalismos no Barroco em Minas Gerais e a circularidade cultural entre o Oriente e o Ocidente’, Revista de Cultura, 22 (1995): 109–16; E.M. Brajniko, ‘Traces de l’art oriental sur l’art brésilien du début du XVIIIème siecle’, Revista da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 9 (1951): 56–79; Leite, Artes e oficios, p. 130.

29 Bazin, Architecture religieuse, vol. 2, pp. 11–12.

30 Bazin, Architecture religieuse, vol. 2, p 11.

31 Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, p. 181.

32 P. Tirapeli, Igrejas paulistas: barroco e rococó (São Paulo: UNESP, 2003), pp. 230–37; Bazin, Architecture religieuse, vol. 2, p. 159.

33 Tirapeli, Igregas, p. 232; Bazin, Architecture religieuse, vol. 2, p.159.

34 D. Carr, ‘In search of japanning in the Colonial Americas’, Antiques & Fine Art, 15 (Spring 2015): 204–11 (p. 205).

35 O.E. González and J.L. González, Christianity in Latin America: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 113. For an excellent study of the architecture of the region, see M. Andrade Ribeiro de Oliveira, O rococó religioso no Brasil (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2003), pp. 213–93.

36 Bazin, Architecture religieuse, vol. 2, pp. 102–3. Bazin was unable to find a single document relating to the construction of this church – ‘on ne possède malheureusement aucun document sur ce joyau de l’art baroque’ – and the date of 1725 is based on stylistic analysis. See also P. Tirapeli, Igrejas barrocas do Brasil (São Paulo: Metalivros, 2008), pp. 218–21.

37 L.H. Zirpolo, Historical Dictionary of Baroque Art and Architecture (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010), p. 515.

38 Bazin, Architecture religieuse, vol. 1, pp. 77–8; Tirapeli, Igrejas barrocas, pp. 232–5.

39 C. Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 80.

40 L.A. Esteves Pereira, ‘Two More Arp Schnitgers in Portugal?’, Organ Yearbook, 14 (1983): 17.

41 The inventory number for this remarkable piece in the Museu de Arte is: 135mas.

42 Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, p. 294.

43 O Museu de Arte da Bahia (São Paulo: Banco Safra, 1997), p. 259.

44 Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, pp. 165–6.

45 I.G. Zupanov, ‘The pulpit trap: possession and personhood in colonial Goa’, Res, 65/66 (2014/2015): 229–315.

46 C. Guillén Nuñez, Macao’s Church of Saint Paul: a Glimmer of the Baroque in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), pp. 98–9, 116–37.

47 P.G. Galende and R.T. José, San Agustín: Art & History 1571–2000 (Manila: San Agustin Museum, 2000), pp. 147–9.

48 C. Dawson, Mission to Asia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 3–72, 224–31; L. Arnold, Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures: The Franciscan Mission to China and its Influence on the Art of the West 1250–1350 (San Francisco CA,: Desiderata, 1999).

49 J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford: Clarendon 1988), pp. 104–5.

50 Tirapeli, Igrejas barrocas, pp. 104–7; L.D. Silva, Pernambuco Preservado: histórico dos bens tombados no Estado de Pernambuco (Recife, 2002), pp. 172–7; Teixeira Leite, A China no Brasil, pp. 207–8; Bazin, Architecture religieuse, vol. 1, pp. 126–7; vol. 2, pp. 122–3, 144–5.

51 F. Perugini, ‘Filippo Buonanni and the Treatise’, in F. Buonanni, Techniques of Chinese Lacquer: the Classic Eighteenth-century Treatise on Asian Varnish, ed. and trans. by F. Perugini (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009), p. ix.

52 Buonanni, Techniques of Chinese Lacquer, p. 2.

53 Buonanni, Techniques of Chinese Lacquer, pp. 10–11.

54 C.M.S. Johns, China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), pp. 70–71.

55 On the susceptibility of colonial Brazilians to French fashion see Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo, p. 305.