Baroque Lisbon, between blue-and-white tiles, gold and some surprising stories
There are churches in Lisbon where you simply don’t know where to look first.
There is gold everywhere. Blue-and-white tiles. Coloured marble. Angels, saints, flowers, columns, paintings…
And just when we think we’ve seen everything, we discover one more little detail.
That is one of the most fascinating things about Portuguese Baroque: the churches are full of stories — some of them unexpected.
Why “Gold on Blue”?
At the Convent of the Cardaes we find a combination that seems almost made to give this article its title: blue-and-white tiles and gilded woodcarving.
“Ouro sobre azul” is a Portuguese expression used when something good is made even better — literally, “gold on blue”.
The blue and white of the walls meets the gold of the carved wood. Between them we find paintings, marble and sculpture.
But there is something worth noticing: the tiles and the gilded woodcarving are not there simply to decorate. They are there to tell stories.
At a time when few people could read, a church could be almost a huge book of images.
When the walls begin to speak
At the Convent of Graça, some of the large tile panels tell episodes from the history of the Augustinians, including the journeys of their missionaries and the spread of their faith in distant lands.
Suddenly, the visitor is no longer simply standing in front of a blue-and-white wall.
They are looking at a story.
In this scene, a group of missionaries takes part in the baptism of new converts. At the centre of the composition, the large baptismal font almost becomes a character in the story itself.
It is the image of a journey that begins far from Lisbon and ends, symbolically, beside that baptismal font.
And that is precisely what makes these tiles so interesting: they do not show only saints and religious figures. They show people, places and events which, for those who commissioned them, were part of a story that stretched far beyond the walls of the convent.
And perhaps this is one of the best ways to look at old tiles: not as wallpaper, but as a story told in images.
And what a distant world appears on those walls!
Africa, Asia, the Middle East…
Blue and white could bring the whole world into a church.
And then comes the gold
If the tiles tell stories, there are churches where gilded woodcarving practically takes over the space.
In the Chapel of Nossa Senhora da Doutrina, in São Roque, gilded wood covers the walls, altar and vault.
The chapel itself is described as a Baroque composition in the “National Style”, created between 1680 and 1695.
But perhaps you don’t need to know anything about art styles to appreciate what is in front of you.
The gold, marble and sculptures seem to form a single whole.
And this is where we begin to understand one of the curious characteristics of Portuguese Baroque: instead of choosing between architecture, sculpture, painting or decoration, it brought everything together.
The “little Baroque angel feet”
And then there are the little details.
At São Vicente de Fora, among the great tile panels, we find angels and putti — those little winged beings that appear constantly in Baroque decoration.
Some have very serious faces, others seem to be simply having fun, but they all have one thing in common:
Those “little Baroque angel feet”.
It is, of course, not a historical expression. It is simply our way of drawing attention to one of those little details that normally go unnoticed.
And perhaps that is exactly what is worth doing in a Baroque church:
stop looking at the whole and start looking for the details.
La Fontaine in tiles
Yes, the same La Fontaine whose fables many of us knew as children.
There are 38 panels at São Vicente de Fora depicting scenes from his fables.
And there is a curious story behind them.
The images were inspired by engravings by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry, who illustrated La Fontaine’s fables.
But it was Portuguese artists who transformed those images into tiles.
A French story thus ended up on the walls of a monastery in Lisbon.
And among the scenes we find “The Hen That Laid the Golden Eggs”.
It is hard to imagine a more appropriate image to appear in an article called Gold on Blue.
But Baroque was not just blue and gold
São Vicente de Fora shows us something else as well.
In its sacristy, the blue of the tiles gives way to a profusion of polychrome marble, wood, painting and gilded details.
It is as if each space had found its own way of surprising us. In a mixture of blue, white, gold and marble.
An art made of encounters
This is also why what we now call Portuguese Baroque did not develop in isolation.
At the Cardaes, we find tiles of Dutch origin.
At São Vicente, we find French fables transformed into Portuguese tiles.
At São Roque, we find marble influenced by Italian craftsmanship.
Images travelled. Artists travelled. Techniques and materials travelled too.
And Lisbon transformed all of this into a language of its own.
Perhaps that is one of the most interesting things to discover in these churches: behind an art that today seems so unmistakably Portuguese, we find stories that came from many different places.
And there is always one more detail
Perhaps that is why Baroque continues to surprise those who enter these churches for the first time.
It is the feeling that there is always something else to discover.
A story hidden in a panel.
A face among the gilded woodcarving.
A little angel.
Some oversized feet.
A La Fontaine fable.
Or simply a combination of blue, gold and light that we were not expecting to find.
All you have to do is slow down and look a little more carefully.
And perhaps that is the best way to discover the Baroque of Lisbon.
Leave a Reply