September 21• Convent of the São Gonçalo de Amarante , Amarante 

19h00 • Concert Portuguese Polyphony

 

 

 The São Gonçalo de Amarante Convent was founded in 1540 by King João III; its construction began three years later. The first parts of the building to rise were facilities like the dormitory, refectory, chapter-house and cloisters, not only because that was the usual approach at the time, for in the location there already existed an old chapel in which St Gonçalo, the popular Dominican friar, was buried. King João III had ordered that his tomb would remain untouched, and that limited the area in which the convent and its church were to be built.

The first master builder known to be in charge of the works was a Dominican, Friar Julião Romero, who probably drew the plans for an early church, which followed the traditional Mendicant structure with three naves and, possibly, a triple chevet. However, once archbishop Friar Bartolomeu dos Mártires returned from Rome, in 1564, that project was abandoned and replaced with a planimetry more appropriate to the new Tridentine guidelines. The works, however, dragged on; the exact reasons for that are unknown to us, but it was probably due to Friar Bartolomeu dos Mártires, who was a Dominican, being too focused on the new convent of his order in Viana de Castelo, not to mention possible financial problems that caused the convent's desertification. In fact, even though most of its living quarters were ready since 1554, only a tiny number of friars resided in it. 

It would take Filipe I's ascension to the throne for work on the church to begin in earnest, in 1581. The new monarch saw this as a good public relations move, given the great popularity of the bridge-building friar, who had been beatified in 1561. Besides that, in the following year, 1582, archbishop Friar Bartolomeu resigned his see and withdrew to the convent in Viana do Castelo, which may be more than a coincidence. Thus, the main structure of the church was built by Porto master builder Manuel Luís between 1581 and 1585, even though it would only be finished in the 1600s. Manuel Luís was followed by Mateus Lopes, Gonçalo Lopes, Pedro Afonso de Amorim, João Lopes de Amorim, Domingos de Freitas, who in 1641 vaulted and roofed the transept, and Manuel do Couto, who, between 1681 and 1686, finished the two upper tiers of the main entrance and built the Kings' Balcony.

The localisation of the saint's tomb, on a cliff by the river, demanded major ground levelling works and, because of that, the temple's axial façade had to be built quite close to the mountain. The church's south wall, facing the Tâmega river, became thus the main façade. For that reason, the building stands out from the general panorama of Minho religious architecture: its portico, on whose upper tier, built by Mateus do Couto, the Solomonic columns of the Portuguese Baroque are already visible, is evocative of the façades of 16th-century Flemish houses, which were also organised in tiered sections, articulated and separated into various spans by means of columns. As to the King's Balcony, on its left, it is a palatial loggia, topping the wall that conceals the church's massive side buttresses. 

Inside we see quite clearly that an attempt at addressing the spatial clarity demands of post-Tridentine rules has been made, via a Latin cross-shaped structure with a single nave, side chapels, domed transept crossing and rectangular chapel. That approach, however, was rather tentative, and the fact that it involved the adaptation of a pre-existing church's plan created some problems, ultimately keeping the desired spatial synthesis from full success. The transept, for instance, has a scale that does not completely harmonise with the rest of the church. Other obvious point is the lack of uniformity of the liturgical trappings, due to the fact that the premises were furnished over a whole century. Thus the side chapels host retables from different times, some Mannerist, others already Portuguese Baroque. In the main chapel, whose arch is preceded by two monumental columns, non-classically topped with corbels, the main retable is carved in the Joanine style of the 1730s; on its left is the entrance to the crypt where St Gonçalo is buried. (JFA)