July 12 • Church of the monastery of Tibães Convent, Braga

18h30 • Concert Portuguese Polyphony

 

 

Certain sources tell us that, during the 6th century, a monastery was founded in the Tibães area by St Martin of Braga. That coenoby would be rebuilt in the 11th century, and in 1110 Counts Dom Henrique and Dona Teresa exempted it from taxation; around that time, the monks adopted the Benedictine rule. After the Order's reformation, Tibães became, in 1567, through a Bull from Pope Pius V, the Seat of the new Order of St Benedict of Portugal and Brazil. The first few decades of the following century would see a renewal of the Order's conventual facilities, including the church that had replaced the original Romanesque temple.

The church of Tibães, built between 1628 and 1661 from plans by Manuel Álvares and Friar João Turriano, has an 'older sister' that also stands in Braga: the church of the Nossa Senhora do Pópulo Convent, whose construction began in 1596. Should we wish to further explore that family tree, we might also add to it the São Gonçalo de Amarante and São Domingos de Viana churches. Outside, it displays the same kind of buttresses as the church of the Braga Eremites, and its interior has the same concept of unbroken spatial continuity between the nave and the main chapel. Its Ionic pilasters and capitals, however, have predecessors in the Dominican churches of Viana and Amarante, and the same can be said for its Latin cross-shaped ground plan, though now free from the spatial hesitations that characterise the Amarante temple. To all this we may add a Benedictine peculiarity: the large size of the main chapel. On the church's Mannerist façade of tiered bodies, where a group of windows marks the centre of the second tier, the two side entrances of the original galilee have been walled up since the 17th century, for stability reasons. 

Thus, the Tibães church is both a phase in the long process that characterised the architecture of the Entre-Douro-e-Minho region and an important repository of gilded wood carvings and effigies from the 1600s and 1700s. Nowadays, we notice a lack of azulejo murals, which would complete Robert C. Smith's definition of the Portuguese Baroque's 'total art work'; such tiles, however, existed here: they were laid in 1668 and later removed, during renovation work in the 1700s. While, in the nave, the retable of St Gertrude (1661), created by Friar Cipriano da Cruz, is still a Mannerist piece, the other retables, in the side chapels, are already Baroque. The same Benedictine sculptor probably designed some of them, as well as many of the effigies they contain.

Over time, the church's nave and main chapel (the latter was enlarged in 1752) were enriched with pelmets, pulpits and canopies, carved frames, an organ, and the altar of Christ on the Cross in the upper choir, together with a retable already in the Rococo style. Most of these pieces are the fruit of a close collaboration between two major names of Northern Portuguese art in the second half of the18th century: architect André Soares, who designed and worked there between 1750 and 1760, and Benedictine sculptor and wood carver Friar José António Vilaça, who worked on the church between 1750 and 1784. It will be, however, in the main chapel, the appropriate scenery, together with the upper choir, for the solemn and deliberate unfurling of the complex, triumphal and nearly unbroken Benedictine liturgy, that the concentration of gold will become denser, as the main retable, chairs, frames and pelmets attest. 

In Tibães, as in São Vítor, all rules are broken, with a Rococo in the Baroque manner: dense and monumental, heavy and hieratic. It obviously differs from the evanescent delicateness of the European  rocaille that inspired it; in the art of Vilaça and Soares, earth certainly does not reach Heaven. Instead, Heaven flows down, together with the lava-like gold of the retables, to the faithful. (JFA)