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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Baroque Goa The Architecture of Portuguese India by José Pereira Church of Our Lady Of Divine Providence. The Church of Our Lady of Divine Providence of Old Goa pertained to the vanished Theatine Convent of Saint Cajetan, a patron saint frequently but mistakenly attributed to the church itself. The convent building was located immediately to the south of where the Palace of the Fortress once stood, near the Arch of the Viceroys. Nowadays only the church attests to the presence of this order of Italian friars in the territories of the Portuguese Padroado of the Orient. And it was precisely due to their refusal to submit to the Portuguese monarchs that the Theatine friars who had arrived in Goa in 1639 were forced to leave the territory. Before that happened, between 1656 and 1672, they built their convent. According to Rafael Moreira, it was designed by the Theatine Father Carlo Ferrari, assisted in the task by Bother Francesco Maria Milazzo. The convent’s builder was Manuel Pereira. Regarding the church, Rafael Moreira establishes the influences of Saint Peter’s in the Vatican only with respect to the façade; its plan derives from the one at the sanctuary of Madonna della Ghiara in Reggio- Emilia. Articulation between the façade and volume of the church, with its centred plan, is done via a galilee running the width of the building. The high altar is located above this entrance space and is possibly the most Portuguese feature of the entire church. The worship space is arranged around a central square crowned by a dome over pendentives, in whose drum are eight rectangular windows. A hemispherical calotte and skylight close this architectural feature in the best tradition of Italian Renaissance domes. Inside, four equally sized arms covered by coffered groin vaults make the Greek cross that defines the church type. Four additional square spaces complete (also in plan) the larger square in which they are placed, if we except the galilee. The church is prolonged on the east side by half the depth of the square where the Greek cross is, making it a plan with a one-and-a-half proportion. The chancel is located here, flanked by two octagonal spaces, with the one on the north side functioning as sacristy. The high altar’s retable and the side altars’ retables are carved giltwork with baroque forms, as are the Solomonic columns. The convent building is arranged parallel to the church, on its north side. Outside, only the south-facing wing perpendicular to the church’s façade is visible. A photo from the turn of the 19th-20th century shows the ground floor with only one central door and two small oval windows. Windows were later opened on this floor, corresponding to the ones on the floor above. The front of the building was enlarged by a wing equal to the first one, framing a central body with a columned portico on each floor. The Church of Our Lady of Divine Providence has architectural features unique in Goa and totally foreign to the architectural tradition of Christian religious architecture directly influenced by the Portuguese. These include: inside, the Greek cross plan, the dome over the crossing with drum lying on pendentives with hemispherical calotte and skylight, the semi-cylindrical back wall of the chancel and the spaces adjacent to the church with its octagonal plan; on the façade, the seven sections (instead of the usual five on façades with towers) articulated by Corinthian columns and pilasters in colossal or Attic order. Also, the high altar’s retable is different from most Goan retables which either resemble a façade due to the niches’ arrangement in levels, or follow the model of a Roman triumphal arch. The church’s architectural features (of direct Italian influence), in contrast, show signs of the specific nature of Goan Christian architecture of Portuguese tradition. The singular nature of the Church of Our Lady of Divine Providence in Goa thus places it in a privileged position as a witness of the Christian missionary endeavour in the 17th century and the complex process of adhesions and resistance to European architectural models. Baroque Goa: The Architecture of Portuguese India by José Pereira. THE TOWER OF THE CHURCH OF ST.AUGUSTINE "This 46 meter high colossal four storied arched belfry tower built of laterite formed part of the facade of the Church of St.Augustine. The tower and Church were built in 1602 by the Augustinian friars. " Very few travel brochures mention that the church attached to the Augustinian convent was dedicated to Our Lady of Grace. This is what the Igreja da Nossa Senhora da Graca originally looked like (courtesy Baroque India by Jose Pereira). Five bays, four storeys, square towers, arched openings with pediments, and the classical sequence of arch-rectangle-oculus-niche in the central bay. The Church of Santana in Talaulim uses this colossal facade as a model for its own massive front. If the tower is 46 meters high, the vault must have been about 21 meters in span! A remarkable feat of engineering for that time. I find this legend repeated in many places: "During construction, the high vault fell down twice. However, the Italian architect would not give up. When built a third time, he and his only son stood under the vault and asked for a heavy cannon to be fired to test the stability of the structure. It did not fall down- until much later." The archaeological excavated finds are laid out like a miniature Stonehenge! The ravages of the monsoons can be brutal and laterite which is a relatively soft stone gets steadily carved out by the rains before its downfall. And part of the mortal remains of the martyred St Ketevan, Queen of Georgia, are believed to be buried somewhere in this complex! ‘Portuguese architecture’ in Goa has little to do with the Portuguese and everything to do with Goa. Property brokers love to peddle ‘Portuguese homes’. But these unique Goan structures aren’t found anywhere else in the world. Goa’s remarkable and unique colonial-era built heritage is comprehensively misunderstood and wilfully misrepresented. The most common error is to view the Latinate architecture of India’s smallest state via the prism of the rest of the subcontinent’s experience of British colonialism, where every aspect of planning and construction was dictated by the European overlords. But that was not the case in Goa, where the Portuguese ran out of money and energy by the cusp of the 18th century, and almost all the buildings that followed until decolonisation in 1961 were triggered, conceived and executed by ambitious natives. In the new millennium, an overheated marketplace has developed for marvellous old Goan dwellings, which are bought and sold as “Portuguese houses”. About this lobotomised real estate shorthand, the Goan architect and Secretary of Goa Heritage Action Group Raya Shankhwalker writes: “Ill-informed brokers have coined the term, which reflects a deeply ignorant conception of the complex, multi-layered evolution of architecture in Goa. It is wrong, even offensively wrong, and it is extremely irritating to see the term actually gain popularity instead of being discarded. The use of local materials, crafts and skills make the Western-influenced Goan house a unique architectural expression.” These nuances matter beyond mere semantics, because the many-layered syncretic Goan identity is being questioned anew in the current national political atmosphere charged with fanciful notions of purity, and a purportedly unpolluted past. Recently, Goa’s residents were shocked to read that the central government will soon establish a regional centre of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts “to promote local indigenous culture to counter Portuguese cultural influence” and “launch a massive hunt for folklore artistes which have nothing to do with Portuguese culture”. Once again, the intricate cultural expressions of Goa that have arisen over millennia of contact with the outside world, most specifically from 450 years as the centrepiece of the Portuguese maritime empire, are treated as suspect, as though they do not qualify as Indian enough. The argument is quite like what continues to rage about the Taj Mahal, which the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Sangeet Som called “a blot on Indian culture…built by traitors”. His colleague GVL Narasimha Rao agreed, “It is a symbol of barbarism.” More worrisome still was Som’s boast, “What history are we talking about? The creator of Taj Mahal imprisoned his father. He wanted to wipe out Hindus. If these people are part of our history, then it is very sad and we will change this history.” The threats sounded very much like warning shots in Goa, where many churches are undeniably built on sites previously occupied by Hindu temples (and most likely Buddhist, Jain and animist shrines before them) but are nonetheless cherished today by pilgrims and devotees of all religions. In this regard, it is exceedingly important to understand the many ways in which Goan experience of the Portuguese Estado da India is unique in the history of colonialism. In this riparian sliver of the Konkan coast, after an initial heyday that lasted for a couple of centuries, the Portuguese only managed to maintain control via painful negotiations with the local elites, who continually extracted considerable concessions to shift the balance of power in a way that was both alien and offensive to other European contemporaries. Unique identity. Two additional potent factors exacerbated this singular situation. From the very beginning of colonial rule there was an official promotion of intermarriage with the locals. Later, the products of these alliances, along with all other Goans, were granted equal rights and freedoms with all other citizens of Portugal.

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