One of Brazil’s most magnificent churches, the baroque Igreja e Convento São Francisco is filled with displays of wealth and splendor. An 80kg silver chandelier dangles over ornate wood carvings smothered in gold leaf, and the convent courtyard is paneled with hand-painted azulejos (Portuguese tiles). The complex was finished in 1723.
Forced to build their masters’ church and yet prohibited from practicing their own religion, African slave artisans responded through their work: the faces of the cherubs are distorted, some angels are endowed with huge sex organs, while others appear pregnant. Most of these creative touches were chastely covered by 20th-century sacristans. The polychrome figure of São Pedro da Alcântara by Manoel Inácio da Costa shows a figure suffering from tuberculosis – just like the artist himself. One side of the saint’s face is more ashen than the other, so he appears to become more ill as you walk past him. José Joaquim da Rocha painted the entry hall’s ceiling using perspective technique, a novelty during the baroque period.
