Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque

Chapter 2. Seven Libraries

20 Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque Seven Libraries Chapter 2 21 2. Seven Libraries The Renaissance explores the universe, the baroque explores libraries. Its meditations are devoted to books. —Walter Benjamin1 The classic of Portuguese literature which celebrates Portuguese colonialism is Luís Vaz de Camões’ (1524–1580) The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas). It is both Renaissance and baroque. Discussed more fully in chapter 10, it is complete with Roman classical gods, who are partly allegorical, and it is also a history of Portugal and the Portuguese seaborne empire. Macao was colonised by the Portuguese from Goa in India, which itself had been colonised by 1510. (Goa has crucial examples of colonial baroque.)2 Portuguese vessels sailed out from Goa to reach Chinese territory on their way to Japan where the Spanish St Francis Xavier (1506–1552) preached in 1549. He was one of the founders of the Society of Jesus (in 1540), and, working under Portuguese auspices, had gone to Goa; he was also to visit Canton (Guangzhou). Goa had been first reached in 1498, by the Portuguese Vasco Da Gama (1460–1524). He returned to Portugal in 1499, and his voyage is the subject of The Lusiads. If we adopt the first half of Benjamin’s statement, quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, comparison becomes irresistible with Camões and The Lusiads. The Renaissance goes outwards into the world, as with the Portuguese seaborne empire. The baroque corresponds to that part of the poem which has an 8. Interior of library, Jardim de São Francisco 22 Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque inward tendency, being melancholic, introspective. The antithesis between the Renaissance and the baroque is stated in Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which is a study of the plays of lamentation, tragedies, plays whose theme is mourning (Trauerspiel), which were written in baroque Germany in the seventeenth century, some of them in the context of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Benjamin links the baroque with a melancholia which perceives the world as in ruins, and he thinks of allegory as the art form best fitted to discuss this. So allegory, the art form for using one thing to describe another, becomes that which suits the baroque. For Benjamin it is characteristic of seventeenth-century trends that the representation of the emotions is emphasised increasingly at the expense of a firmly defined action, such as is never absent from the drama of the Renaissance. The tempo of the emotional life is accelerated to such an extent that calm actions, considered decisions occur more and more infrequently. The conflict between sensibility and will in the human form, which [Alois] Riegl [a Viennese art historian] has demonstrated so beautifully in the discord between the attitude of head and body in the figures of Giuliano and Night on the Medici tombs [in Florence], is not confined to the manifestations of this norm in the plastic arts, but also extends to the drama. (99) The melancholic belongs, according to Benjamin, to the library, the site of reflection on disjunctions between the self and the exterior world. The library, like the city, is an archive: the city archives memories through its street names: Portuguese, Chinese, English; ‘through its street names, the city is a linguistic cosmos’, Benjamin writes.3 If the library is baroque, Macao is a library of the baroque as well as containing libraries in itself. It certainly has libraries for the most melancholic. At its simplest, Benjamin’s aphorism about the Renaissance and the baroque suggests one way of thinking about Macao’s baroque: its libraries. Macao’s richness can be suggested by looking at one of its unusual aspects: its libraries. This chapter explores seven. The Leal Senado library is an adaptation of the eighteenth-century library in the Convento de Mafra outside Lisbon (built 1717–1730), for which the architect was the southern German Fredrico Ludovice (1670–1752).4 The library there, built for João V (ruled 1706–1750) was modelled on inspirations from Germany and Italy. João’s library occupies a space like a church, with a crossing and 9. Library in the Leal Senado 23 2. Seven Libraries 24 Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque a cupola.5 The library in Macao, obviously much smaller, two rooms only, shows its baroque character in the scrolling on its ceiling, the cartouches which surmount the dark wood...