Unos emblemata monásticos en azulejos: el programa jeroglífico de la iglesia conventual de Nossa Senhora do Terço, en Barcelos (Portugal)

Abstract

The northern Portuguese town of Barcelos, to the west the city of Braga, is home to the church of Nossa Senhora do Terço, which once formed part of a Benedictine convent. Inside the church, where the Baroque decorative splendour characteristic of the early decades of the 18th century remains virtually intact, the walls of the main nave are entirely covered with historiated tiles dating from 1713 and attributed to the Lisbon workshop of Antonio de Oliveira Bernardes. These ceramic coverings feature scenes from the life of St Benedict, while the pillar bases on both sides of the nave, are adorned with a series of hieroglyphs illustrating passages and maxims taken from the Rule of the holy founder of Western monasticism. In this work, we offer an iconographic analysis of this emblematic programme, which is of interest because of its markedly formative and uplifting orientation, a characteristic typical of hieroglyphic sets of baroque tiles from the Portuguese setecentos.