Image , Ritual and Urban Form: Porto in the 16th Century

Abstract

In the early 17th Century, the Spanish painter Francisco Pacheco railed against his apprentices, telling them that the image should stand out of the picture. The topic was the one most debated in the art of the Counter-Reformation, whose main directives, outlined in the Council of Trent, would be put in motion simultaneously with urban "Christianisation". They presupposed a social contract, established between producer and receiver, implying maximum clarity of the message, which involved an ambiguous grey area that would be reserved for the outside of the focus. In painting, which sacrificed everything that was incidental or extraneous to the story, showing the essential and neglecting the accessory, the binary radicalism of the concept became more explicit, through the Caravaggian illumination or in the case above, the Spanish tenebrism of Velásquez, to whom Pacheco's admonition was addressed. In our Doctoral Thesis presented at the School of Architecture in Barcelona, we sought to demonstrate that the Plastic Arts were not the only field for the application of Luminist principles. In this article we aim to summarise this thesis by exposing the important relationships between image, ritual and urban form in 16th Century Porto, after a time, therefore, the late Middle Ages, which Huizinga classified as deeply iconophile , in which image and ritual were put at the service of the reformulation of a State becoming increasingly centralised and interventionist, whose action extended to the sphere of the Church: with King João II, and especially King Manuel I, the Crown was an active sponsor of religious reform that was pursued with redoubled energy and systematisation, from the reign of "the Pious", then already within the political system of close bilateral cooperation that was designated the Confessional State. We therefore believe that this type of approach to anthropological and symbolic components, which seeks to take into account the increasing importance that is given in contemporary research on the city's history, can be very fruitful.