The Baroque Revival in Quebec

Abstract

VICTORIAN ECLECTICISM appears to have had almost as much sense of direction as the styles of earlier, more settled centuries. This principle is particularly well illustrated by the Baroque Revival, or more properly perhaps the Late Italian Renaissance Revival, of the mid-nineteenth century in Quebec. On the surface, this movement appeared to complete the ruin of Quebec's traditional style which the Gothic Revival of the 1820's had begun; actually, neither the Baroque nor the Gothic Revival in Quebec was really alien in spirit to its traditional architecture, both were simply manifestations of that same spirit in forms suitable to nineteenth-century taste. The history of the Baroque Revival in a curious way repeats the essential process whereby the Quebec tradition was originally formed. That tradition, as it developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, represented a fusion between academic and elements. On the one side were the academic ideas of men who were theoreticians and amateurs in architecture, and often clergymen such as Bishops Laval and Saint-Vallier, and Chaussegros de Lery; on the other was the practical adaptation of these ideas to the Quebec climate and resources by builders trained up in traditions-Claude Baillif, Jean Maillou-and local artisans of all sorts. It was in precisely this way that the Baroque Revival developed. Two clergymen-Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal and Father Felix Martin-and John Ostell, an English architect, provided the literary and theoretical ideas behind it; an artisan trained up in the native craft idiom, Victor Bourgeau, made the necessary adaptation of these ideas to the older Quebec tradition to give the new style its practical vitality. The story begins in 1842 when Mgr. Bourget, a Canadian born at Levis in 1799, became second Bishop of Montreal. Eager to embellish his new diocese with buildings suitably expressing its fast-growing wealth and population, the bishop looked about for a suitable advisor and discovered Felix Martin, a thirty-eight year old Jesuit from Brittany, who arrived in Montreal in May of 1842. They at once became and remained the closest of friends. By the standards of mid-nineteenth-century Quebec, Father Martin was excepti nally well informed on architectural matters; he had travelled and studied all over France and Spain and acquired a much more than dilettante command of archaeological scholarship.1 Father Martin's interest in architecture, however, was largely incidental. His basic turn of mind was antiquarian, showing a ra her indiscriminate interest in old things simply because th y were old.2 Associative and romantic qualities in archit cture, rather than practical problems of form and structure, concerned him most. But in Martin's case, this typically nineteenth-century attitude was precisely what made him such a key figure in the Baroque Revival of Quebec-for not only could he talk to Mgr. Bourget about architecture in terms the bishop could best appr ciate, but his romantic interest in antiquities soon led from an earlier interest in Gothic to the older Quebecois tradition.:' Martin became a leading authority in this field and in turn brought Mgr. Bourget to an appreciation of it. And through the Quebecois tradition Mgr. Bourget was pre ared to move towards a revival of Baroque from original sources. Two churches best illustrate Father Martin's eclectic