Baroque Obscenities

Kitsch visions of hell, Church of São Francisco, Salvador, Bahia

It’s Sunday, so time for some religion. I nearly died in the church of São Francisco. Its famous “exuberant profusion of golden arabesque forms,” reputedly qualify the church as one of the best examples of early baroque architecture (1708). As I sat down on a pew a depressive wave of monstrous iconography settled above my head, and in minutes I was gasping for clean air. I’ve always prided myself on giving well-researched entertaining lectures. However, there have been moments when my skills deserted me. I am at home when talking about the history of modernism and the European avant-garde. I can talk for days about the emergence of the capitalist city and the Russian and French revolutions, but not so much I discovered about the Baroque. On the day in question, I arrived in the packed lecture hall, notes in hand with a carousel of 35mm slides as was the custom before digital images. As I began and the projector clicked through successive images of sumptuously kitsch churches and palace interiors, I quickly discovered that I didn’t actually agree with what I had written, and worst if all realised it was boring. I was losing the audience. This didn’t happen. I had a reputation to maintain. I took a deep breath and with a burst of honest clarity  admitted that I had very little to say. What was the Baroque? The architectural epitaph of a ruling class locked in a mortal battle with an ascendant bourgeoisie more interested in machinery than the virgin Mary. A perverse orgy of gold and silver-plated vanities built to camouflage the horrors orchestrated by European aristocrats. In truth all ecclesiastical monuments are a fusion of free and forced labour, serfs obliged to lug stone and dig foundations on pain of the whip alongside relatively free master craftsman dedicated to their art. But all I could think of when sitting in the Igreja São Franciso was murder, suffering and delusion. Intimidated populations cower in mortal fear of damnation. Slaves collapse in fields of sugar cane. Fat priests gorge on heaving tables. There was no divinity just an air of abject suffocation. After five minutes the ghosts began to appear from the cracks. The naked cherubs wept blood. The sculptures melted like hot wax. The building moaned. I couldn’t breathe and ran for the exit.