Church of São Roque

Church · Bairro AltoLisbon,Portugal

A flat plain Jesuit front in Lisbon hiding a painted timber ceiling and a side chapel ordered from Rome in lapis, agate and mosaic.

The Church of São Roque has a flat, grey, plain front and one of the richest interiors in Lisbon behind it. The Jesuits raised it in the 1560s and roofed the nave with a painted timber panel rather than a stone vault, one of the earliest ceilings of its kind in Portugal. The side chapels get steadily richer as you walk up towards the altar, and the last one on the left was not built here at all. João V ordered it from Rome in 1740, in lapis lazuli, amethyst, agate, alabaster, porphyry, gilt bronze and silver, and it arrived by ship. The king died in 1750, a year before it was reassembled and shown. The pictures inside it look like oil paintings but are mosaics, made from tiny pieces of glass and stone in the Vatican workshop, and for its size the chapel is usually called the most expensive ever built.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Give your eyes a full minute at the door — the church is kept dark to protect the gilding and the paint, and everything you came for is invisible until you have adjusted.
The room feels low and wide for a church — nothing lifts the middle of the nave, so your eye runs along the line of side chapels instead of up.
The chapel's silver is next door — the pieces made in Rome to go with it are in the museum, not the church, which is why the chapel itself looks bare of fittings.

Things to do

1
Get close to the chapel pictures
Go to the last chapel on the left and lean as close as the rope allows. From the nave the panels look like oil paintings; from a couple of metres away you can see that they are made of thousands of small cut pieces of glass and stone. The change only happens at close range, and that is the point of the technique.
2
Walk up the nave and watch the chapels get richer
Start at the door and take each side chapel in turn instead of going straight to the famous one. The materials get richer as you go: painted wood, then tile, then marble, then gilt. Each chapel was paid for by a different donor, so the sequence shows how a church of this date was funded.
3
Stand under the middle of the ceiling
Find the centre of the nave and look up. The painted architecture on the flat timber panel only lines up from this one spot; step a few metres either way and the perspective falls apart. It is a trick built for a congregation that stood where you are standing.