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- Title
Fátima and artistic creation (1917-2007): the Sanctuary and Iconography - art as scenery and as protagonist of a specific message.
- Authors
DUARTE, Marco Daniel Carrola
- Abstract
The diachronic reading of the Shrine of Fátima, according to the vast available documentation, shows that the theme of architecture became very important for the development of this place. Architecture is the artistic discipline which has been structuring the shrine whether through popular archetypes (Little Chapel of the Apparitions) whether through the most erudite projects that turned the shrine into a field including aesthetic movements, such as the art from the nineteenth century (basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary), the art of the twentieth century, in a first period related to the scenographic architecture of Estado Novo (esplanade and colonnade), and in a posterior stadium related to an art trying to find aesthetic solutions that assigned to the place a real international look, reflecting the tendencies of post-modernism. In the turn of the new century the architectonic discipline will continue to rule through the construction of the broadest church in Portugal, the Most Holy Trinity church. The plans and elevations of the new buildings have, also, required campaigns of artistic valorization which, mainly in some moments of the daily life of the Shrine, transformed the place into a laborious laboratory of art, facing with tenacity the difficult, however fundamental, epistemological debate on sacred art. In fact, notorious names of the artistic production from the 80' and 90' of the twentieth century have achieved artistic labours on painting, on sculpture or on stained glass. Always driven by the celebrative moments, the Shrine of Fátima gets to the threshold of the twenty first century with some more motives to the promotion of works of art: the Jubilee of the year 2000 and the beatification of the two seers of the apparitions. However, if this chronological marker has already brought some novelty in terms of work of art, it is the period of the 90 years since the apparitions of Fátima that distinguishes indelibly the landscape of the shrine, through the construction of the Most Holy Trinity church. This project had the ability to open a new phase in the life of that place without annihilating neither in the implantation, nor in the elevation, nor in the volume the constructive monumental tradition erected throughout nine decades. Alongside with the physical construction of the shrine, the artistic discipline has found in Fátima the favourable field in terms of iconographic creation, and once again depending on a reality in construction 'ex nihilo'. Since one is dealing with creation from a new reality, the historian may classify the typologies of the Image of the Virgin of Fátima, from the "type" (the image created for the Little Chapel of the Apparitions as official figuration); the "archetype" (the image of Our Lady of Lapa, which inspired the great number of volumetric features of the sculpture), and the "subtypes" or new and subsidiary models (such as the posterior figurations of the Pilgrim Virgin and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in consequence of the iconic reflexion and of the revelation of the Message of Fátima itself). One may also add to these typologies various iconographic fusions, among those one can notice the presences and the absences of the Virgin of the Message of Fátima, valued in the different iconographic syncretism intrinsic to the them that derives from the episodes of Fátima, such as - although with different kinds of representation - the theme of Our Lady of Carmo, of Our Lady of Sorrows and of Our Lady in the context of the Holy Family, also valued in the iconographic syncretism from the derivation of senses, as it happens with the themes of the coronation of the Virgin of Fátima or of the Virgin of the Apocalypse. It still belongs to the iconography of Fátima the plastic fixation of themes such as the one of the Miracle of the Sun, the one of the Apparitions of Tuy and Pontevedra, the one of the Secret of Fátima, the iconographic fixation of the Shepherds seers itself, one wishing to pull them out from the pictures of 1917, and, among others, the aesthetic fixation of the image of the Angel of Fátima, whose artistic labour is going to find inspiration in the theme of the Guardian Angel of Portugal. With such a fertile ground and with the immeasurable impact of Fátima in the Christian world, and not only in it, it is no surprise that the worthiest artists look into the issue and that, with different levels of cultural acceptance, they sign works in the context of this theme. The Shrine - as a place of physical landscape built out from architectural, sculptural, pictorial and urbanistic elements, and also as a place of psychological landscape built out from pilgrims in ritual practises that fill in the esplanade with the light of the candles in the night vigils or with the white handkerchiefs during goodbye - claims itself as iconographic 'topos', unique recognized image, for various motives such as the artistic elements, in the whole globe.
- Subjects
SHRINES; ARCHITECTURE; CHURCH architecture
- Publication
E-Journal of Portuguese History, 2019, Vol 17, Issue 2, p573
- ISSN
1645-6432
- Publication type
Abstract