SOLIS - Church of Santa Engrácia/National Pantheon: building campaign, quarries exploited and restoration works

1.7.2000

Project status

concluded

REF

POCTI/EAT/35063/99

Main research unit

Centre for History of the University of Lisbon

Principal Investigator

Maria João Neto (ULisboa)

Research team

Carlos Alberto Machado Figueiredo (ULisboa); Luís António Aires Barros (ULisboa); Manuel Batoréo (ULisboa); Maria Amélia Alves Rangel Dionísio (ULisboa); Maria João Pita de Azevedo Oliveira Basto (ULisboa); Rui Cores Graça (ULisboa); Vítor Serrão (ULisboa)

Project fellows

Fernando Grilo (ULisboa)

Today, the need to preserve Architectural Heritage leads to an interdisciplinary research including disciplines such as archaeology, history of art, geology, engineering, and architecture. The study of the technology used in the historical quarries only recently has occupied interdisciplinary research teams. The knowledge of the entire process, from stone extraction to carving by the masons became fundamental. It includes the identification of the carving methods, tools used, labour organisation, transportation methods, et cetera. All this activity is at the basis of a certain mental-artistic level that led to the production of an architectonic project supported by sponsors for affirmation, devotion or simple aesthetic pleasure. The historical-artistic study in tandem with the knowledge of the technological process are determining for the characterization of the provenance of the stones used during the building and restauration processes. Hence, the need to try to establish the connections between extraction methods and carving and the pathologies shown in the monument. The church of Saint Engrácia-National Pantheon is a particular case in the environment of the Portuguese Architectonic Heritage due to vicissitudes that walked hand-in-hand with its building. The present building raised on the hill of Saint Clara in Lisbon is the third consecrated to Saint Engrácia. A long and difficult path led between the simple temple built in the second half of the 16th century, to the rich building started in 1632 that has fallen in ruins before its conclusion in 1681; and lastly to the grandiose building whose construction began in 1682 but that was not concluded before a “decision” to end the construction in the 1950-60s under the aegis of DGEMN. The mains purpose of SOLIS is to document in a book this monument in all its facets, locate the origins of the stone employed in its construction, rebuild the working courtyard assembled for its construction, understand the technicalities responsible for the consecutive building lack of success, assess the effects of time on the unfinished building – no roof for almost three centuries, and relate these vectors with possible stone pathologies taking into account extraction methodologies, transportations, carving, and final settlement of the carved blocs. Likewise, it is important to determine the ideological-political circumstances that led the Estado Novo regime to decide to finish the construction of the temple and transform it into the National Pantheon, as determined by the Decree of April 29, 1916. And finally, assess the building campaigns of the 20th century – technical difficulties met, provenance of the stone, and used technology – in comparison to earlier times, establishing cause-effect relations among them and characterize the underlined pathologies within a dynamic of preservation.

(SOLIS was the name of the New Christian who was accused of desecrating the Church of Saint Engrácia in 1630, and who would have cursed according to which the construction works would never end).