FROM SCULPTURE TO ARCHITECTURE : JEAN DE ROUEN AT THE MONASTERY OF SANTA CRUZ OF COIMBRA ( Ca 1528-1535 )

Upon his arrival in Coimbra, in about 1528, Jean de Rouen immediately started working for the Monastery of Santa Cruz, of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine. The house was undergoing a spiritual and physical reformation ordered by John III, with the Hieronymite Friar Brás de Braga in charge. Jean de Rouen, sculptor, or “imagineer”, was commissioned with some ornamental architectural pieces, such as arches and doorways, where he applied the new language of the Renaissance – as, for example, the arch of the high choir of the church, framed by a classic composition of pilasters, entablature and a pair of tondi. Simultaneously, he also became responsible for those space-containing architectural structures such as a small chapel amongst the Silence cloister, or the Manga cloister fountain tempietto. In this paper we aim to analyse Jean de Rouen’s work at Santa Cruz, during the first phase of his Portuguese career, and the growing scope of his artistic activity from the scale of sculpture to that of architecture. Key-words: Jean de Rouen, Monastery of Santa Cruz, Silence cloister, coffered vaults, Manga fountain


I. The Monastery of Santa Cruz, Coimbra
The Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, was the see of the order in Portugal and one of the main religious houses in the country. It was founded in 1131 by the archdeacon Telo, the school master João Peculiar and the future Saint Theotonius (Gonçalves, 1938: 21, 26) and came under the direct support of the first King of Portugal, Afonso Henriques (1109-1143-1185), who made Coimbra Portugal's first capital city. Afonso and his son Sancho I are both entombed in the church. The monastery was set outside the city walls, to the North, over an old water course that flowed from the Santa Cruz valley to the nearby Mondego. It had its own circuit of walls and it has been suggested that the former Romanesque church, finished around 1150, had a pillared narthex before the nave (Gonçalves, 1942;Real, 1974: II, 212;Rossa, 2001: 349;Alarcão, 2008: 154-167;and 2013: 27-31).
Santa Cruz was extensively reformed in its architecture during the first years of the 16 th century. In 1502, King Manuel (1469-1495-1521 passed through Coimbra on a journey to Santiago de Compostela and was able to observe the poor state of the monastic building, by then already three hundred years old. However, the decision to intervene in the monastery only occurred when Pope Julius II attempted to nominate his nephew Gallioto Franciotto Della Rovere as the new prior, to succeed the deceased João de Noronha (1505), in order for him to receive the monastery's extensive incomes. King Manuel warned the Pope not to expect any money since it was needed for the total reconstruction of the religious house. With this show of resistance, the kings of Portugal eventually obtained the right to appoint the new priors, as the Pope gave up on the idea of diverting the wealthy revenues to one of his own family (Dias, 1982: 105-106).  (Jacques Boytac: 1507-14) and cloister (Marcos Pires, 1517-21). Photos by the author.
Inside the nave of the church, elaborate new ornamental structures were executed for the royal tombs, between 1518 and 1522 (Gonçalves, 1975;Craveiro, 2002: 63). These new structures were not originally placed inside the chancel (where they can be seen today) but rather against each lateral wall of the nave, just before the main chapel. They were probably designed by João de Castilho, master and architect of Spanish origin (who was in charge of the Jerónimos monastery in Lisbon, having succeeded Boytac) and executed by his half-brother Diogo de Castilho (Fig.2a), who had settled in Coimbra (Dias, 1982: 141-144).
The resemblance of these structures to the south portal of the Jerónimos church is suggestive.
Finally, master builder Diogo de Castilho was responsible for the church's main portal, executed between 1523 and 1525, in the soft white limestone of Ançã (Dias, 1982: 148-149).
It was also in this timeline that another important character came onto the scene, the French sculptor Nicholas Chanterene, who played a pivotal role in introducing Coimbra to the Renaissance. He executed the church's pulpit (before 1521, Fig.2b), the recumbent royal figures for the tombs and also four Renaissance reliefs for the new cloister, representing stages of the "Passion of Christ" (Fig.2c), directly inspired by engravings by Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer (Moreira, 1991: 314;Gonçalves, 2007: 182;Craveiro, 2011a: 131 (Craveiro, 2011a: 30-32 John, to the south of the monastic church.

II. Jean de Rouen's first years in Portugal
Even today, we still do not know the exact succession of events which brought Jean de Rouen from his native France to central Portugal. His training background remains also undocumented, although almost all studies on his life and work agree that he came from Rouen, Normandy, and from the local Renaissance milieu shaped in the early 16 th century by Cardinal Georges d'Amboise (Gonçalves, 1981).
His route through Spain, in his way to Portugal, also remains unclear.
The first document where his name appears puts him in Coimbra on 4 th April 1530 (Garcia, 1913: 1-4) . However, he almost certainly arrived a 5 couple of years earlier, for by this date he was already married to Isabel Pires and was designated as "a friend and server" of the Monastery of Santa Cruz. He was given a plot of land within the city walls to build a couple of It was dissolved in mid-1529 (Dias, 1982: 160 (Gonçalves, 1974). The first of them may be seen in his domain of Tancos, in central Portugal, near the Tagus river. There, Rouen most likely designed the main portal of the church of the village of Atalaia, c a 1528 (Fig.3 (Borges, 2004: 43-44) or even to another character connected with Santa Cruz, the French figure sculptor Hodart (Gonçalves, 1974: 14-17).    (Grilo, 2000: 727-801). The absence of Chanterene means, we must assume as a strong possibility, that Jean de Rouen was summoned to Coimbra to serve as a competent substitute for his French forerunner. As we have said, no documents survive to this day relating to Jean de Rouen's coming to Coimbra, or to his former career and training in France, presumably in Normandy.

Archways at the church of Santa Cruz
One of Jean de Rouen's first attributed tasks at the Monastery of Santa Cruz (Dias, 1982: 170) was to collaborate in the refurbishment of the monastic church, which was undergoing yet another major transformation, just a few years after it had been totally reconstructed by Boytac, as we have seen. This new modification comprised the erection of a new high choir over the entrance, the vault of which was executed by Diogo de Castilho, again using the Gothic structural system. The chancel stalls, made by Olivier de Gand during King Manuel's reformation (Antunes, et al., 2014), were transferred to this new high choir by François Loiret (or Francisco Lorete) another French artist working in Coimbra, who also added a new set of stalls to the older ones.
Jean de Rouen has been credited with executing the slender Roman arch that separates the high choir from the nave (Dias, 1982: 170), with no less than 33 coffers, the age of Christ's sacrifice   (Dias, 1982: 169). However, the current ones (

The architectural setting for Hodart's "Last
Supper" in the monastic refectory and the Silence cloister chapels.
On 5 th March 1528 Bartolomeu de Paiva, one of the King's councillors, celebrated a contract with master Diogo de Castilho for the erection of the new monastic dependencies (Garcia, 1923: 176-189;Dias, 1982: 156-159). New structures were planned, such as a new refectory, a new kitchen, a new library, a new infirmary and a new Porter's cloister to the west. Unifying these new facilities, on an added upper level, was to be the new dormitory, consisting of two perpendicular wings of individual cells along central corridors.
One of these wings was to be prolonged to the east, suggesting that a third cloister in that direction was already under consideration (Lobo, 2006: 42-45).  Works, however, had to start at ground level. The north wing of the already existent Silence cloister was rebuilt to accommodate the new refectory. It substituted the former refectory which had been placed along the east wing of the same quadrangle. Diogo de Castilho finished the new structure in a little more than two years, executing the majestic late-Gothic vault that covers its elongated space (Fig.6). For the refectory, a special feature was commissioneda human-size sculptural ensemble of the "Last Supper" of Christ and the Apostles, in terracotta, to be placed over the refectory's top east wall. It was ordered in 7 th October 1530 (Garcia, 1913: 4-5) from yet another French artist, the enigmatic Hodart Vyrio. He would finish all the statues by the end of 1533 (Garcia, 1913: 6) . 7 During the late nineteenth century, following the 1834 suppression of the Religious Orders in Portugal, part of the monastic north wing was torn to the ground (in 1888) just east of the refectory. The "Last Supper" figures were taken out, carried from place to place, and significantly damaged in the process. It was only quite recently that they were partially recovered and put together, although arms and legs are still missing, one of the apostles is headless, and only the head remains of yet another disciple. They are now on display in a room dedicated to them at the Machado de Castro National Museum, in Coimbra (Fig.7).
He received the final payment on 8 th January 1534 (Garcia, 1913: 6). In the same period, and as we have mentioned before, Hodart may have worked 7 on the kneeling statues of Luis da Silveira and Diogo de Lemos (for Góis and Trofa) which have been attributed to him. Nevertheless, Nelson Correia Borges attributes the kneeling figures to Jean de Rouen himself (Borges, 2014: 43-44 (Révah, 1957). The "description and drawing" of the Monastery of Santa Cruz (Descripçam e debuxo do mosteyro de Santa Cruz de Coimbra) was originally written 8 in Italian (Sampayo Ribeiro, 1958: 28-36) by the Prior of the Monastery of St. Vincent of Lisbon for the Cardinal Antonio Pucci in Rome, Protector of the Canons Regular. It was translated into Portuguese by Friar Veríssimo for a very rare edition, printed at Santa Cruz in 1541. A copy from the Newberry Library of Chicago was facsimiled by Israel Salvator Révah (Révah, 1957). 92 digitAR -Revista Digital de Arqueologia, Arquitectura e Artes | número 7 (2020)  In our opinion, the designer of this last chapel must be the same one responsible for the "Last Supper's" opening (and the totality of the refectory's east end, including pulpits, canopies and archways). The pilaster bases of this chapel's frontispiece are exactly the same, with the same detailing (Fig.10). In 1530, when the opening was almost certainly made, Jean de Rouen was the only artist at Santa Cruz which would have been able to elaborate such a design .  (Révah, 1957).   Independently of the layout of the long stone bench where the apostles sat, we think that the

An important question related to the "Last
Supper" is how the space was covered. Our hypothesis is that it was covered by a coffered wooden barrel vault, beneath a stone or brick barrel vault (at a somewhat higher level) that would have defined the dormitory floor. We think this type of solution would have made more sense than a Gothic rib vault, as the whole east end of the refectory was designed in the Classical manner (and also because a Gothic rib vault would probably have lasted to the present day).
Relating to the coffer design, we considered a simple grid of square coffers (Fig.12)   resemblance to the refectory's arched doorways that give access to the pulpits (Fig.14). This allows us to attribute this chapel to Jean de Rouen and to a time around 1530 or even before. It may be that the Silence cloister chapels referred to above, and the refectory's main entrance doorway, were some of the "many and good works" that Jean de Rouen had made for the monastery, according to the document (mentioned earlier) of April 1530. In our opinion, these are, most probably, Jean de Rouen's first works at Santa Cruz, since the church archways were only executed around 1531.

The new monastic dormitory
The monastic main dormitory would eventually be built along a sole east-west wing over the new refectory and kitchen, as a contract of 26 th September 1530 clearly demonstrates (Garcia, 1913: 253-260;Dias, 1982: 161-164). According to this document, signed between Bartolomeu de Paiva and carpenter Pero Anes, cells were to be built along both sides of a central corridor, 128 meters long, which encompassed the renovated monastery's three cloisters, including the two new ones, to the east and west (Lobo, 2006: 50-54;Couto, 2014: 90-112, 135-137). Large windows were to be placed at each end of the central corridor. Pairs of these large windows were also to be placed on each side of three transverse intervals that crossed the corridor, in order to give further illumination. although we have argued more recently that it would have been more likely that what the king (or someone else) designed on the royal garment was the general layout of a new monastic cloister to the east -or, to be precise, the Manga cloister (Lobo, 2006: 53-54) which would give name to the tempietto that stood in its centre, a few years later (Fig. 16).
On 7 th September 1533 Friar Brás de Braga signed a contract with three master masons to build the water tanks and the four round turrets of the tempietto (Garcia, 1913: 87-89;Dias, 1982: 172). We also know that in 1535 a payment was made to Jean de Rouen (and also to Jerónimo Afonso) on the execution of the stone work and the alter pieces for the four turret cells (Correia, 1930: 110-111;Dias, 1982: 172). No reference has been found to the execution of the eight columns, stairs, fountain and cupola of the tempietto proper, but it has been assumed that Jean de Rouen was the architect of the piece as a whole (Kubler, 1972: 9 ;Dias, 1982: 173   Abreu (Abreu, 2009) (Abreu, 2009: 40). The four water tanks represent the four rivers of the Genesis, as Francisco de Mendanha relates in his description (Révah, 1957). recurrence of sin and the luxury of "too much talking", obstacles which must be avoided to prepare for higher thoughts and aspirations (Abreu, 2009: 42). According to Friar Brás de Published under the .tle Directorium aureum contemplativorum.

12
Although the fountain, which has a circular base, stands upon an octagonal platform. 13 "In effect, this central tempietto houses and dignifies these pure waters that cleanse of all sin, the source from which the blood of Christ springs, 14 shed in remission from the sins of the world, under the pagan architectural sacredness of the tholos". and of coordinating the whole design (Fig.17).
Besides the substitution of the original wooden drawbridges by the current wedged stone slabs ( Fig.18a), another visible alteration was the opening of passages through the stone bases (in the shape of quarter circles) that unified each pair of Corinthian columns (Fig.18b). These passages originally did not exist -the stone bases have clearly been cut through. Therefore, physical access to the drawbridges was not straight forward (it may have been assisted by a stone square platform where the wooden drawbridges would land, Fig.18c). This reinforces, in our view, the required metaphysical process of passing from the "spiritual life", represented by the octagonal platform of the fountain, to the "over-essential and contemplative life" -of which no physical remnants subsisted, when the brother was enclosed in his turret-cell for "over-essential contemplation" (Fig.18d).
It is not known when these alterations were produced. We can observe, by enlarging the famous photograph of the Manga cloister of c a 1880 (again, Fig.16), that the stone benches had already been cut through and that the wooden drawbridges had already been replaced by the stone slabs. Perhaps this was done after the dissolution of the religious orders of 1834, or perhaps the brothers themselves altered the design sometime during the 17 th or 18 th centuries, forgetful of its original symbolism.

The new monastic façade
The monastic façade of Santa Cruz no longer exists, as well as the Porter's cloister that was built in the place of the old female monastery of  (Gonçalves, 1974: 26;Craveiro, 2011b: 78), which was made under the bishopric of Jorge de Almeida (1482-1543). Art Historians have credited it to Jean de Rouen (Gonçalves, 1974: 29;Dias, 1982: 206) an attribution with which we agree. We also agree with its timing being This type of classical structure over the monastic entrance was soon to be copied and systematized by a new religious congregation that would 20 make its appearance in the following few years. In fact, the Jesuits would replicate this type of element in the entrance of almost all of their houses and colleges in Portugal.

The infirmary chapel
To conclude the story of the group of works  (Révah, 1957) . This wooden vault 21 would have been a similar coffered structure to the one we have placed over the reconstitution of the "Last Supper". Naturally, the design of this architectonic element must be credited, again, to Jean de Rouen.
Here, the design of the chapel vault can be alternatively (or jointly) attributed to the church's architect, Isidoro de Almeida.

V. Conclusions
Although in his time Jean de Rouen was normally referred to as an "imagineer" he was 26 also considered, more rarely, to be an "architect" -at least a couple of times, the first in a contract of 1566 (Garcia, 1913: 32;Gonçalves, 2005: 290).