San Francisco, Lima

1657-1675

Vasconcellos, Constantino de (architect); Escobar, Manuel de (architect)

Lima, PER

One of the largest monastic complexes in Lima, San Francisco was once a city within a city.

The design of the façade seems to be that of Constantino de Vasconcellos, who also designed the church. With repeated forms—curving pediments, arched niches and an oval window—it is a visually integrated work. It features an “altarpiece-facade” that echoes the form of the elaborately-carved retables (retablos) found within the church. Repeated tri-part columns in upper and lower parts help unify it. To the left isportería, or entrance to the monastery.

The Franciscan order was one of the most powerful in the New World, and they made their presence known in cities with expansive monasteries, this one just adjacent to the Plaza de Armas at the center of the city. They hired a Portuguese architect, Constantino de Vasconcellos, to build this church, on a site where a previous structure had given way to an earthquake. He did not live to see it finished, and his assistant Manuel de Escobar (and his assistants) brought it to completion.

As with most churches in Lima, San Francisco is a combination of cut stone and lightweight quincha roofing—an Andean technique using woven reeds and plaster that is better suited to this seismically-active region than stone vaulting.

San Francisco once spread over a site that was about 250 meters long in colonial Lima. Its walls enclosed gardens and six arcaded patios, the largest about 50 meters across. Today, much of this enormous complex is gone. As the number of Franciscans and the power of the church has dwindled, the modern urban fabric of Lima has encroached upon grounds once part of the monastic complex.

In major cities like Lima, the complexes built by the religious orders, such as San Francisco, competed with those built by the archbishop, such as the Cathedral, which stood only three blocks away. Since Lima was so often hit by earthquakes, the ability of a religious order to maintain such a building—even though it often required rebuilding and shoring up—was a material sign of spiritual success.

Barbara E. Mundy

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Ballesteros, J. Bernales. 1972. Lima: La ciudad y sus monumentos. Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de la Universidad de Sevilla.

Bayón, Damián and Murillo Marx. 1992. History of South American Colonial Art and Architecture. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa.

San Francisco de Lima: rescate de un patrimonio. 1987. Lima: UNESCO.