Ornament and Order in the Spanish Colonial Philippines

As part of the Spanish Empire from 1521 to 1898, the Philippine Islands were subject to the same Spanish settlement philosophies that guided urban planning in the Spanish Americas in the sixteenth century. Philip II’s Ordinances of 1573 prescribed city planning that discouraged the Spanish from mingling with native populations. By the mid eighteenth century, however, the construction and arrangement of fortified walls within the Philippine port city of Manila allowed for activities that supported the livelihood of its ethnically diverse residents through the Manila Galleon trade. Walls orchestrated encounters among not just the Spanish governors and Filipino laborers, but an international assembly of merchants, clerics, dock workers, and craftsmen from Europe, the Americas, China, and regions throughout the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. On the less populated islands of the Philippines, fortified churches with thick walls served as shelters for towns vulnerable to attacks by seafaring raiders from southern kingdoms trafficking in the Sulu and Celebes Seas. Against this context the physical forms of walls had to convey physical as well as political impenetrability and stability. This presentation will take a close look at the ornamentation and aesthetics of eighteenth-century walls, whether fortified enclosures of exclusive neighborhoods in Manila or the “Earthquake Baroque” styled buttressed walls of churches in the southern islands. Representations of walls in drawings and prints will also be considered, comparing walls consisting of squared and even bricks with those ornamented with niches in tribute to a favored saint or royal figure.