The church of Santa Maria Maior de Barcelos is located in an artistic time of transition, between the end of Romanesque art and the beginning of the Gothic construction cycle. Some of the constructive and decorative solutions used here participate in these two arts, which began to be antagonistic, at least in the Île-de-France region, where Gothic was born, but which, in peripheral areas, merged and interpenetrated, forming a style of transition to what many call Romanesque-Gothic.
The constructive initiative was due to Count D. Pedro, in the 14th century, after the outstanding examples of the Gothic mendicant of Santarém, Olival de Tomar or Santa Clara-a-Velha of Coimbra were completed. Its compact and archaic aspect, as a result of the geographical implantation of the old Romanesque nobility, is also due to the fact that the 17th century condal initiative was situated at the level of a probable remodeling of the building, and not of a root construction.
Several constructive hesitations identified in the church seem to point to this remodeling reality. The fact that the north nave is wider than the south or that the capitals seem to be mostly from the 14th century, as opposed to the bases of columns still Romanesque (CA Ferreira de Almeida, 1990, p.43) makes us think about this possibility. On the other hand, the history of the town of Barcelos, with a charter since D. Afonso Henriques and county seat since D. Dinis, is a factor of vital importance for the likely concentration of a relevant constructive activity and that certainly will not have started only in the 14th century.
Despite the general Romanesque aspect, the Barcelean matrix must be inserted in the Gothic period, as the main portal clearly shows. Inserted in an advanced body and flanked by two powerful buttresses – an element clearly committed to the Romanesque – it has no tympanum and the capitals of the archivolts are entirely vegetalist (CA Ferreira de Almeida, 1986b, p.68). Equally Gothic is the internal spatial organization. Apparently, the 18th century construction opted for torso arches and forms, a solution in force in some Romanesque buildings and with a long duration in the Galician construction tradition. The attention that the counts dedicated to the church determined, however, that a remodeling of the 15th century suppressed this scheme and endowed the interior of the Matriz with a markedly begging spatiality (CA Ferreira de Almeida, 1990, p. 43). A space that in a first approach could mean one of the first Gothic testimonies in Entre-Douro-e-Minho, actually belongs to the 15th century, given that, in addition to the sixteenth and eighteenth century remodeling, it only confirms the need for a rigorous monographic study on the history of the Matriz de Barcelos in relation to the ducal house.
At the dawn of Modernity, the Igreja Matriz de Barcelos was the main temple in the town and one of the most important in the region. It is for this reason that we will see, at this time, some private funerary chapels and isolated burials appear in the space of the Matriz-Colegiada. Of all of them, the most important is that of the Pinheiro family, whose palace is located very close to the monument. This pantheon, dating from the mid-16th century, is one of the best testimonies of Renaissance art in Entre-Douro-e-Minho. Other works marked the transition to the Modern Age, such as the new vault of the chancel, a Manueline work, with a starry profile, funded in 1504 by a local Jew, D. Gil da Costa, whose name and date appear on the central branch. Subsequently, the entire interior of the temple was decorated in the Baroque style, dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, the remarkable set of altarpieces and, above all, the full lining of the walls with blue and white tiles, imported from Lisbon and the great workshops of the early seventies.
