Above the single entrance door a circular medallion in soapstone shows Saint Francis receiving the stigmata - the five wounds of Christ impressing themselves on his hands, feet, and side. Aleijadinho carved that panel himself. Below it a curved frontispiece in the same green-gray stone holds the eye, and two circular bell towers flank the composition. Circular bell towers were rare in Brazilian religious architecture of the 1760s - most churches had square ones. So were the oculus windows closed with decorative reliefs rather than glass. The whole facade plays with convention, pulling the building into the Rococo vocabulary of curves and movement while keeping a Brazilian weight and silhouette. Aleijadinho had studied European engravings of buildings he would never visit, and he made their grammar his own.

Step inside and look up. The flat wooden ceiling of the nave bears a painting by Manuel da Costa Ataide, known as Mestre Ataide - the Glorification of Our Lady Among Musician Angels. The angels are Brazilian, painted with the faces and skin tones Ataide saw around him, not the pale European cherubim of baroque convention. The composition lifts the eye into an illusion of clouds and sky, a trompe-l'oeil heaven painted on a ceiling in a hill town halfway around the world from the Sistine Chapel it distantly echoes. Gold glows on the woodwork below. Sculpted angels hold the cornices. The interior decoration continued for more than a century after construction began in 1766 - the gilding and the altars were not finished until the late 1800s.

Ouro Preto - the name means Black Gold, for the dark iron oxide that coated the metal here - was the richest mining town in the Portuguese empire in the 1700s. Gold discovered in Minas Gerais at the end of the 17th century poured through Vila Rica on its way to Lisbon, Rio, and the wider Atlantic economy. The Church supported and benefited from the boom: lay brotherhoods of different social classes each commissioned their own elaborately decorated churches, competing in ostentation. Saint Francis was built by the Third Order of Saint Francis, a lay brotherhood of white devotees. Baroque here was religion and wealth at the same time - a theology of abundance that, as one art historian put it, let 'ornamentation run riot on interior walls, retablos, and facades.' The town's wealth came from the labor of enslaved Africans who extracted the gold. Aleijadinho's own mother was among those enslaved people. That contradiction sits permanently inside the building he designed.

Aleijadinho's illness progressed through the second half of his life. Contemporary accounts describe him losing toes, then fingers, then mobility itself. He was said to work from a wheeled cart, his tools bound to the stumps of his hands, sometimes carving facing away from the work because he could not bear for his assistants to see him. He kept producing sculptures, altars, and church designs until he was nearly seventy, and his soapstone prophets at the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas - made in his final working years - are considered the summit of Brazilian colonial sculpture. His mixed-race status in a racialized society was complicated: his professional standing placed him above the enslaved people around him, but he never enjoyed the social position of full-blooded Portuguese artists. He lived in a liminal space, and the buildings he designed reflect it.

Ouro Preto's historic center became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, and Saint Francis of Assisi is its most photographed building. The church is still in use, not just a museum. During Holy Week, thousands of participants fill the streets for processions that have continued for two and a half centuries, with music and ceremonial masses. As one ethnomusicologist observed, these celebrations renew local memory of the baroque era and the city's vanished prosperity. The gold is gone. The empire is gone. What remains is the architecture Aleijadinho and his mentors and his assistants and the anonymous enslaved builders left behind - a green-stone facade, a painted ceiling, and a saint receiving the stigmata over a door in a little town that once made the world's wealth.