A snapshot of sixteenth-century Lisbon. The anonymous Chafariz d'El Rei and its problems

elective courses
general courses

Good knowledge of English; knowledge of Portuguese, and/or Spanish a strong advantage.

Classroom

The course explores explores themes related to life on the streets of a booming European metropolis (slavery, urbanism, trading activity, cosmopolitanism, civic bylaws and religious repression, division of labour between the sexes) as well as scrutinising problems of artistic representation through genre, issues of authenticity and artistic meaning.

Full description: This vigorous anonymous painting of Lisbon depicting the scene around the King's Fountain in the Alfama, the Chafariz d'el Rei, and packed with 155 human figures involved in a variety of distinct, but not immediately clear social activities within one overarching scene or setting provides an intimate and priceless window into Portuguese daily life at a time of rapid globalisation. But it also poses a number of thorny questions since the picture emerged unexpectedly onthe public scene in 1997. Is our painting Flemish or Portuguese, the view of an insider or outsider, or perhaps even a collaboration? Might the picture be a twentieth-century fake? Can we and how should we proceed to read its detail at face-value, or is there a deeper message? And would that be ludic, exotic or vilipendious (moral condemnation of black/white intermixing primarily by churchmen)? What genre of artistic production can we see this picture as part of? Is globalisation necessarily a ‘thin’ phenomenon prior to the nineteenth century? The course will use this controversial painting to explore a number of different but distinct themes grounded in sixteenth-century Portugal :the history of Portugal and its overseas empire, social history, history of art, questions of historical meaning.

Bibliography: This course will run over twelve weekly two-hour sessions. We will look at a number of primary source materials, mostly translated into English, watch documentaries and probe the forger’s art.

Supporting materials:

Annemarie Jordan Gschwend & Kate Lowe, The Global City: on the streets of Renaissance Lisbon, London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2015.

António Manuel Hespanha, No alvorecer da modernidade, 1480-1620, vol. 3 of História de Portugal, ed. José Mattoso, Lisbon: Imprensa, 1997.

In English the best surveys of metropolitan Portugal during the ‘Grandes Descobrimentos’ are Anthony Disney, A history of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, 2 vols., C.U.P. 2009 and the older A.H. de Oliveira Marques, A history of Portugal, 2nd ed. New York : Columbia University press 1976, 2nd edition.

Robert C. Smith, The Art of Portugal, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.

E. Stols & J. Everaert, Flandres e Portugal. Na confluência de duas culturas, Antwerp: INAPA, 1991.

Carmen Fracchia, ‘Constructing the black slave in early modern Spanish painting’, in T. Nichols ed. Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe. Picturing the Social Margins, Ashgate 2017.

M. Bodian, “Men of the Nation”: the shaping of ‘converso’ identity in early modern Europe’, Past & Present, 143 (1994), pp. 48-76.

Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up. Cultural identity in Renaissance Europe, New York: O.U.P., 2010.

Noah Charney, The Art of Forgery, Phaidon 2015.

T. Rabb & Rotberg, Art and History. Images and their Meaning, C.U.P. 1988.

Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscape. The rise of pictorial genres in the Antwerp art market, Philadelphia U.P., 2006.

Primary sources:

Damião de Goís, Lisbon in the Renaissance. A new translation of the Urbis Olisiponis Descriptio, ed. Jeffrey Ruth, New York: Italica

Press, 1996.

Giovanni Botero, Delle cause della grandezza delle città (On the Causes of the Greatness of Cities), 1588.

D. Francisco Manuel de Mello, Carta de Guia de Casados (Lisbon, 1651) trans. by John Stevens as The government of a wife, London 1697.

Cesare Vecellio, Habiti Antichi et Moderni, Venezia 1664, ed. Margaret Rosenthal as The Clothing of the Renaissance World, London: Thames &

Hudson, 2008.

Luis Méndez Rodríguez, La aventura de Jerónimo Köler: Sevilla, 1533, Seville: Marcial Pons Historia, 2013.

Christoph Weiditz, Authentic everyday dress of the Renaissance: all 154 plates from the Trachtenbuch, New York: Dover Publications, 1994.

Hugo Gurgeny, prisoner of the Lisbon Inquisition, ed. Mary Brearley, New Haven: Yale U.P., 1948.

Students will be assessed via weekly presentations (individual or group, according to class size), a coursework essay question (ca. 2500 words).