Art: Portuguese Primitives

For a little more than a century and a half (from 1415 to 1581) little Portugal was one of the most aggressive and wealthiest countries in Europe. Egged on by the tough little kings of the House of Aviz, her explorers (Pedro Alvares Cabral, Tristao da Cunha, Alfonso de Albuquerque, Vasco da Gama, Lourengo de Almeida, et al.) ranged the seas from Greenland to Japan, netted an empire second only to Spain’s. Like most nouveau riche nations, 15th-Century Portugal then began to take an interest in art. She carefully coddled a school of Portuguese painters, began a Portuguese Renaissance. Then, in 1581, Philip II of Spain conquered Portugal, and the Portuguese Renaissance died in its primitive stage.

Portugal’s primitives, hidden in isolated monasteries and village churches, were soon forgotten. But recently Lisbon’s National Academy of Beaux-Arts has begun to gather them. Last month Portugal celebrated its 800th birthday, its 300th year of freedom from the temporary domination of Spain. Lisbon’s Academy of Beaux-Arts decided to celebrate with an exhibition of 319 paintings by Portugal’s 15th-and 16th-Century primitives.

The Academy’s scouts had scoured Portugal’s mountain villages. In some they had been treated like a looting army. Angry villagers, seeing their shrines dismantled, rang their church bells. In the town of Vizeu a crowd of buzzing parishioners surrounded a truckload of paintings, for two days refused to budge. To get a strong-faced portrait of St. Peter out of São João, the Minister of Education had to go in person, beg its release in the name of the Government.

Visitors who crowded the Beaux-Arts Gallery had to admit that Portugal, during its peak century and a half, had been almost as good at painting as it was at exploring. Connoisseurs found these primitives strongly influenced by the Flemish school founded about 1410 by famed Painter Hubert van Eyck. Some of the early Portuguese masters, like Nuno Gonçalves and Cristóvão de Figueiredo, were subtle portraitists who could have swapped paint brushes & pallettes with all but the best of the Flemish painters. But the Portuguese types por trayed, the thinner paint on the canvases, the gentler, sun-warmed treatment of crucifixions, decapitations and flayings, gave Portugal’s school a flavor all its own.