In 1866 Dante Gabriel Rossetti purchased a late 16th-century oil painting of an animated street scene in an unknown city, which he believed to be from the school of Velázquez. Cut in two it adorned first his London home then Kelmscott Manor, where it still hangs. It was not until 2009 that historian Kate Lowe and art historian Annemarie Jordan Gschwend positively identified the city as Lisbon and the subject as the Rua Nova dos Mercadores—the New Merchants’ Street—described by a contemporary as “one of the richest streets in the world”.
The Rua was the commercial and cultural hub of a city being reconstructed with the wealth pouring in from Portuguese trade across the globe. It was to an extent Lisbon’s St Mark’s Square, a place for civic ceremony and theatrical displays of power, but principally its Rialto, “the Fifth Avenue and Bond Street of its day”. Here merchants had their houses and shops, from which they bought and sold the exotic produce of the Age of Discoveries. It attracted visitors from across Europe to marvel and to buy. Lisbon was the global city at the time, and this painting, by an unknown Flemish artist, bears witness to its unique qualities.
The value of its identification lies in the rarity of images of Renaissance Lisbon. Everything vanished in the great earthquake of 1755—not only the visible historic city, but many of its works of art, and almost all its inventories and accumulated records that might enable us more fully to comprehend the extraordinary vitality of Lisbon as the conduit that exposed Europe to the goods and tastes of a wider world.
Using the Rua Nova as its starting point, Gschwend and Lowe, the editors of The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon, have brought together a collection of 15 highly illustrated essays by historians and art historians to explore the significance of 16th-century Lisbon, at a time when Portugal’s trading connections were unequalled.
The painting itself, in which many of the figures are of African origin, provides documentary evidence for the city’s claim to be considered a global hub. In the Rua and the streets around, it seemed that anything that the world might contain could be purchased – Ming porcelain, parrots, ivories from Sri Lanka and West Africa, jewellery, lacquered ware, Asian textiles and images in rock crystal.
Key essays by Gschwend and Lowe decode the busy street scene to explore issues of racial mix and identity in this most diverse city, to consider its urban fabric, and to reconstruct the trades that it engendered and the lives of its occupants. Successive contributions then focus on the artefacts that were bought and sold on the Rua, and the trading systems that allowed the production, procurement and movement of works of art across the world, and the resulting patterns of consumption within the city.
Hugh Crespo uses the inventory of a merchant’s house on the street to examine the objects that the Portuguese acquired and used in their everyday life. By the end of the 16th century, silk textiles from the East and gilded furniture had saturated the market, so that only the most exquisite trophies were items for the collections of royalty and nobility.
Artefacts initially considered desirable luxuries became commonplace for the middle classes, as the torrent of oriental produce landed on the Lisbon waterfront swelled in volume: one single ship’s inventory records the import of 19,000 Asian fans, another from 1518 a cargo of over 2,000kg of Chinese silk from the Malabar Coast, a figure that rose continuously throughout the century.
The book contains detailed studies of particular art forms—the production of rock crystal carvings from Sri Lanka, lacquered Indo-Muslim shields and sculptured devotional Christian ivories from India—that also reveal sophisticated purchasing systems allowing Europeans to commission hybrid works of art to local tastes in idioms drawn from the furthest corners of the Earth.
Given the often slim documentary evidence on which the contributors have had to draw, many unanswered questions remain about the circumstances of the production and movement of these artefacts and works of art that brought new perspectives to European aesthetics.
The editors and contributors make the case for further research into this understudied area of the development of Renaissance taste. The present volume brings the forgotten importance and contribution of a great European city to fresh attention.
• Roger Crowley is a historian. His latest book is Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire
The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend and K.J.P. Lowe, eds
Paul Holberton Publishing,
296pp, £40 (hb)