Contemporary Arts
Portuguese Art
How strange it would have seemed to a nine- teenth-century mind that many of us should be more familiar with the sculpture of a former Portuguese territory in Africa, Benin, than we are with the art of Portugal herself, our oldest ally, to which this year's Winter Exhibition at the Royal Academy is devoted. Since the war when the number of London's major exhibitions has increased so consider- ably, some have found these long-established shows to be too comprehensive, too much con- cerned with the ideal of academic complete- ness. The first few galleries of the Portuguese exhibition suggest that, for once, we shall not be required to absorb works, but having seen painting, sculpture and metalwork dating from 800 to 1600, we arc plunged into a medley of furniture, architectural fragments, textiles, metalwork, carriages, the whole gamut of a provincial Baroque. I must confess here and now to an antipathy for Baroque not uncom- mon among the English, but it seems least acceptable when this turbulent and ostenta- tious style expresses itself in objects of daily and intimate use, the very things which do not invite pomp and circumstance. Public archi- tecture, public sculpture, propagandist paint- ing on a large scale, royal coaches, can at least contain complexities of rhetoric and ornament without appearing to rise above their station. When, however, the smaller objects do not come from a tradition of the highest attain- ment, when their makers often have an un- distinguished sense of form, and when a host of such things, with some of their essential perfection and glitter dented or rubbed, are crowded together in the artificial setting of a museum, then the spectacle has the indecent pathos of an aged, sagging primadonna mak- ing the last of her final appearances. I should be unfair to the organisers of this exhibition, and particularly to Professor Reynaldo dos Santos, who has managed his formidable task with such affectionate enthusiasm and scholar- ship, if I were to suggest that there are not in these particular rooms delightful and inter- esting things to be found, especially by con- noisseurs of furniture or metalwork or ceramics.
I suspect that Portugal's most remarkable achievements in the visual arts are, in fact, architectural, and it is a pity that the excellent photographs displayed in the small South Room could not have been distributed in the appropriate galleries to give an additional reference to the other work. As it is, the Romanesque fragments in Gallery I and the examples of free-standing sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are interest- ing, sometimes charming, but not of excep- tional merit. One work, however, transcends
the rest—a full-size crucified Christ by an un- known artist of the early fourteenth century. Here, as in the paintings of Nuno Goncalves, that reserve which is apparently characteristic of the Portuguese temper becomes a positive artistic virtue. The carving reveals a profound, yet modest, withdrawn spirituality, the feeling of the work being perfectly contained and ex- pressed by its form and preserving throughout the finest balance between realism and expres- sionist distortion. This sculpture seems indeed to offer its own unfavourable comment on much of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting to be seen in the three following rooms. Nearly every one of these pictures has a Christian theme and yet with few exceptions these do not pass beyond an illustrative vigour to that enduring devotional power which can only be the result of outstanding artistic dis- tinction and originality. There is a pervading coarseness of modelling, colour and execution, and the realistic details in the figures and their surroundings lack that innocent or penetrating observation which is characteristic of the best Flemish painting; and it is Flemish models to which Portuguese painting constantly refers. This failure adds lustre to the achievement of the fifteenth-century painter, Nuno Goncalves, and to his masterpiece, the polyptych of The Veneration of St. Vincent, a remarkable gathering of individuals from every rank of contemporary society. His realism is the con- sequence of a profound awareness of the pecu- liarities of the human creature. He can gam colour a splendid resonance, make colour saturate form and handle pigment so that it contains not only the colour and form, but communicates the substance of life. The design of this altarpiece has a considerable grandeur even if he does not bring to the bodies of his kings and nobles, priest and fisherman, the reality which is to be found in all their faces. He has also a very personal inventive- ness and imagination, which give the two panels on the left a hypnotic strangeness and immediacy. His sympathetic awkwardness in constructing the human body can also he seen in the naked figure of St. Vincent in another picture.
One compelling reason for visiting this exhi- bition is the Monstrance of Beldm, made in 1506 by the goldsmith, Gil Vicente, for apart from the exciting intricacy of its structure, this masterpiece contains figures of the apostle and of God the Father, the Dove of the Holy Spirit and creatures from the animal creation, all of them fashioned from enamel as well as gold and made with an elegant tenderness not to be found anywhere else in these galleries. This work, in fact, crosses the very real frontier which divides works of figurative art from works of craft, a frontier which some writers have tried to deny or conceal. There is also
delightful craftsmanship and fantasy in some of the Indo-Portuguese examples to which one of the rooms is devoted, and particularly in the works made in China and Japan for Portu- guese clients. Here the country's extraordinary achievements in exploration and trade have found a most delightful artistic fulfilment.
BASIL TAYLOR
Previous page
