Portugal: Louvre to display 14 Rennaissance works from Lisbon museum

The Louvre Museum in Paris will host an exhibition dedicated to ancient Portuguese painting in 2022, focusing on 15 works from Lisbon National Museum of Ancient Art, a source from the French institution told Lusa on Tuesday. Under the title “L’Age D’or de la Renaissance Portugaise” (“The Golden Age of the Portuguese Renaissance”), the exhibition will take place between 10 June and 10 September, in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre Museum, the most visited in the world.

Under the title “L’Age D’or de la Renaissance Portugaise” (“The Golden Age of the Portuguese Renaissance”), the exhibition will take place between 10 June and 10 September, in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre Museum, the most visited in the world.

The show, which takes place within the Portugal-France Cross Season of cultural diplomacy between the two countries, will present about 15 paintings lent by the National Museum of Ancient Are (MNAA), in Lisbon, through a partnership.

“Very rarely presented, or even identified in French museums, Portuguese painting deserves to be better known: this presentation of fifteen excellent quality painted panels, lent by the MNAA, will be a discovery for the French public”, underlines a text from the Louvre about the exhibition, sent to Lusa.

The exhibition is curated by Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, curator of the painting department of the Parisian museum – the largest art museum in the world, housed in a historic monument in Paris – and is based on scientific collaboration between that department and the Portuguese museum.

Visitors to the Louvre “will be able to see exquisite and wonderfully executed paintings” by artists such as Nuno Gonçalves (active 1450-before 1492), Jorge Afonso (active 1504-1540), Cristóvão de Figueiredo (active 1515-1554) and Gregorio Lopes (active 1513-1550), according to the museum.

Since the 1930’s exhibition, at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, on Portuguese art from the time of the Discoveries, and the most recent exhibitions in France (“Sun and Shadows: Portuguese Art from the 19th Century”, in Paris, at the Musée du Petit Palais, in 1987, and Rouge et Or. Trésors du Portugal Barroco”, also in the Parisian capital, at the Jacquemart-André Museum, in 2001), that “this privileged period of the Portuguese Renaissance” had not been dealt with, the French museum also recalls.

The Painting Department also points out, in the document sent to Lusa, that it wishes to “continue to enrich this collection [of Portuguese paintings], under the universal vocation of the Louvre Museum and the requirement to offer the most comprehensive panorama possible of European painting”.

The duration of this “exhibition-dossier will also be an opportunity to make known the Portuguese paintings presented more generally in France, as part of the project to identify Iberian paintings from French public collections”, indicates the same source from the museum, which in 2019 received 9.6 million visitors.

The show is part of the programme of the Cross Season between France and Portugal, a cultural diplomacy initiative created to deepen relations between the two countries, and which will be carried out between February and October 2022, with exhibitions, shows and other events curated by the director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, alongside Manuela Júdice and Victoire Bigedain Di Rosa, in the commissariat.

Created in 1884, the MNAA houses the country’s most relevant public collection of painting, sculpture, decorative arts – Portuguese, European and Expansionist – from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, including the largest number of works classified as “national treasures”, as well as the largest collection of Portuguese furniture.

In the different areas of the collection, there are some reference works of the world artistic heritage, namely the Panels of São Vicente, by Nuno Gonçalves, a masterpiece of European painting of the 15th century.

The triptych “The Temptations of Saint Anthony” by Hieronymus Bosch, “Saint Augustine” by Piero della Francesca, “The Conversation” by Pietr de Hooch and “Saint Jerome” by Albrecht Dürer are among the museum’s best-known works.