Gregório Lopes

• 1. Introduction

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  Gregório Lopes was a Portuguese painter who lived from about 1490 to 1550, and in 1520 a prince made him a knight. Prince Jorge de Lencastre conferred the honor, and with it Lopes entered the Order of Santiago. That is an unusual distinction for a man who earned his living with brushes and wooden panels. He is counted among the most important Renaissance painters Portugal produced, yet his name rarely travels far beyond his homeland. Who taught him the craft, and who trusted him with their walls and altars? Where did his paintings hang, and where can a visitor find them today? And what became of the family he left behind?

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• 2. The Court Workshop

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  The workshop of Jorge Afonso was where Gregório Lopes learned to paint. Afonso served as court painter to King Manuel I, so the training ground sat close to the throne. In 1514, Lopes married Afonso's daughter, which bound the pupil to the household of his master. Lopes eventually took up the royal post himself. He painted for Manuel I and then for the king's successor, John III. Those two reigns gave him steady access to the church and court patrons who commissioned the largest works of the day. The first of those commissions arrived in the same decade as his knighthood, and they filled the walls of Lisbon.

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• 3. Altarpieces of Lisbon

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  Between 1520 and 1525, Lopes worked alongside a fellow painter named Jorge Leal on altarpieces for the Saint Francis Convent of Lisbon. The two men also shared other joint projects. During the same decade, Lopes painted panels for the Church of Paraíso, a name that means Paradise. His early career carried him beyond the capital as well, to Sesimbra and Setúbal. At the Monastery of Ferreirim he joined two other artists, Cristóvão de Figueiredo and Garcia Fernandes. Nearly all of this output was religious, made for churches and monasteries in central Portugal. Lopes would soon leave this circle of collaborators and settle in a new city.

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• 4. Tomar

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  Tomar became Lopes's home in the 1530s. There he painted several panels for the Round Church of the Convent of Christ, work that ran from 1536 to 1539. In 1538 and 1539 he also produced the main altarpiece for the Church of Saint John the Baptist. After Tomar, the record of his career thins to a few final commissions. In 1540 he made altarpieces for the Convent of Santos-o-Novo in Lisbon. The last work known today dates to 1545, for the Valverde Convent, which stands near Évora. After that year, no further commission appears in the record.

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• 5. What Remained

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  The National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon holds many of the paintings Lopes made. A visitor there can see his panels gathered in one place, away from the convents that first commissioned them. His son, Cristóvão Lopes, was born in 1516 and also became an artist. Cristóvão chose portraiture and worked as a portrait painter for the Portuguese royal family. He lived until 1594, outlasting his father by more than four decades. The son therefore carried the family's link to the crown well into a later era.

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