Nuno Gonçalves

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Nuno Gonçalves was court painter to King Afonso V of Portugal, and almost nothing else about his life is documented. He spent at least two decades working in Lisbon and produced a polyptych now considered one of the most celebrated works of 15th-century art. Then his name disappeared from his art. For centuries, the painting existed without an author. The questions his work raises are two: who was this painter, and what was the world that made him?

  181213

• 2. Student of the North

  ›

  Born around 1425, Gonçalves may have received part of his training in the Low Countries. His paintings bear an unmistakable resemblance to the work of Jan van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, and Dieric Bouts. That resemblance points to training under an artist already fluent in Flemish technique. One plausible theory places him specifically in Brussels, in the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. He was appointed to the court on the 20th of July 1450 and held the position until at least 1471. In that same year, he was also designated official painter for Lisbon. King Afonso knighted him in 1470. He died around 1491, and Francisco de Holanda, writing several decades later, would still invoke his name as a benchmark of the painter's craft.

  12813920

• 3. Six Panels, Fifty-Eight Faces

  ›

  The polyptych known as the Saint Vincent Panels comprises six oil paintings on wood. The panels were likely created between 1450 and 1470 to mark Afonso V's victories in Morocco. Reading left to right, the panels take their names from the Friars, the Fishermen, the Prince, the Archbishop, the Knights, and the Relic. Vincent of Saragossa occupies the two center panels, surrounded by 58 figures. Those figures represent the royal court and a range of classes in early modern Portuguese society. Since the panels were discovered in the late 19th century, identifying each of those faces has been a persistent scholarly debate. Among those most commonly proposed are Afonso V, Isabella of Coimbra, Henry the Navigator, and Prince John.

  231125

• 4. A Painter's Eye

  ›

  Gonçalves built every composition around people rather than place. He kept backgrounds spare, drawing attention directly to the faces he painted, and those faces carry a rare expressive specificity. His luminous handling of oil paint and his eye for realism were shaped by the Flemish and Italian schools of his time. Yet his insistence on treating each figure as a distinct individual had no exact parallel among his contemporaries. The Saint Vincent Panels are the only work assigned to him with confidence. Several other paintings are tentatively linked to him by stylistic similarity. Among them are works held at the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon and a Portrait of Princess Saint Joana in Aveiro.

  1218108

• 5. Recovered from Silence

  ›

  Gonçalves had been largely forgotten as an artist before Jose de Figuerdia changed that in the early 20th century. Figuerdia was the first director of the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon. He made the attribution that attached Gonçalves's name to his masterpiece. His evidence rested on a passage in Francisco de Holanda's 1548 manuscript, Pintura Antigua. That passage mentioned an altar of St. Vincent produced by Gonçalves. After the panels were cleaned, a signature at the bottom, believed to be Gonçalves's initials, gave the attribution more solid ground. Holanda, a 16th-century artist and art essayist, had called Gonçalves one of the foremost painters of his era. The art historian Robert Chester Smith went further. He described Gonçalves as likely the greatest Portuguese painter of all time, rivalled only by Domingos António de Sequeira. Chandler Rathfon Post, teaching at Harvard, returned to Gonçalves often in his lectures. Scholars credit him with initiating the Portuguese Renaissance in painting. He is also believed to have designed the scenes for the Pastrana Tapestries. His image now stands on the Padrão dos Descobrimentos in Belém, alongside the explorers and navigators who defined the age he documented in paint.

  21121818