HI S T ORY

The Kelmscott painting of the Rua Nova dos Mercadores, Lisbon, c.157090

Elephants on the Rua Nova

isbon in its heyday in the sixteenth

century was the most globally connected and multicultural city on earth.
Its ships were a redoubtable presence in harbours from Brazil to Japan; the distantly produced goods it imported attracted merchants
and princes throughout Europe; and its population included more Africans (mostly slaves,
but not all) than anywhere else outside their
home continent. That its importance in world
history is all too rarely recognized may be due
to a lack of glamour. If the most famous Portuguese figure of the age is Ferdinand Magellan,
who sailed for Spain, and Portugals finest
poet, Lus de Cames, is known mainly to specialists, it is not too surprising that Venice,
Rome and London get more attention as great
sixteenth-century cities. But that perspective
should be changed by this splendid book.
The Global City came into being quite by
chance, in December 2009, when the editors
identified a painting in Kelmscott Manor,
once owned by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and cut
by him into two parts, as a depiction (completed between 1570 and 1619) of the principal mercantile street in Lisbon, the Rua Nova
dos Mercadores. Filled with dozens of figures,
the almost 2-metre-wide canvas cried out
for explication, and set Annemarie Jordan
Gschwend and Kate Lowe on the path that
ended with this book.
The Rua Nova may be what got the authors
going, and the painting does remain central to
the analysis, but the fifteen essays roam far
from this base, offering a rich account of the
people and goods that shaped the Lisbon of
their day. We start with Lowe, who introduces
us to painted cityscapes (though not the
one that set the tone for this genre, Bellinis
Piazza San Marco) and especially to sixteenthcentury renditions of Lisbon, into which the
Kelmscott painting injects a unique vividness
and human dimension. Building on the latter
in a second essay, she looks at the different
communities that made up the population,
with particular emphasis on the Africans who
were so prominent both in the painting and in
the city itself. A later contribution discusses

THEODORE K. RABB
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend
and K. J. P. Lowe, editors
THE GLOBAL CITY
On the streets of Renaissance Lisbon
240pp. Paul Holberton. 40 (US $60).
978 1 907372 88 9

the African objects that the Portuguese traded.

Gschwend, too, has three esays: a remarkable
reconstruction of the physical appearance of
the Rua Nova itself; a survey of the beautifully
crafted international objects that flowed in and
out of Lisbon; and the story of the dealer and
the painter from whom the canvas has
descended.
The other nine essays suggest what life was
like in this global city. We encounter local
homeowners like Duarte Gomes and Simo de
Melo, whose houses we are able to enter; foreigners who settled here for instance, Bartolomeo Marchionni of Florence; and the
multitude of occupations that brought people
to the Rua Nova. From shipwrecks and inventories we learn of the goods that the ships
carried and which adorned Lisbons homes.
Some costly objects were luxuries, beautifully
designed in ivory, gold and precious stones;
but often what we consider a rarity, such as
Chinese porcelain, was just an everyday part
of a comfortable existence. The making and
the transportation of material goods however
exotic they may be, whether Chinese screens,
Ceylonese rock-crystal carvings, or African
spoons is illuminated again and again.
Perhaps the most startling of these evocations of a lost world is the presence in Lisbon of
outlandish animals. We learn of elephants who
helped move heavy freight, of monkeys, and
even a rhinoceros. Most colourful of all is an
entire chapter devoted to the turkey. There is an
episode with a turkey in the Kelmscott painting, and that opens the door for Shepard Krech
to explain how the bird got to Europe and
spread through the world, its varieties, and the
reactions of those who domesticated and ate it.

What may be most remarkable about this

book is the high standard of interdisciplinary
scholarship that it maintains. The quality of
essays in collections can vary, but not here.
This is modern historical inquiry at its best:
clear, precise, forthcoming about problems
of evidence, and relentlessly focused on its
central questions: what does this street tell us
about Lisbon, and what does the movement of
goods and people that was essential to the Portuguese Empire tell us about the world Lisbon
shaped? To answer those questions the authors
rely on the traditional examination of texts, but
also on the study of material goods, on technological tools such as computer graphics, electron microscope micrography, and chemical
analyses, and above all on the testimony of the
visual arts.
Persuading historians that paintings, sculptures and buildings are as powerful as the written word in providing evidence of the past has
not been easy. Despite triumphs from the pen
of Jacob Burckhardt or, more recently, from
Jonathan Brown and John Elliott, the inclination either to ignore pictures or to use them as
decoration remains strong. In Daniel Strums
massive The Sugar Trade (2013), for instance,
a sumptuous feast of illustrations has almost
no impact on the text. A magnificent scene
of the Terreiro do Paco, a centre of public life
in Lisbon, containing dozens of figures, on
which Gschwend and Lowe would have had
much to say were it not painted too late, in
1662, arouses no curiosity not even the black
gentleman with a sword at his side.
By contrast, the present volume is attentive
to every detail it can find. Because of the terrible earthquake of 1755, most of the documentary record has been lost. But that does not
daunt the authors. Even if not a single example
of an imported Japanese folding chair has
survived, one can talk about it because of its
representation in a painting. And the many
objects we do have, from fans and thimbles to
chests and shields, are open windows into the
life of the past.
One does not often recommend a book
without reservation. But in this case the one

TLS FEBRUARY 12 2016

shortcoming, the absence of an index, is completely overshadowed by the achievement of

restoring Lisbon to its rightful place as one of
the most important centres in the history of the
modern world.