An anonymous sixteenth-century painting of the King’s Fountain in the Lisbon Alfama, Chafariz d’el Rei, recently the subject of speculation over its provenance and date, has also been of interest because of its depiction of so many black and white figures together, from all social strata and walks of life and in many (often water-related) trades in a public square. It very obviously suggests that black residents of Lisbon at that time, if originating from the trade in slaves, had been able to make their way as freedmen and women into Portuguese society. With careful reading of the figures in the painting against other written and painted portrayals from the time, the author attempts to deduce if this was an accurate depiction of Lisbon in the 1500s, or whether the painter might have distorted reality to render Lisbon as a ludic or exotic space – or indeed to disparage it. The painter himself might well have come from northern Europe.
Laura R.BassWunderA., ‘Fashion and urban views in 17th century Madrid’, in José Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo, Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europea Hispánica, 2014), vol. 1, p. 378.
2.
For the idea that the work was produced by a Netherlander, see:RodriguesAna Maria, ed., Os Negros em Portugal – Secs XV a XIX [exhibition catalogue] (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1999), p. 106.
3.
CaetanoJoaquim Oliveira, ‘Uma desconhecida obra prima de Gregorio Lopes’, in Estudo da Pintura Portuguesa. Oficina de Gregório Lopes (Lisbon: Instituto de José de Figueiredo, 1999), pp. 129–32.
4.
DacosNicole, ‘Os artistas flamengos e a sua influência em Portugal (sécs. XV–XVI)’, in StolsEddyEveraertJan, eds, Flandres e Portugal. Na confluência de duas culturas (Antwerp: I.N.A.P.A., 1991), p. 162.
5.
See Vitor Serrão, ‘A Imagem do Mar e da capital do império no século XVI: um novo testemunho iconográfico da Lisboa das Descobertas’, in As rotas océanicas (sécs. XV–XVII): quartas Jornadas de História Ibero-Americana (Lisbon: Colibri, 1999), pp. 171–87; and Fernando Antonio Baptista Pereira, Sapovídeos, 2 March 2017, http://videos.sapo.pt/6ZYuuHj8ycZ8JOrLNHQF.
6.
Zorro’s cantiga ‘En Lixboa, sobre lo mar’, in José Pereira Tavares, Antologia de Textos Medievais (Lisbon: Sá da Costa Livraria, 1961), p. 55.
7.
SilvaRodrigo Banha daet al, ‘Largo do Chafariz de Dentro: Alfama em Época Moderna’, in José António Bettencourt and André Teixeira, Velhos e Novos Mundos: Estudos de Arqueologia Moderna, vol. 1 (Lisbon: CHAM, 2012), p. 71 ff.
DurãoVitor C. M., ‘Análise Urbana de Territórios Construídos: Os Aterros na baixa e na frente Ribeirinha de Lisboa, Portugal’, Revista da Gestão Costeira Integrada12, no. 1 (2012), p. 25.
10.
Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Inv. 14/130 Ilum.
11.
Damião de Goís, Urbis Olisponis Descriptio published in 1554, trans. and repr. in Jeffrey S. Ruth, Lisbon in the Renaissance (New York: Italica Press, 1996), p. 23.
12.
Serrão, ‘A Imagem do Mar e da capital do império no século XVI’, p. 184 covers the obras de ampliação carried out by the architect Nicolau de Frias on behalf of the Senado in 1598.
13.
‘Viagem a Portugal dos cavalleiros Tron e Lippomani, 1580’, repr. in Herculano, Opúsculos (Lisboa: Viúva Bertrand, 1873–1908), vol. 6, p. 121.
14.
Ariès and Duby, History of Private Life, vol. III, 413 remind us that ‘Ovens, washhouses and shops were the province of women’.
15.
BrandãoJoão, Grandeza e Abastança de Lisboa em 1552, ed. José da Felicidade Alves (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1990), pp. 103–06; Padre Duarte de Sande, ‘Lisboa em 1584’, Archivo pittoresco, t. VI (1862), p. 85; Francisco de Holanda, Da fábrica que falece na cidade de Lisboa, ed. Joaquim Vasconcelos (Porto: Imprensa Portuguesa, 1879), cap. VI ‘D’Agoa livre’, p. 14. There are 1929 and 1984 editions of this text.
16.
RodríguezLuis Méndez, La aventura de Jerónimo Köler: Sevilla, 1533 (Seville: Marcial Pons Historia / Fundación Focus-Abengoa, 2013), pp. 217–65.
17.
FonsecaJorge, ‘Black Africans in Portugal during Cleynaert’s visit’, in Earle and Lowe, eds, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), p. 113 ff.; Garcia de Resende, ‘Miscelânea’, Livro das Obras de Garcia de Resende, ed. Evelina Verdelho (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1994), p. 572.
18.
Cf. in the Seville census of 1565, slaves accounted for 7.4 per cent of the population, Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, ‘La esclavitud en Castilla durante la Edad Moderna’, in Estudios de historia social de España, ed. C. Viñas y Met (Madrid: Departamento de Historia Social de España del Instituto Balmes de Sociología, 1949–60), vol. II (1952), pp. 367–84. The figures for Spain as a whole are 1.25 per cent, Bartolomé Bennassar, The Spanish Character: attitudes and mentalities from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979), p. 106. Carmen Fracchia cites a far higher figure (30,000 slaves out of a total Sevillian population of 120.000), ‘Constructing the black slave in early modern Spanish painting’, in Tom Nichols, Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate: Farnham, 2007), p. 180, but does not declare her source. See also Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe medieval (Bruges: Tempele, 1955), vol. 1, esp. pp. 615–32, 835–46. The Lisbon statistics are cited in Luís Arquilino’s television documentary, Portugal no Tempo das Descobertas, EBM (1993), although travellers like Bartholomé Villalba y Estaña, writing in 1577, cited a figure of ‘tres o quatro mil almas’, El pelegrino curioso y grandezas de España (Madrid: 1886–89), vol. II, p. 58. There are some fine early sixteenth-century miniatures depicting blacks in domestic service from the Livro de Horas de D. Manuel, Dagoberto L. Markl, Livros de horas de D. Manuel (Lisboa: Impr. Nacional Casa da Moeda, 1983).
19.
CorreaManuel, História da Fundaçam e Progresso da Casa de Sam Roque (c. 1588). Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional, Codex 4491.
20.
See VinkMarkus, ‘Freedom and slavery: the Dutch Republic, the VOC world, and the debate over the “World’s Oldest Trade”’, South African Historical Journal59, no. 1 (2007), pp. 19–46; Dienke Hondius, ‘Access to the Netherlands of enslaved and free black Africans: exploring legal and social historical practices in the sixteenth–nineteenth centuries’, Slavery & Abolition32, no. 3 (2011), pp. 377–95.
21.
Quote from David Dabydeen and others, Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 453. For more information, see the contributions in Joaneath Spicer, ed., Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, MD: Walters Art Museum, 2012).
22.
Being a galley slave was no monopoly of ‘Moorish’ or ‘white slaves’; we know that black African slaves too were sent there. Serving in the galleys was a common punishment for a range of crimes from homosexuality to murder. Fleets of galleys were the choice for Mediterranean transport, and were stationed in the Algarve. Plate 74 of Weiditz’s Trachtenbuch depicts black slaves preparing water tanks for the naus in Barcelona.
23.
Noted in Júlio de Castilho, A Ribeira de Lisboa (Lisboa: Publicações da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 1943), vol. II, pp. 18–19. Original source is in the Arquivo Histórico da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Livro do Posturas da Cidade, C7, 99r. Also repr. in Lowe and Jordan, The Global City, Appendix 4. A version published in the Revista Municipal de Lisboa, no. 17, 1886, p. 19, repr. in Os negros em Portugal, sécs. XV a XIX, 105, suggests that black women, mulatto women and both freed and captive Indians were to use the third and fourth spouts (i.e., tending towards the Alfama side). Cf. the Vista do Mosteiro dos Jerónimos da Praia de Belém by Filipe Lobo, dated 1660 (currently in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon). Here only white women are depicted at the fountain.
24.
AHCM, Lxa, Ch. Cidade, 396, Posturas reformadas, liv. 1, tit. 30, post. 2, f. 139.
25.
BrandãoJoão, ‘Majestade e Grandezas de Lisboa em 1552’, ed. FreireAnselmo Braamcamp, Archivo Histórico Portuguez, XI, (1917), p. 76; Christovão Rodrigues de Oliveira, Sumário em que brevemente se contém Algumas Coisas (assim Ecclesiásticas como Seculares) que há na Cidade de Lisboa (c. 1554-55), ed. A. Vieira da Silva (Lisbon: 1938–9), p. 94.
26.
‘Letter to Jacques Latomus’, dated 26 March 1535, Évora, in: Alphonse Roersch, ed., Correspondance de Nicolaus Clénard (Bruxelles: Palais des Académies, 1940–1), vol. I, p. 54; cf. Plate 44 of Weiditz’s Trachtenbuch, which depicts a white maidservant carrying unglazed earthenware pots on her head.
27.
Francisco de Quevedo, Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler (El Buscon), trans. and ed. Michael Alpert (London: Penguin, 2003), p. xxx.
28.
Regateiras are often translated as ‘hucksters’, even though the term had its own pejorative, cadela or cadelão. Two revised editions of manuscript no. 8581 of the Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa have been published: Silveiro Bueno, ed., Auto das Regateiras (São Paulo: Saraiva/INL, 1969) and Giulia Lanciani, ed., Auto das Regateiras (Roma: Edizioni dell’A̓teneo, 1970).
29.
‘Majestade e Grandezas’, Archivo Histórico PortuguezXI (1917), pp. 59, 60.
30.
Durão, ‘Análise Urbana de Territórios Construídos’.
31.
Das Trachtenbuch des Weiditz, Plate 22; A. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 148.
32.
Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, Comedia Vlysippo, ed. de Sousa FarinhaB. J. (Lisbon: 1787), Act II, Scene VII, p. 150.
33.
Male slaves were frequently set to work in the stables; Cardinal Henrique (who was one of Cleynaerts’ students) had seven ‘stable slaves’. Évora, Biblioteca Pública, Cód. CXI/1–6 cited in Fonseca, ‘Black Africans in Portugal’, p. 117.
34.
Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen, p. 76, especially footnote 65.
35.
CasaresAurelia Martin, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: genero, raza y religion (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2000), p. 397.
36.
de Oliveira MarquesH., ‘Uma descricão de Portugal em 1579-80’, in Oliveira Marques, Portugal Quinhentista (Ensaios) (Lisbon: Quetzal, 1987), pp. 127–245.
37.
C. de C. M. Saunders, ‘The life and humour of João de Sá de Panasco, o negro, former slave, court jester and gentleman of the Portuguese royal household (fl. 1524–1567)’, in HodcroftF. W.et al., eds, Medieval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honour of P. E. Russell (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1981), pp. 180–91.
38.
BouzaFernando, ed., Cartas de Felipe II a sus hijas (Madrid: Akal Ediciones, 1998), Letter XXI of June 4, p. 86.
39.
Repr. in Os negros em Portugal, sécs. XV a XIX, p. 108.
40.
Original in the Museu Biblioteca dos Condes de Castro-Guimaraes, Cascais. A recent edition was published by the Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1995.
41.
Durão, Análise, p. 25. We can see these tercenas as well as the postigo to the west of the Chafariz, in the pencil drawing in the University of Leiden dated to 1570, Inv. J29-I5-7831-110/30; reproduced in the Museu da Cidade de Lisboa.
42.
‘Olissippo, quae nunc Lisboa’, published in the ‘Civitates orbis terrarum’ series, vol. 5 (Cologne, George Braun, 1598).
43.
Holanda, Da Fábrica que falece à cidade de Lisboa; Fernando Castelo-Branco, ‘Aspectos urbanísticos de Lisboa na perspectiva dos viajantes estrangeiros’, Povos e Culturas 2 (1987), pp. 535–44.
44.
BrearleyMary, Hugo Gurgeny: prisoner of the Lisbon Inquisition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 21.
45.
Repr. in Isabel Castro, Os Africanos em Portugal, p. 23.
46.
Henri Bresc, Un monde mediterranéen: économie et société en Sicile, 1300–1450 (Rome/Palermo, 1986), II, p. 450.
47.
Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen, pp. 168–69. Sassetti thought that black Cape Verdeans were very quick to learn, and good players of the lute. Lopes is in António Prestes et al., Primeira Parte dos Avtos e Comedias Portvgvesas (Lisbon: Andres Lobato, 1587), f. 45.
48.
Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen. The author does not take the Berardo picture into consideration.
49.
Afonso Lopez, Autos e Comedias Portuguesas. Primeira parte dos Autos e comedias portuguesas / feitas por Antonio Prestes & por Luis de Camões & por outros autores portugueses cujos nomes vão no principio das obras (Lisboa: Andres Lobato, 1587), p. 46.
50.
Stefan Halikowski Smith, ‘Um tributo’, in Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, ed., Eduino de Jesus: A Ca(u)sa dos Açores em Lisboa (Angra do Heroísmo: Instituto Açoriano de Cultura, 2009), pp. 143–44. This is an idea, borne out by bylaws in Coimbra and Évora, forbidding men from loitering on riverbanks and paying court to slaves and other women trying to wash clothes, Arquivo Distrital de Évora, Câmara Municipal, Posturas Antigas, 2, f. 66v (9 July 1556).
51.
‘Annotationes in abusus sacramentorum’, in Theobladus Freudenberger, ed., Hugo oncilii Tridentini actorum (Freiburg: Sumptibus Herder, 1972), pt. III, vol. 2.
52.
For a critical discussion of this text, see Jeremy Lawrance, ‘Black Africans in renaissance Spanish literature’, in Earle and Lowe, eds, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, p. 70 ff.
53.
See Dirk Stoop, for example, or the anonymous View of Rossio Square in Lisbon, oil on canvas (private collection), repr. in Lowe and Jordan, The Global City, fig. 27.
54.
For a discussion on this theme, see Lowe and Jordan, The Global City, p. 43 ff. Carmen Fracchia’s work analyses a series of Hispanic paintings for images of blacks, whom she feels are generally unrepresented or typically shown as slaves, presented as a ‘natural urban phenomenon’ and in ‘ethnic tension’ with Europeans, ‘The urban slave in Spain and New Spain’, in Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing, eds, The Slave in European Art: from renaissance trophy to abolitionist emblem (Warburg Institute Colloquia 20, 2012), pp. 195–216; ‘(Lack of) visual representation of black slaves in Spanish Golden Age Painting’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (Tesserae) 10 (June 2004), pp. 23–34.
55.
Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, Comedia Aulegrafia (Lisboa: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1619), fol. 12v.
56.
The Order of Santiago held great swathes of land in the extreme south of the country, controlling up to a third of the region south of the Tejo.
57.
DutraFrancis A., ‘Evolution of the Portuguese Order of Santiago, 1492–1600’, Mediterranean Studies4 (1994), pp. 63–72.
58.
See the entry about the sculptor of this bust, Francesco Caporale, Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana1960–2015), vol. VIII, pp. 671–2. The cloak borne by the Chafariz horseman appears to be made of dark velvet.
59.
Stefan Halikowski Smith, biography of Dom Manuel I in Christian-Muslim Relations, 1500–1900 (Brill: Leiden, 2014), vol. 6, p. 286.
60.
António Brásio, ed., Monumenta missionaria Africana (Lisbon: Agencia Geral do Ultramar, 1952), vol. 1, Africa Ocidental (1471–1531), pp. 349–50 cited in P. E. Russell, ‘White kings on black kings: Rui de Pina and the problem of black African sovereignty’, in P. E. Russell, Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic, 1340–1490: chivalry and crusade from John of Gaunt to Henry the Navigator (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), ch. 16, p. 163, n. 15.
61.
‘[T]here are to be seen in that city beautiful jennets which the Portuguese buy for any price’, cited in Herculano, Opúsculos, vol. VI, pp. 121–22.
62.
‘Descalça vai para a fonte’. This cantiga, actually a redondilha, is in Hernâni Cidade, ed., Obras completas de Luís de Camões (Lisboa: Sá de Costa, 1955–62), vol. 1, p. 154.
63.
WaferJim, Taste of Blood: spirit possession in Brazilian Candomble (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
64.
‘Wilhelm Johann Müller’s description of the Fetu country, 1662–5’, in JonesAdam, ed., German Sources for West African History, 1599–1699 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983), p. 164.
65.
ThorntonJohn, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), 2nd edition, p. 243.
66.
SmithWilliam, A New Voyage to Guinea (London: Nourse, 1744), p. 26. More generally, Wyatt MacGaffey, ‘Dialogues of the deaf’, in Stuart Schwartz, Implicit Understandings (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994), pp. 264–5.
67.
This sombre dress is confirmed by Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni, p. 281 and inventories of André Resende’s clothes on his death in 1573, see John R. C. Martyn, ed., On Court Life (Bern/New York: P. Lang, 1990), p. 36.
68.
Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni, p. 285.
69.
DeforneauxMarcelin, Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), pp. 56–7. We see ruffs earlier in northern Europe amongst local dignitaries as in P. Pourbus’s portrait of the Bruges alderman Jacob van der Gheenste, painted in 1583.
70.
ChallesRobert, Journal du voyage des Indes Orientales: à monsieur Pierre Raymond (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1998), p. 57.
71.
Personal communication from François Soyer, 14 June 2017. He shared seventeenth-century materials from the Bibliotheca Sefarad and Rizi’s oil painting Profanación de un crucifijo to demonstrate his point. Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: signs of otherness in North European art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), vol. I, pp. 42–3, 46.
72.
BellAubrey, Portuguese Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 99.
73.
As far afield as the Po-Win Taung caves of Burma, although without the chin strap of those revellers in the tanque at Ormuz, Luís de Matos, ed., Imagens do Oriente no século XVI: Reprodução do Códice Portugûes da Biblioteca Casanatense (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1985), Table XVIII.
74.
‘Letter of Vaz de Caminha’, in William Greenlee, Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral (London: Hakluyt Society, 1938), p. 9; Fernão Peres de Andrade distributed caps on his embassy to Annam, João de Barros, Da Asia (Lisboa: Na Regia Officina Typografica, 1777–1788), dec. III, pte. II, cap.VI, 182.
75.
BuescuAna Isabel, D. João III (Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 2008), pp. 10–13.
76.
LavanhaJoão Baptista, Viagem da catholica real magestad del rey d. Filipe III … a su Reino de Portugal y Relación del Solemne Recibimiento (Madrid: Thomas Iunti, 1622), 52v. See Plate 9.
77.
BethencourtFrancisco, The Inquisition: a global history, 1478–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Table 2.1, p. 79.
78.
Cf. similar text in Exodus 19:12–13.
79.
BodianMiriam, ‘“Men of the nation”: the shaping of “converso” identity in early modern Europe’, Past and Present143 (1994), pp. 48–76; Robert Garfield, ‘A forgotten fragment of the Diaspora: the Jews of S. Tomé Island, 1492–1654’, in WaddingtonR. B., ed., The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and after (New York: Garland, 1994).
80.
Discussed in Bienfaisance et Répression au XVIe siècle: deux textes néerlandais, trans. by Pierre Brachin (Paris: Libr. philosophique J. Vrin, 1984).
81.
LindsayKenneth C., ‘Mystery in Bruegel’s proverbs’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen38, Bd. (1996), pp. 63–76.
82.
LavanhaJ. B., Viage de la Catolica Magestad del Rey Don Felipe III, fol. 8r.
83.
DiasAida Fernanda, ed., ‘“D” Alvaro de Brito Pestana a Luis Fogaça, sendo vereador na cidade de Lixboa em que lhe daa maneira para os ares maos serem for a dela’, in Garcia de Resende, Cancioneiro Geral (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1990), vol. 1, p. 57. Digital version: http://www.literaturabrasileira.ufsc.br/_documents/0006-02950.html#13 (accessed 1 April 2017).
84.
António Manuel Hespanha, ‘Luís de Molina e a escravização dos negros’, Analise Social XXXV, no. 157 (2001), pp. 937–60.
85.
SullivanM. A., ‘Bruegel the Elder, Pieter Aertsen and the beginnings of genre’, The Art Bulletin93, no. 2 (June 2011), p. 130.
86.
Serrão, ‘A Imagem do Mundo’, p. 178.
87.
GibsonWalter S., Mirror of the Earth: the world landscape in sixteenth-century Flemish Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
