A galeria de retratos dos Vice-Reis e Governadores do Estado da Índia : percurso para a sua reinterpretação e salvaguarda

Abstract

The portrait Gallery of the Viceroys and Governors of Estado da India has not yet had a prominent place in the context of Portuguese portraiture and Indo-Portuguese painting. Comprising 120 oil paintings made between 1547 and 1958, incorporated in the Archaeological Museum Velha Goa, under the administration of the Archaeological Survey of India, Ministry of Culture, Government of India, this collection represents an important and unexplored case-study for the humanistic and scientific fields, covering unique documentary, cultural, historical, technical-artistic and iconographic values in the context of the Portuguese Ultramarine context. Alas, the fragile state of conservation has been a constant in the course of this collection, which justified several interventions, resulting is an overlap of successive layers of repaints that never allowed a factual reading of the information contained in the portraits, which has limited the development of conclusive studies since the mid-20th century. This thesis presents, for the first time, the results of a bilateral and multidisciplinary project put into practice for the integrated study of 16 portraits from the Goa collection, based on a previous methodology applied to the three portraits incorporated in the National Museum of Ancient Art, in Lisbon. The data were collected and processed with the support of the Centro de Investigação e Estudo em Belas-Artes-CIEBA (University of Lisbon, Faculty of Fine Arts) and the Laboratories HERCULES (from the University of Évora) and José de Figueiredo (DGPC). The results were used to develop proposals to support the reinterpretation of the collection and in the creation of a strategy for its safeguard and exhibition, in an international collaborative project, example of good practices in the conservation and management of shared heritage, which we hope can be replicated in other projects. The multidisciplinary approach allowed the opening of a new page in the study of this collection, through the access of researchers from various areas of expertise to data that were “hidden” and to whose dissemination we now intend to contribute.