Dear Shaded Viewers,
In Lisbon the midday sun is overwhelmingly blue, especially where it meets the glittering surface of the sea. Right away, you understand that this city likes a hard and decorative surface. Absolutely all sidewalks are paved in cobblestones. It does not matter that they are slippery and difficult to walk on, because the Portuguese love to have patterns everywhere. So it is not so surprising that, since the 15th century, they’ve decorated their architecture with ceramic tiles.
For a couple of centuries, only aristocrats could afford this decoration, favoring the blue and white Delft from the Netherlands most. Tiles were imported, along with craftsmen to install them well into the 1600s, when Portuguese tile workshops developed. Craftsmen were trained academically in the arts, were influenced by French Rococo art of the 1700s, and the industry never looked back. When an earthquake struck Lisbon in 1755 (only the Alfama district survived), the newly constructed buildings used Portuguese tiles. Everybody used tile to decorate their buildings: homeowners, tradesmen, municipalities — and no longer just the aristocracy. They became an expression of the national character, one of Portugal’s contributions to the world’s artistic heritage.
Quite by chance, I stayed in a pension that has been created to rescue the building and save the fac?ade of the old Viuva Lamego factory, covered in pale blue and white allegorical scenes, like pictures from a book. The factory’s director, Luis Ferreira, was famous in the early 1800s for his beautiful hand-painted panels of flower vases, trees and figures. One of his buildings, empty but under restoration, was located on the street behind the pension. And it is wonderful.
Art Nouveau designs are inspired by the beauty of the natural world. Not far from my hotel was small Art Nouveau building that seemed rather down-at-heel, kind of dusty looking, and housing a laundromat. But this building turned to gold in the late-afternoon sunlight. It influenced my visit to Lisbon’s famous Calouste Gulbenkian Museum where Art Nouveau pieces caught my eye: Edward Burne-Jones’s women lying in a meadow looking at their reflections in water.
A wedding band covered in trees by a pond whose bank is covered in diamonds – a ring, I might add, that might temp even me to marriage.
The 20th century brought masterpieces in tile-decorated municipal architecture. Some think Sao Bento, the railroad station in Porto, is the greatest of them all. It was completed in 1916, the interior walls chronicling the history of Portugal painted by the artist Jorge Colaco. The restaurant in Lisbon’s Tile Museum quite rightfully celebrates the wonderful food found in Portugal: ham, sausages, rabbit, sheep, and geese. Fish, especially.
Nobody knows why the Portuguese – more than any other European country – chose to use tiles so extensively on their architecture. Climate is a factor: it never freezes there. Taste is another: the desire to decorate all surfaces which they inherited from the Arabs. But the interpretation I prefer is that the Portuguese love shining walls because they are like the surface of the sea.
Sources:
Kaslow, Amy. “The Mosaics of Portuguese History,” Christian Science Monitor 11/15/1991.
Sabo, Rioletta. Portuguese decorative tiles: azulejos. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998.
Pereira, Joao Castel-Branco. Portuguese Tiles from the National Museum of Azulejo, Lisbon. London : Zwemmer, 1995.
Viuvalamego.com. The Viuva Lamego factory is still in business and produces the great tile murals that decorate the subway stations.
