Resumen de Portraits of Male and Female Musicians in Portuguese Paintings from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
This investigation is about concrete portraits (not crypto-portraits) of male and female musicians by Portuguese painters, since Vieira Lusitano to Sequeira, Columbano, Emília Braga and Malhoa. A portrait is the presence of an absence. A synonym of affectivity, propaganda, social prestige and power, it perpetuates the memory of the person portrayed, with more or less verisimilitude. The first Western treatise on portraiture was written in Portugal in 1549: the dialogue Do Tirar polo Natural, by Francisco de Holanda (1517/18–84). Given this feat, one might expect a number of portraits of musicians by national artists and workshops to have reached us throughout the centuries. However, Holanda’s treatise lists a series of precepts that can help explain the dearth of male and female portraits of Portuguese musicians in the following centuries: “Let the excellent painter (…) paint very few people, carefully selected”. Individual and collective, from public or private collections, the theme of the musician’s portrait is marginally considered or even ignored by the art historians. What constitutes the nature of these Portuguese portraits? What they reveal to us? In the end of the chapter, we present an inventory with more than half a hundred of portraits of male and female amateur and professional musicians from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries painted by national painters.
