Versão portuguesa aqui.

GPS 40.66006234569439, -7.910919289169835

The Grão Vasco National Museum is located in the historic center of Viseu, in the former 16th-century Paço dos Bispos de Viseu, next to the cathedral.

It is not surprising that the painter Vasco Fernandes, made famous over the centuries with the epithet Grão Vasco, is the major reference, in terms of designation and content, of the Viseu museum. Founded on March 16, 1916, precisely for the purpose of preserving and valuing “the valuable paintings existing in the Cathedral of Viseu (...) the treasure of the chapter of the Cathedral, in addition to other objects of artistic or historical value”, the National Museum Grão Vasco (MNGV) had its first space in the Cathedral's premises until 1938.

Francisco de Almeida Moreira, its founder and director, owes the expansion of the collections, as well as the progressive conquest of the galleries of the building adjacent to the Cathedral, the Paço dos Três Escalões, which at the time of the foundation of the museum still housed various public services. .

The Museum's main collection consists of a remarkable set of altarpiece paintings, from the Cathedral, churches in the region and deposits in other museums, by Vasco Fernandes (c. 1475-1542), Grão Vasco, by collaborators and contemporaries. The collection also includes objects and figurative supports originally intended for liturgical practices (painting, sculpture, goldsmithery and ivories, from the Romanesque to the Baroque), mostly from the Cathedral and churches in the region, to which are added archeology pieces, an important collection of paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries, examples of Portuguese earthenware, jewellery, oriental porcelain, numismatics and furniture.

Collections

Painting

One of the virtues of this museum's painting collection is that it allows the enunciation of the main moments, movements and protagonists in the history of Portuguese painting.

With the aim of showing the work of the painter Vasco Fernandes, Grão Vasco, which were located in the sacristy of the Cathedral of Viseu, which after reforming the main altar of the cathedral and the side chapels were moved there, the Grão Vasco Museum is founded. through the perseverance of Almeida Moreira, its first director.

After this nucleus, other works by artists from the region joined the larger works of the “Portuguese Primitives” period, with the use of occasional acquisitions and deposit requests, namely to the National Museum of Ancient Art.

The enlightened way in which the first director of this Museum organizes this collection based on the inestimable value of the set of Renaissance paintings, which took extra care and was mobilized by high criteria for choosing works from the 17th to 20th centuries, thus intending to create a comprehensive museographic collection , which allowed for the possibility of incorporating pieces of relevant painting value from later periods, to place them next to those of Vasco Fernandes. Even having, in 1917, received the first set of works from the National Museum of Contemporary Art, expanded through acquisitions in salons, auctions and directly from artists, thus constituting an interesting and significant collection of paintings from the 19th-20th century.

Sculpture

From the expressive collection of sculptures, and from a more recent chronology, namely from the 13th, 16th and 15th centuries, the collection allows, with some exemplarity, to evoke the vast Christian iconographic repertoire of the Middle Ages.

Stone sculpture dominated the production from the workshops in Coimbra, the 15th-century Resurrected Christ, which emerged from these workshops, of surprising physical beauty, and the humanist dimension of this figuration is undoubtedly representative of the interpretation of the spirituality of the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Average.

The collection includes a vast array of sacred images from the 17th and 18th centuries, which highlight the essential characteristics of the artistic production of these centuries.

The renewal of major sculpture in Portugal takes place through the activity of Italian and French sculptors in the first half of the 18th century. From one of the main foreign sculptors who settled in Portugal in the Pedrino-Johannine period, the Frenchman Claude Laprade, the chapter of the cathedral of Viseu commissioned three sculptures for the lateral retables – two still in situ – and the sculpture of Saint Anne and the Virgin , executed in 1723, dismounted years later, Still from this period, the presence of numerous full-figured images, of holy bishops and Franciscan saints and martyrs, from the production of Lisbon workshops, mostly from the extinct congregations religions of the capital.

Ceramics

The ceramics collection, one of the most numerous and diversified in the museum's collection, constitutes the visible expression of Portuguese collecting at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, when prevailing fashion and taste led to the formation of the main private collections of this type of objects, especially encouraged when museums, on an institutional level, welcome and express them.

The MNGV ceramic collections are essentially of three types: oriental porcelain, Portuguese earthenware and European ceramics.

The earthenware from the 19th century collection. XVII, produced in Portuguese workshops, evoke the Portuguese Expansion in the East, often resorting to the imitation of Chinese decorative models, or resorting to the typical blue and white painting, so well known through Ming porcelain.

It features some emblazoned earthenware, pharmacy containers and a rare reliquary bust.

Drawings

Valuable collection of drawings of unquestionable artistic quality, inscribed in the temporal universe that goes from the 19th century to the 19th century. XVIII to the 2nd half of the century. XX

On the broad theme of “Body”, there are detailed studies from the figure to the finished drawing, revealing the languages ​​and choreographies of the body, naked or inhabited.

On the “Sacred and the Profane”, the MNGV drawings illustrate both tendencies, with the continuity of secular themes until the mundane compositions, in the course of the century. XIX and XX.

For the 18th century, the iconographic discourse was staged around the humanized images of Mary, saints, apostles and angels. The preparatory religious drawings for major works are by Vieira Lusitano and are essentially descriptive in nature. Finished compositional or autonomous drawings find in Domingos Sequeira the last breath of theological significance.

“Landscape and narrative”, in this collection, one glimpses the contours and form of a new aesthetic feeling by the hand of Tomás da Anunciação, who transcribes in an expressive design elements that inhabit nature: animals and men.

The “Portrait”, the highlight goes to the drawings by Columbano – who gained fame as an excellent portraitist, having received and executed numerous orders from clients and distinguished personalities of his time – even though they are finished studies for a major work, and which have made in the absence of a live model, they manage to faithfully and vigorously reproduce the characters, capturing the presence of the model in the fiction of the portrait.

With António Carneiro, he breaks definitively with the conventional gender portrait. This is an intimate record of the portrayed in which the artist intends to communicate the subject's psychological plausibility and emotional charge, penetrating his essence, testifying to a relationship of complicity between the artist and the model.

Jewelery

The silverware collection is made up of pieces of use and apparatus (17th to 20th century). In this, the lavenders stand out, pieces engraved with the family coat of arms and other insignia of ownership, being especially important the set pieces of ceremonial use, coming from Italy, formerly belonging to the Bishop of Viseu D. Júlio Francisco de Oliveira (1740-1765 ), composed of two liturgical chalices, a box of hosts, three salvers and an aguamanil.

Furniture

The furniture collection consists of a significant number of pieces that integrate examples of different types, in a chronological universe that goes from the 17th century to the second half of the 20th century. They reveal the refined taste of provincial nobles and the sumptuousness of the ecclesiastical palaces.

Portuguese civil furniture is widely represented with the three great styles that marked the 18th century in Portugal, namely “D. João V”, “D. Jose” and “D. Maria I”, which make it possible to identify some technical, morphological and aesthetic solutions, in a particularly creative and receptive time of great foreign influences.

Metals

This collection is particularly important due to the presence of a significant set of religious implements, with emphasis on the processional crosses from the 17th century. XIV to century. XVI, a copper boiler from the century. XVI and offering plates from the century. XV, in brass, works from the Nuremberg workshops.

Numismatics

The integration of this important collection of numismatics occurs with the incorporation of the Legacy of José Nogueira Lobo, in 1932, recently expanded with the Legacy of Pereira da Gama.

The oldest specimen, from bolhão, in this collection was minted in the reign of D. Sancho I, king of Portugal from 1185 to 1211 and covers all periods of the Portuguese monarchy until the establishment of the republic.

Textiles

Due to its nature, combined with conservation reasons and peculiar exposure conditions, this set has remained in reserve. Objects as diverse as carpets, religious clothing, liturgical implements, bedspreads, fabric fragments, etc.

Most of the museum's collection of textiles is linked to liturgical regalia. The importance attributed to certain pieces of vestment, not only as a means of distinction or identification, but above all as a figurative support, through embroidery, is found in some pieces of great artistic significance.

With the presence of a silk embroidered arming cloth, from China and dating back to the 17th century. XVII, the artistic and geographical scope of this collection is extended.

Glass

The composition of this collection is mostly household objects from the mid-20th century, produced in the factories of Marinha Grande, which combine innovative shapes and innumerable shades.

Highlights include the pieces by Jorge Barradas (1897-1971), dating from 1930, produced in Marinha Grande, which follow a trend of reproduction and recreation of Portuguese motifs, which had already been developed since the beginning of the 1920s. artists, the decoration of enamel-painted glass produced in Marinha Grande during the 1940s and 1950s reflected precisely these themes, evoking regional and national traditions through aspects of Portuguese crafts and folklore.

Engraving

The museum's print collection consists of c. of 50 works. Highlight for the works of Angélica Kauffman, produced by the remarkable engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (Florence, 1727 – Lisbon, 1815).

A special reference to the work “Reconnaissance patrol in nobody's land” by Adriano de Sousa Lopes as an artist-official of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps and the only official Army painter in France in the years 1917 and 1918, with the mission of documenting the Portuguese participation on the western front, which produced in the aftermath of the conflict. Also part of this collection are works by José Contente, who became famous in the field of drawing and engraving, and an interesting series of engravings on Alfama by Attila Mendly De Vetyemy.

Documentary estate

This archive contains around 1,300 documents, 17 handwritten books and 4 separate stamps, covering a chronology that extends from the 13th to the 20th centuries, mostly from the notary office of the Cathedral of Viseu.

Part of this valuable documentary heritage, which, contrary to expectations, was not transferred to the newly created District Archive of Viseu (January 1932), was made known in 1955, when the lieutenant and musicologist Manuel Joaquim made public the news of a set of 15th-century missives, two antiphonaries and an 18th-century book copying the old privileges of the chapter, immediately advancing with a meritorious attempt at an inventory of a set of parchments.

Archeology

Although the MNGV archeology collection is not a collection of exceptional value, it nevertheless has some very important pieces. This is the case of a fragment of a votive altar, whose provenance is unknown, which is the result of the expression of popular devotion to a pre-Roman indigenous deity from the region of Viseu, COSEI, until now unknown, extending further south cult of this divinity, until then known in castros in the north of the country and in Galicia. Another work in the collection that proves once again the syncretism between Roman and indigenous religions is a votive altar with a Roman inscription dated to the 17th century. II, from Cavernães, with the following translation: Lúcio Valerio Caturo raised (this altar) to the god Lurúnio (in fulfillment of the vow) of his father, Sateilo, very grateful. The first news about the Cavernães inscriptions is given to us by Manuel Botelho Ribeiro Pereira in his work “Dialogos Morais e Politicos” (written between 1630 and 1636), after which other authors became interested, namely Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria, this altar is not it is described and it is not known when it entered the Museum.

Paço dos Bispos de Viseu The Grão Vasco National Museum is housed in a historic building in Viseu known as Paço dos Bispos de Viseu, Paço dos Três Escalões or Building of the Seminar, which has been classified as a National Monument since 1924.

Located in one of the wings of Praça do Adro, the greatest emblem of the heritage value of the city of Viseu, the Paço dos Três Escalões is an extensive and imposing granite massif that has, in shape and scale, no parallel in the city. Unique in the relationship between sobriety and monumentality, especially due to the north façade, much longer and elevated over huge granite rocks, it develops inside in long galleries, where they still punctuate, despite the different types of use and the profound alterations that it was subject to in the over time, several original elements, including the classicist fireplaces.

The building, built on the site of the former episcopal residence, the Paço dos Três Escalões, was originally intended to be a seminary or college for the training of the clergy. A commemorative tombstone certifies that the works began on June 6, 1593, extending through the first half of the 20th century. XVII. Although the authorship of the original project is unknown, it is probably due to an architect of Castilian origin, similarly to what happened with the current façade of the Cathedral, commissioned by João Moreno from Salamanca.

The project by the architect Eduardo Souto Moura, who between 2001 and 2003 freed the interior from the many interposed and distorting elements, adapted it to the requirements of a new museum program.

Versão portuguesa aqui.

GPS 40.66006234569439, -7.910919289169835

The Grão Vasco National Museum is located in the historic center of Viseu, in the former 16th-century Paço dos Bispos de Viseu, next to the cathedral.

It is not surprising that the painter Vasco Fernandes, made famous over the centuries with the epithet Grão Vasco, is the major reference, in terms of designation and content, of the Viseu museum. Founded on March 16, 1916, precisely for the purpose of preserving and valuing “the valuable paintings existing in the Cathedral of Viseu (...) the treasure of the chapter of the Cathedral, in addition to other objects of artistic or historical value”, the National Museum Grão Vasco (MNGV) had its first space in the Cathedral's premises until 1938.

Francisco de Almeida Moreira, its founder and director, owes the expansion of the collections, as well as the progressive conquest of the galleries of the building adjacent to the Cathedral, the Paço dos Três Escalões, which at the time of the foundation of the museum still housed various public services. .

The Museum's main collection consists of a remarkable set of altarpiece paintings, from the Cathedral, churches in the region and deposits in other museums, by Vasco Fernandes (c. 1475-1542), Grão Vasco, by collaborators and contemporaries. The collection also includes objects and figurative supports originally intended for liturgical practices (painting, sculpture, goldsmithery and ivories, from the Romanesque to the Baroque), mostly from the Cathedral and churches in the region, to which are added archeology pieces, an important collection of paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries, examples of Portuguese earthenware, jewellery, oriental porcelain, numismatics and furniture.

Collections

Painting

One of the virtues of this museum's painting collection is that it allows the enunciation of the main moments, movements and protagonists in the history of Portuguese painting.

With the aim of showing the work of the painter Vasco Fernandes, Grão Vasco, which were located in the sacristy of the Cathedral of Viseu, which after reforming the main altar of the cathedral and the side chapels were moved there, the Grão Vasco Museum is founded. through the perseverance of Almeida Moreira, its first director.

After this nucleus, other works by artists from the region joined the larger works of the “Portuguese Primitives” period, with the use of occasional acquisitions and deposit requests, namely to the National Museum of Ancient Art.

The enlightened way in which the first director of this Museum organizes this collection based on the inestimable value of the set of Renaissance paintings, which took extra care and was mobilized by high criteria for choosing works from the 17th to 20th centuries, thus intending to create a comprehensive museographic collection , which allowed for the possibility of incorporating pieces of relevant painting value from later periods, to place them next to those of Vasco Fernandes. Even having, in 1917, received the first set of works from the National Museum of Contemporary Art, expanded through acquisitions in salons, auctions and directly from artists, thus constituting an interesting and significant collection of paintings from the 19th-20th century.

Sculpture

From the expressive collection of sculptures, and from a more recent chronology, namely from the 13th, 16th and 15th centuries, the collection allows, with some exemplarity, to evoke the vast Christian iconographic repertoire of the Middle Ages.

Stone sculpture dominated the production from the workshops in Coimbra, the 15th-century Resurrected Christ, which emerged from these workshops, of surprising physical beauty, and the humanist dimension of this figuration is undoubtedly representative of the interpretation of the spirituality of the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Average.

The collection includes a vast array of sacred images from the 17th and 18th centuries, which highlight the essential characteristics of the artistic production of these centuries.

The renewal of major sculpture in Portugal takes place through the activity of Italian and French sculptors in the first half of the 18th century. From one of the main foreign sculptors who settled in Portugal in the Pedrino-Johannine period, the Frenchman Claude Laprade, the chapter of the cathedral of Viseu commissioned three sculptures for the lateral retables – two still in situ – and the sculpture of Saint Anne and the Virgin , executed in 1723, dismounted years later, Still from this period, the presence of numerous full-figured images, of holy bishops and Franciscan saints and martyrs, from the production of Lisbon workshops, mostly from the extinct congregations religions of the capital.

Ceramics

The ceramics collection, one of the most numerous and diversified in the museum's collection, constitutes the visible expression of Portuguese collecting at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, when prevailing fashion and taste led to the formation of the main private collections of this type of objects, especially encouraged when museums, on an institutional level, welcome and express them.

The MNGV ceramic collections are essentially of three types: oriental porcelain, Portuguese earthenware and European ceramics.

The earthenware from the 19th century collection. XVII, produced in Portuguese workshops, evoke the Portuguese Expansion in the East, often resorting to the imitation of Chinese decorative models, or resorting to the typical blue and white painting, so well known through Ming porcelain.

It features some emblazoned earthenware, pharmacy containers and a rare reliquary bust.

Drawings

Valuable collection of drawings of unquestionable artistic quality, inscribed in the temporal universe that goes from the 19th century to the 19th century. XVIII to the 2nd half of the century. XX

On the broad theme of “Body”, there are detailed studies from the figure to the finished drawing, revealing the languages ​​and choreographies of the body, naked or inhabited.

On the “Sacred and the Profane”, the MNGV drawings illustrate both tendencies, with the continuity of secular themes until the mundane compositions, in the course of the century. XIX and XX.

For the 18th century, the iconographic discourse was staged around the humanized images of Mary, saints, apostles and angels. The preparatory religious drawings for major works are by Vieira Lusitano and are essentially descriptive in nature. Finished compositional or autonomous drawings find in Domingos Sequeira the last breath of theological significance.

“Landscape and narrative”, in this collection, one glimpses the contours and form of a new aesthetic feeling by the hand of Tomás da Anunciação, who transcribes in an expressive design elements that inhabit nature: animals and men.

The “Portrait”, the highlight goes to the drawings by Columbano – who gained fame as an excellent portraitist, having received and executed numerous orders from clients and distinguished personalities of his time – even though they are finished studies for a major work, and which have made in the absence of a live model, they manage to faithfully and vigorously reproduce the characters, capturing the presence of the model in the fiction of the portrait.

With António Carneiro, he breaks definitively with the conventional gender portrait. This is an intimate record of the portrayed in which the artist intends to communicate the subject's psychological plausibility and emotional charge, penetrating his essence, testifying to a relationship of complicity between the artist and the model.

Jewelery

The silverware collection is made up of pieces of use and apparatus (17th to 20th century). In this, the lavenders stand out, pieces engraved with the family coat of arms and other insignia of ownership, being especially important the set pieces of ceremonial use, coming from Italy, formerly belonging to the Bishop of Viseu D. Júlio Francisco de Oliveira (1740-1765 ), composed of two liturgical chalices, a box of hosts, three salvers and an aguamanil.

Furniture

The furniture collection consists of a significant number of pieces that integrate examples of different types, in a chronological universe that goes from the 17th century to the second half of the 20th century. They reveal the refined taste of provincial nobles and the sumptuousness of the ecclesiastical palaces.

Portuguese civil furniture is widely represented with the three great styles that marked the 18th century in Portugal, namely “D. João V”, “D. Jose” and “D. Maria I”, which make it possible to identify some technical, morphological and aesthetic solutions, in a particularly creative and receptive time of great foreign influences.

Metals

This collection is particularly important due to the presence of a significant set of religious implements, with emphasis on the processional crosses from the 17th century. XIV to century. XVI, a copper boiler from the century. XVI and offering plates from the century. XV, in brass, works from the Nuremberg workshops.

Numismatics

The integration of this important collection of numismatics occurs with the incorporation of the Legacy of José Nogueira Lobo, in 1932, recently expanded with the Legacy of Pereira da Gama.

The oldest specimen, from bolhão, in this collection was minted in the reign of D. Sancho I, king of Portugal from 1185 to 1211 and covers all periods of the Portuguese monarchy until the establishment of the republic.

Textiles

Due to its nature, combined with conservation reasons and peculiar exposure conditions, this set has remained in reserve. Objects as diverse as carpets, religious clothing, liturgical implements, bedspreads, fabric fragments, etc.

Most of the museum's collection of textiles is linked to liturgical regalia. The importance attributed to certain pieces of vestment, not only as a means of distinction or identification, but above all as a figurative support, through embroidery, is found in some pieces of great artistic significance.

With the presence of a silk embroidered arming cloth, from China and dating back to the 17th century. XVII, the artistic and geographical scope of this collection is extended.

Glass

The composition of this collection is mostly household objects from the mid-20th century, produced in the factories of Marinha Grande, which combine innovative shapes and innumerable shades.

Highlights include the pieces by Jorge Barradas (1897-1971), dating from 1930, produced in Marinha Grande, which follow a trend of reproduction and recreation of Portuguese motifs, which had already been developed since the beginning of the 1920s. artists, the decoration of enamel-painted glass produced in Marinha Grande during the 1940s and 1950s reflected precisely these themes, evoking regional and national traditions through aspects of Portuguese crafts and folklore.

Engraving

The museum's print collection consists of c. of 50 works. Highlight for the works of Angélica Kauffman, produced by the remarkable engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (Florence, 1727 – Lisbon, 1815).

A special reference to the work “Reconnaissance patrol in nobody's land” by Adriano de Sousa Lopes as an artist-official of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps and the only official Army painter in France in the years 1917 and 1918, with the mission of documenting the Portuguese participation on the western front, which produced in the aftermath of the conflict. Also part of this collection are works by José Contente, who became famous in the field of drawing and engraving, and an interesting series of engravings on Alfama by Attila Mendly De Vetyemy.

Documentary estate

This archive contains around 1,300 documents, 17 handwritten books and 4 separate stamps, covering a chronology that extends from the 13th to the 20th centuries, mostly from the notary office of the Cathedral of Viseu.

Part of this valuable documentary heritage, which, contrary to expectations, was not transferred to the newly created District Archive of Viseu (January 1932), was made known in 1955, when the lieutenant and musicologist Manuel Joaquim made public the news of a set of 15th-century missives, two antiphonaries and an 18th-century book copying the old privileges of the chapter, immediately advancing with a meritorious attempt at an inventory of a set of parchments.

Archeology

Although the MNGV archeology collection is not a collection of exceptional value, it nevertheless has some very important pieces. This is the case of a fragment of a votive altar, whose provenance is unknown, which is the result of the expression of popular devotion to a pre-Roman indigenous deity from the region of Viseu, COSEI, until now unknown, extending further south cult of this divinity, until then known in castros in the north of the country and in Galicia. Another work in the collection that proves once again the syncretism between Roman and indigenous religions is a votive altar with a Roman inscription dated to the 17th century. II, from Cavernães, with the following translation: Lúcio Valerio Caturo raised (this altar) to the god Lurúnio (in fulfillment of the vow) of his father, Sateilo, very grateful. The first news about the Cavernães inscriptions is given to us by Manuel Botelho Ribeiro Pereira in his work “Dialogos Morais e Politicos” (written between 1630 and 1636), after which other authors became interested, namely Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria, this altar is not it is described and it is not known when it entered the Museum.

Paço dos Bispos de Viseu The Grão Vasco National Museum is housed in a historic building in Viseu known as Paço dos Bispos de Viseu, Paço dos Três Escalões or Building of the Seminar, which has been classified as a National Monument since 1924.

Located in one of the wings of Praça do Adro, the greatest emblem of the heritage value of the city of Viseu, the Paço dos Três Escalões is an extensive and imposing granite massif that has, in shape and scale, no parallel in the city. Unique in the relationship between sobriety and monumentality, especially due to the north façade, much longer and elevated over huge granite rocks, it develops inside in long galleries, where they still punctuate, despite the different types of use and the profound alterations that it was subject to in the over time, several original elements, including the classicist fireplaces.

The building, built on the site of the former episcopal residence, the Paço dos Três Escalões, was originally intended to be a seminary or college for the training of the clergy. A commemorative tombstone certifies that the works began on June 6, 1593, extending through the first half of the 20th century. XVII. Although the authorship of the original project is unknown, it is probably due to an architect of Castilian origin, similarly to what happened with the current façade of the Cathedral, commissioned by João Moreno from Salamanca.

The project by the architect Eduardo Souto Moura, who between 2001 and 2003 freed the interior from the many interposed and distorting elements, adapted it to the requirements of a new museum program.