The National Museum of Ancient Art is the most important art museum from the 12th to the 19th centuries in Portugal, housing the most important public collection of ancient art in the country. Its collections — around 40,000 pieces — include European painting, sculpture, drawing and decorative arts, as well as collections of Asian (India, China, Japan, etc.) and African (Afro-Portuguese ivories) settled between Europe and the Orient following the voyages of discovery – which began in the 15th century and of which Portugal was a pioneer nation.
The museum is located in a late 17th century palace, built by D. Francisco de Távora, first Count of Alvor. The Palace is known as Palácio de Alvor-Pombal because, in 1759, after the Távoras Process, the building was acquired at auction by Paulo de Carvalho e Mendonça, brother of Marquês de Pombal who, on the death of the former, became the owner. of the palace. In 1879 the palace was rented, and later acquired, by the Portuguese State to install the National Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology, officially opened on May 11, 1884.
Pedro Alexandrino de Carvalho (1729-1810) was the most productive painter active in Lisbon in the decades that marked the reconstruction of the capital after the great earthquake. His career as a painter gained notoriety from 1780 onwards, unfolding in multiple commissions. A quick and tireless worker, he was responsible for the execution of many paintings of ceilings and altarpieces for churches in Lisbon and other locations, having also worked on the decoration of several palaces. His graphic work, of which we find some of the best examples here, allows us to get to know one of the most successful Portuguese artists of the late Baroque generation. Less known than some of his contemporaries who benefited from a foreign education, he surpassed them, however, in his very own compositional schemes, due to the freedom and dynamism of his compositions. Source: https://agendalx.pt/events/event/pedro-alexandrino-de-carvalho/
Giovanni Baglione (1566-1643) was one of the fundamental painters of Roman painting at the beginning of the 17th century when the pontifical city, under Pope Borghese Paul V, confirmed itself as the artistic center of all Europe. Despite the bad reputation created for him in a famous process that opposed him to Caravaggio and the Caravagescians, in 1603, Baglione accumulated great orders, fame and honors such as those of Prince of the Academy of S. Lucas and Knight of Christ, and he was important not only for his painting but for the writings on art he published in 1639 and 1642. He worked on the decorations of the Vatican Library, the Lateran Palace, the Charterhouse of Naples and for the great churches of Rome, in an intense production of multiple influences. This St. John the Baptist, signed and dated 1610, takes up one of Baglione’s most cherished themes, who treated it repeatedly, almost always in a young model, exploring the human figure with a sculptural character of great monumentality. Source: https://agendalx.pt/events/event/o-belo-a-seducao-e-a-partilha-3/