I watched with interest a TV programme about the conservation work on the vast trove of paintings in the Rachol seminary by the London School of Picture and Frame Conservation, and their students (Restoration Studio Goa).
I was especially riveted by a massive oil-on-canvas painting of Dom Sebastião (1554-1578) of Portugal.
It appeared unsigned. Who painted it? Was it painted here, or brought over from overseas?
I happened to be also leafing through a book ‘Encompassing the globe: Portugal and the world in the 16th & 17th centuries’ (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2007).
In a chapter ‘Incarnate Images: The Jesuits’ Artistic Program in Portuguese Asia and beyond’, American-Canadian author and art historian Gauvin Alexander Bailey suggests that native, even some unconverted artists were responsible for much of the Jesuit art. A letter from Fr. Miguel Vaz to D. João III (November 1545) praises the skill of ‘gentile’ painters, but then says in the same letter that the Devil was behind the success of the most important such painter in Goa! A bizarre comment, as it would make those who engaged the painter’s services the Devil’s accomplices!
Although some artists were asked to convert as part of their contract, there is no evidence this actually happened. But by 1606, “so few skilled Christian artists were in Portuguese Asia” that any prohibitory edicts were rescinded or ignored.
The text on a scroll on the painting’s upper right corner states that its subject is “El Rey D. Sebastião, Fundador deste Collegio” (King Sebastian, founder of this College). The crowned Portuguese royal coat-of-arms is held aloft in the sky by an angel (signifying the house of Aviz) and a large bird (an eagle?).
A youthful, auburn-haired king in plumed helmet and battle gear gazes at us, astride a magnificent white steed which dominates the canvas. Although the fact-checking website Snopes dismisses as urban legend the belief that a horse’s two front hooves raised above the ground in statues and paintings signify that its rider died in battle, it’s certainly true here. This leads one to guess that the painting was executed after his death.
I could locate just five other paintings of D. Sebastião (three by the Portuguese court painter Cristóvão de Morais),
all executed in his lifetime, stylistically very different from this one, and none of them on horseback, therefore making the Rachol Sebastian quite special.
The artist has ‘zoomed in’ on D. Sebastião amid a scene of carnage. One sees a fallen horse, an armour-clad knight, and two bare-chested men in the foreground, of darker complexion, and more corpses further back. The king’s sword is sheathed in its scabbard on his left. A brandished sword might have disturbed the composition and further enlarged the scale of the painting.
In pre-1961 Goa, schoolchildren learned Portuguese history, but this was quite understandably expunged after 1961. So I knew nothing about Portuguese monarchs in my childhood except for what my dad told me. But in these later decades of my life, as I delve into Goan history, a working knowledge of Portugal’s dynasties does become relevant.
As you might expect, he was named Sebastian as he was born on the saint’s feast day (20 January), until then quite an unusual royal family name. He was heir-apparent at birth, born just two weeks after the death of his father João Manuel, Prince of Portugal. At the subsequent death of his paternal grandfather D. João III, he ascended to the Portuguese throne aged just three, ruling through regents until he came of age.
His formative years were heavily influenced by religious orders, the Theatines but especially the Jesuits, with particular reference to Aleixo de Meneses (1559-1617, who would eventually be consecrated Archbishop of Goa in 1595).
His many failed attempts at marriage have inevitably led to speculation about his sexual orientation.
A topic with echoes for our time: he ordered two new hospitals built when the bubonic plague ravaged Lisbon (1569), and sought medical help from Spain. He also built several shelters (Recolhimentos), Recolhimento de Santa Maria and Recolhimento dos Meninos (shelters for children) and provided wet nurses for orphaned infants.
Portugal’s greatest bard Luís Vaz de Camões (c. 1524 or 1525 -1580) was Sebastian’s contemporary. Camões presented the king his masterpiece Os Lusíadas in 1572
and dedicated a poem to him that won Camões a royal pension.
Again relevant to our present: Sebastian initiated the Celeiros Comuns (Communal Granaries) in 1576, agrarian reform that helped farmers tide over poor harvests.
Unfortunately, Sebastian’s legacy will forever be inextricably linked to the cause of his demise, which I think the painting references, the Battle of Ksar-el-Kebir ( Alcácer Quibir, the Battle of the Three Kings) in Morocco, 4 August 1578.
In the 1990 Portuguese film ‘Non’, ou A Vã Glória de Mandar’ (No, or the Vain Glory of Command), directed by Manoel de Oliveira (available on YouTube with English subtitles and well worth watching), it is called “the greatest disaster in our history.”
Very briefly: Sebastian used the pretext of aiding the deposed Moroccan sultan Abu Abdallah Mohammed II wrest back his throne from the new Sultan Abd Al-Malik I (uncle of Abu Abdallah Mohammed II) to indulge in impetuous, ill-advised, ill-prepared, vainglorious military adventurism, expansionism fuelled also by his own fanatical crusading zeal. Not only were Sebastian’s forces vastly outnumbered (although technologically superior), but he lacked tactical skill or experience. Worse, he paid no heed to his own war council.
All three aforementioned monarchs died that day. As Sebastian had no heir and most of the Portuguese nobility who might have been in line of succession also perished in battle, his death effectively ended the House of Aviz dynasty, which had ruled Portugal for two centuries. The financial cost of the madcap exploit (which also would include paying ransom money to free those Portuguese nobles taken prisoner by the enemy) bankrupted the treasury.
Philip II of Spain, the default nearest male claimant to the throne (Sebastian’s uncle) invaded Portugal, leading to the ‘Iberian Union’ of Spain and Portugal that would last from 1580 to 1640, when the Portuguese Restoration War established the House of Braganza as Portugal’s new ruling dynasty.
Sebastin’s story was the inspiration two centuries later (1843) for a grand opera, ‘Dom Sébastien’ by Italian operatic composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848). It is a lush orientalist romp (with even a baritone role for Camões), but which one critic panned as “a funeral in five acts”.
Although Sebastian’s corpse was recovered, doubts that he might have somehow survived led to the ‘Sebastianism’ messianic myth, the belief that he, the Hidden One (O Encoberto) will someday reappear ‘one foggy morning’ to save Portugal in its darkest hour and create a global Portuguese ‘Fifth’ Empire.
There is even a fanciful theory that Miguel de Cervantes’ famous novel ‘Don Quixote’ (1605) is a satire of the Sebastian myth, offering tantalising clues from the work to substantiate it, but they don’t sound conclusive. Click here for other literature in this vein.
Portuguese novelist and medical doctor António Lobo Antunes (b. 1915), in his novel As Naus (1988). The Return of the Caravels, trans. Gregory Rabassa (2003),
Sebastian features prominently among the danse macabre of parodied national heroes in 1970s post-revolutionary Portugal at the ignominious end of the colonial empire that had begun with the setting forth of those caravels more than four centuries earlier.
One could argue that the Rachol Sebastian, ‘hidden’ behind decades if not centuries of layers of dust, grime and varnish, has ‘reappeared’ thanks to the conservation work.
(An edited version of this article was published on 01 July 2021 in my column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Navhind Times Goa India)
Update: On 25 February 2023, I was able to get a closer look at the painting in Rachol, thanks to the initiative of the Museum of Christian Art, led by their volunteer guide Clive Figueiredo.
At the lower left corner, there is a signature, dated 1892.
I am unable to read the name. Was this the painter or some ‘restorer’? They tended to add their names to the paintings they worked on, as we saw for ourselves in other paintings in the seminary and elsewhere.
Luis Dias 