Annemarie Jordan Gschwend

This is an absolutely amazing book lavished with beautiful photographs and blessed with well-written articles that reflect the latest in scholarship--a combination that is a rare treat in itself, much less when its topic is so fresh and little-known as Lisbon in the 16th century, when it was a global city bursting with exotica and luxury goods. The cover is a section of the Rua Nova paintings of Lisbon's main shopping street when at its height in the 1500s--a painting once lost and only found in the back room of a bookshop by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the famous pre-Raphaelite artist, in the spring of 1866. Its streets show black-robed citizens, chamber-pot bearers, religious figures, police, nobles, dark-skinned slaves (one carrying a large jug on his back in chains, sign of an attempted escapee), half-breed children, and even a turkey, newly brought to Lisbon from the New World. It was a world of exploration and colonisation and the riches that came with such foreign conquests, that lasted only 100 years when Portugal's monopoly of the Pacific Ocean was curtailed with the emergence of the Dutch and English East India companies. Lisbon's glory days came to a final climactic end when the city was destroyed in a disastrous earthquake and tsunami in 1755.

This is not a book about Portugal's maritime explorations and conquests, but rather a look into the financial and material rewards that came as a result. Begin with the epilogue, which tells the story of Rossetti's purchase, before dipping into the 14 articles, each on an aspect of Lisbon and its sensational exotic booty that turned it into a global city, its shops bursting with foreign wares that were sought by the elite and crowned heads of Europe. The details are amazing--Queen Catarina of Austria's Ming Chinese porcelain shopping list, examples of rock crystal carvings of the baby Jesus probably made for India's wealthiest new Christians, Japanese Namban screens with their detailed scenes of the unloading of Portuguese ships with Martaban jars, porcelains and textiles. The focus is on the cosmopolitan nature of the city, and the goods available in its shops--ivories, crystals, textiles, bezoar stones, gems, porcelain, jewellery, lacquerware, and even exotic birds and animals. The articles are all richly illustrated, often with artefacts shown for the first time.

Kudos to the two editors of this handsome and intelligent volume (Annemarie Jordan Gschwend and Kate Lowe).… (mere)