FOREWORD
FROM LISBON TO JAPAN
São Roque welcomes you to the Grand Palais, to this depository for Lisbon's Rua Nova dos Mercadores (New Merchants Street) where you can admire precious objects arrived to the capital’s seaport in the Portuguese caravels from India, Japan and other exotic faraway lands.
On arriving in Africa and in the Far East, the Portuguese, determined and commercially minded, focused on establishing a complex network of diplomatic and trading relations, as well as a chain of commercial outposts that would ensure global control over the African, Far-Eastern and Southern Atlantic maritime trade. Simultaneously they targeted the development of scientific, cultural, aesthetic and artistic synergies that remain of considerable relevance in the 21st century.
In its determination, 16th century Portugal will pioneer countless civilizational interactions of unimaginable magnitude that will be felt for centuries to come; introducing fire arms to Japan, astrolabes and greenbeans to China, engaging on the abhorrent Atlantic slave trade, taking tea to England and pepper to the New World, bringing Chinese silks, spices and Indian medicines into Europe and even an elephant and a rhinoceros to be gifted to the Pope.
For the first time in History, Europe was flooded by fascinating exotic goods and by remote and mutually unknown peoples' that could see, touch and communicate
directly with each other.
Welcome to this voyage through three hundred years
of Portuguese Art.
Lisbon, September 12th 1519 + 500
Mário Roque & A. A. Lima