From Rome to Lisbon
COMISSIONER
Teresa Leonor ValeORGANISATION
Museu de São Roque - Santa Casa da Misericórdia de LisboaDesigned around the so-called Weale Album – the majority of the drawings in which are being shown in Portugal for the first time – the exhibition From Rome to Lisbon: an album for the Magnanimous King is built around the key idea of the journey between Rome and Lisbon during the reign of King John V.
It is therefore important to approach the journey as a process of cultural and artistic exchange, recognise what actually travelled – words, drawings, works of art – and get to know the agents promoting that journey: the sovereign himself, of course, but also the ambassadors who, from Rome, tried to ensure the best satisfaction of orders and commissions from the capital of the kingdom and sent the pieces.
In an attempt to better reconstitute this journey, the exhibition shows, in addition to the drawings from the Album (30 in total, distributed over two exhibition sections, 15 each time), works by the same artists who produced those drawings that were included in the volume compiled by the ambassador Pereira de Sampaio for the Magnanimous King in the forties of the 18th century, and that allow us, in their three-dimensionality, to provide a kind of materialisation of the drawings, in a more effective approach to the missing pieces.
