Sacred Art and the Treasuries of the Cathedrals

The term sacred art designates the body of works qualified for and intended for liturgical worship — distinct from the broader field of religious art precisely by virtue of their function in the service of the altar. In Portugal, this universe encompasses silver and gold goldsmithing, vestments and embroidery, the liturgical implements, reliquaries and devotional images, accumulated over more than eight centuries of Christian life centred on the cathedrals, monasteries and churches. Together they form one of the country’s richest artistic repositories, traversed by idioms ranging from the Romanesque to the Baroque and by the hands of both Portuguese and foreign artisans.

Goldsmithing and liturgical implements

The most valuable core of these collections is, as a rule, the sacred goldwork: chalices, patens, monstrances, processional crosses, thuribles and pyxes, wrought in silver and, in the exceptional pieces, in enamelled gold. Function determines form — to keep and display the consecrated Host, to hold relics, to carry the incense — but each age impressed its own style, and so Portuguese goldsmithing constitutes almost a parallel history of taste and technique.

The masterpiece of the genre is the Monstrance of Belém, commissioned by King Manuel I for the Monastery of Santa Maria de Belém and attributed to the goldsmith and playwright Gil Vicente, completed in 1506. It was wrought from some seven kilograms of gold from the tribute of the Ruler of Kilwa, on the East African coast, brought back by Vasco da Gama on his return from the second voyage to India. Conceived as a late-Gothic micro-architecture, it presents the twelve apostles kneeling, the dove of the Holy Spirit in white enamelled gold and, at the summit, God the Father holding the globe of the Universe — a material synthesis of the Most Holy Trinity. It is preserved today in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, within its benchmark collection of national sacred art.

In a monstrance or a reliquary, the precious material is never an end in itself: gold and silver exist to make the invisible visible, offering the faithful an object of contemplation.

Vestments, reliquaries and the cathedral treasuries

Alongside the goldwork, the treasuries include the vestments — chasubles, copes, dalmatics and altar frontals — in silks, velvets and gold embroidery, which document the history of liturgical textiles and of the embroiderers’ workshops. The reliquaries, in turn, guard venerated fragments, from a saint’s relic to the processional cross, and give material form to devotion in goldwork, ivory and gemstones.

These ensembles took shape in the cathedrals over the centuries and, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, began to be turned into museums. The Museum of Coimbra Cathedral, opened in 1884, was the country’s first museum of sacred art and is today incorporated into the Museu Nacional Machado de Castro, which brings together goldwork from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, including the chalice of D. Gueda Mendes and the treasure of the Holy Queen Isabel. The Treasury-Museum of Braga Cathedral, created in 1930, preserves the chalice and paten of St Geraldo, from the eleventh century, and an Islamic ivory casket from the beginning of the eleventh century.

A living heritage

Unlike many museum collections, sacred art frequently retains its function: pieces that continue to go out in procession or to serve in the liturgy, binding the object to the gesture for which it was created. Its safeguarding thus intersects with the life of communities and with the stewardship of religious heritage, and falls within the broader field of Portuguese decorative arts, where goldwork, textiles and gilded woodcarving share techniques and workshops. To study these treasures is to follow, piece by piece, eight centuries of faith, power and artistic mastery.