Pattern and Carpet Azulejo (17th Century)

The seventeenth century is the decisive moment in which the azulejo asserts itself as a truly identity-defining art in Portugal. If the preceding century had been dominated by the importation and learning of the Flemish and Italian techniques of maiolica, it is now that the workshops of Lisbon find a language of their own, capable of covering the great surfaces of churches, convents and palaces with economy of means and enormous decorative effect. The key to that transformation was the pattern azulejo: the repetition of a single ceramic module, which made it possible to cover entire walls from a small number of designs.

From chequered tilework to the carpet

In the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, the enxaquetado (chequered tilework) became widespread — a composition made of monochrome tiles alternating in two colours, white and blue or white and green, arranged diagonally. The effect, dynamic and geometric, evokes the old medieval ceramic pavements and prolongs, in its structure, the memory of the azulejo of Hispano-Moorish origin and its repetitive patterns. In its richest versions, the enxaquetado incorporated scattered decorative elements that broke the austerity of the chequerboard.

From these geometric matrices develops the century’s most characteristic typology: the carpet azulejo. The name describes its visual workings precisely — surfaces obtained by the multiplication of a single model, forming continuous, polychrome patterns that imitate large carpets and textiles. These compositions were almost always bounded by borders, friezes and bands that framed them within the architecture, integrating the covering into the building as a whole.

The carpet azulejo resolves, with elegance, a practical problem: covering much with little. Beauty here is born of modular repetition and rhythm, not of the singularity of each piece.

Polychromy and motifs from the East

The seventeenth-century palette is frankly polychrome, playing on the blue, yellow, green and white inherited from maiolica. Upon this base are drawn plant-based, floral and geometric motifs of Mannerist grammar, in which roses, camellias and garlands intertwine in calculated rhythms. From the middle of the century, the importation of printed textiles from India introduced a new repertoire — the compositions of birds and foliage, with flowers, animals and birds of Eastern inspiration, much used in altar frontals produced in the potteries of Lisbon.

These solutions coexist with the albarradas, vases of flowers flanked by birds, dolphins or infant figures, and already announce the figurative taste that would dominate the following century. The pattern azulejo does not disappear with the turn of the century: it continues, with variations, into the twentieth century, but it is in the seventeenth that it defines its essential language.

A chapter in the decorative arts

As a major branch of the Portuguese decorative arts, seventeenth-century tilework exemplifies the way in which a utilitarian technique becomes a work of art applied to architecture. The most significant ensembles have survived in churches and chapels across the country, and their systematic study today finds its reference at the Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon, which holds altar frontals and pattern coverings from this period. The counterpoint to this polychrome exuberance would arrive later, with the rise of the blue-and-white azulejo in the Dutch taste, which would replace colour with figurative narrative from the end of the century.