[Paper:] Nuno Senos (Lisbon): The Great Hall of the Ducal Palace of Vila Viçosa

From the 1530s to the 1560s, duke Teodosio de Bragança conducted a series of major construction campaigns in his family’s palace in Vila Viçosa providing the building with a new wing faced with a splendid marble façade (the first secular renaissance façade in the country) and a series of new rooms. Among these, a monumental staircase leads to an also new great hall of grand proportions, decorated with expensive mural paintings. In this paper I shall use recently located documentation to analyze the relevance of this space within the duke’s architectural commissions relating the physical characteristics of the room (including its place within the palace’s circuits) with the events that took place inside.

Bibliographical notice

Nuno Senos is professor of Early Modern Art and Architecture at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He completed his Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His research and teaching interests span the architecture of early modern Portugal and its overseas possessions as well as the impact of empire in art consumption in Portugal in the 16^th century. He is also Associate Researcher at the Portuguese Center for Global History at the Universidade Nova, Lisbon, where he works with the research group on The Arts and the Portuguese Expansion.

This paper will be presented at the international conference:

State-Rooms of Royal and Princely Palaces in Europe (14th-16th c.): Spaces, Images, Rituals – Lisbon/Sintra, 15-17 March 2017 (link)

which aims to put the Sala dos brasões in Sintra in its European context as a royal/princely state-room. It is a follow up to the “Heraldry in Medieval and Early modern State-rooms” held in March 2016 in Münster, which, for its part, focused on the heraldic décor of medieval and early modern state-rooms as such.