No art is as closely tied to the image of Portugal as azulejos, the glazed and painted ceramic tiles covering churches, cloisters, palaces, fountains, stations, shops and entire house fronts. The name does not come from azul, blue, but from the Arabic az-zulayj, "small polished stone".
Origins
The first tiles arrived in Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century from Seville, where Mudéjar workshops made geometric tiles using the cuerda seca or arista technique, which separated colours with small ridges. King Manuel I, after a journey to Spain, had them used throughout the National Palace of Sintra, which still holds one of the finest ensembles of Mudéjar azulejos (see Sintra).
From maiolica to carpets
In the sixteenth century the maiolica technique arrived from Italy, via Flanders and Spain, allowing painting directly on the glazed surface, as on a canvas. Potters began producing in Portugal and creating figurative compositions. In the seventeenth century "carpet" azulejos spread, polychrome geometric and floral patterns repeated endlessly, covering whole church walls like ceramic tapestries.
Blue and white
At the end of the seventeenth century, influenced by Chinese porcelain and Dutch Delftware, fashion changed: the great blue and white panels were born, true ceramic paintings with religious, mythological, hunting and court scenes, by masters such as António de Oliveira Bernardes. It was the golden age of the Portuguese azulejo, which was also exported to Brazil. After the 1755 earthquake, rebuilding Lisbon called for simpler, mass-produced tiles, the Pombaline patterns.
Façades
In the nineteenth century it became common to clad house façades in azulejos, a fashion said to have been brought by Portuguese returning from Brazil, where it protected walls from damp. The streets of Lisbon, Porto, Aveiro and Ovar filled with colourful houses with relief tiles and geometric patterns. In the early twentieth century Art Nouveau and the painter Jorge Colaço revived large narrative panels: his masterpiece is the hall of São Bento station in Porto, with some twenty thousand azulejos telling the history of Portugal.
The modern azulejo
In the twentieth century artists such as Maria Keil decorated the stations of the Lisbon metro, now a true underground museum of contemporary ceramic art, and the azulejo entered modern architecture and street art. Sadly, theft of azulejos from old façades was a serious problem for years, countered by conservation campaigns.
Where to see them
The place not to miss is Lisbon's Museu Nacional do Azulejo, in the Madre de Deus convent, with five centuries of history and a famous 23-metre panel showing Lisbon before the earthquake. Other unmissable places: the Fronteira Palace in Lisbon, the National Palace of Sintra, São Bento station and the churches of Santo Ildefonso and the Capela das Almas in Porto, the university of Évora and the church of Nossa Senhora da Consolação in Elvas. See also Portuguese crafts.