In/Visibilities and Pseudo/Visibilities: the black woman’s portrait in the Bemposta chapel in Lisbon (1791-1792)

Giuseppe Trono’s painting in the Bemposta chapel, produced in 1791-1792, is the most representative artwork related to the social policies implemented by the Queen Mary I. This article focuses on the historical and artistic analyses to frame the political and religious context, and to clarify its misunderstood iconography. The cult of the Sacred Heart, instituted in 1779 by Pope Pius VI, is crucial to reframe the meaning of the painting. The new approach offers an original interpretation of the black woman who is represented in it. Her identity and biography are brought to the light. Her subjectivity is compared to the more known biographies of the enslaved black dwarfs, who lived at the Portuguese royal court, mainly the female dwarf Rosa of the Sacred Heart, portraited in Mascarada Nupcial by José Conrado Roza (1788). Her in/visibility is compared, also, to the ‘silence’ about the black presence in the painting The earthquake of 1755 by João Glama (2nd half of 18th century).


The Bemposta chapel in Lisbon (1791-1792)
In the royal palace of Bemposta, the chapel is a sumptuous building, which interior and façade were integrally restructured and redecorated in the second half of the 18 th century (Academia Militar, 2005). but, until recently, it was underestimated and misunderstood (Raggi & Degortes 2018).
It was underestimated because of the reductive critical appreciation by the art historian José Augusto França, who considered Giuseppe Trono as a painter without talent and the painting "as a curious mix of styles: very conventional in the sacred figures; more bright in the common people; and even without avoiding to copy and imitate the portraits, painted two years before by the Irish painter Thomas Hickey, in the royal family's figures" (França, 1967: 77). Indubitably, the painting's iconography is very unusual. It is not based on recognizable patterns and it shows, on the right, Queen Mary I and the royal family; on the left, a group of people in which women and children prevail; above, Our Lady of Immaculate Conception who gazes at the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the past, this altarpiece was referred with different titles, mostly with a periphrastic title, such as "a painting with the royal family and Our Lady of Immaculate Conception" (Borges, 1986: 154). The concepts of the Immaculate Conception and the presence of royal family were stressed.
Nonetheless, in the rare descriptions dedicated to this painting, who most attracted the attention was the black woman, painted in the center of the group on the left.

In/Visibilities
In these descriptions, the black woman's presence in the group of common people was referred to reinforce the idea of the Portuguese multi-ethnic and peaceful society (Moita, 2005(Moita, /1955. This approach characterized the luso-tropicalist ideas about the Portuguese colonial domination in the early-modern and modern world. Thus, this kind of visibility perpetuated the false image of the Portuguese colonial domination as colonialismo brando (Bethencourt, 2015;Rossa & Ribeiro, 2015). The black woman remained 'invisible' without identity, name and history, as well as everyone else in the left group.
For that and other reasons, the painting as a whole continued misunderstood.   Undoubtedly, Zacharias-Félix Doumet visited the Bemposta chapel and he was impressed by this Trono's painting, specially by the black woman's figure. Doumet did not recognize the original iconography, but only the singularity of the painting and, in his watercolor, he reconstructed another 'reality'. He combined the two groups, painted by Trono on the right and on the left of the canvas, into only one. In the center, the black woman maintains the same gaze, but she holds in her hands a folding fan, no more a rosary as in the original painting. The two white women at her side (the woman with the newborn in the arms, and the woman who looks at her) become three and they sit around the black lady, and their attitudes seem more attracted to chatting with each other than praying. The female child who prays kneeling near the little dog is reconverted in a little boy who plays with a big dog. The standing men are dressed in different clothes that correspond to their different social roles, but they seem more interested in conversing than in praying. Only the two women who pray in front of the altar, the first with fan and rosary, are represented in more hieratic and devoted attitudes. Their clothes in flowered tissue, the veil, and the jewels that can be glimpsed below connect these women with the female members of the royal family in Trono's altarpiece. Zacharie-Félix Doumet totally ignored the images of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception and the Sacred Heart of Jesus painted in the altarpiece, and transformed the painting into a secular scene that takes place in a sacred space. The high number of portraits attracted his artistic imagination, especially the black woman who he puts in the center of his watercolor. He aimed to represent the Portuguese Customs and the Bemposta's painting gave him a perfect model to create a virtual Portuguese reality. Without understanding the original meaning of the altarpiece, he sweetened the Portuguese social reality based on centuries of slaver domination.

Pseudo/Visibilities
In 2018, the black woman became the image of one of the characters narrated by the historical romance D. Maria I. Uma rainha atormentada por um segredo que a levou à loucura (Stilwell, 2018: 457-458). So, the 'historical' romance gives a pseudo/visibility to Rosa, contributing, at the same time, to make invisible two subjectivities: that of Rosa, whom story is distorted; and that of the black woman, whom history is denied.  In front of the royal family there is another group of people, which identity is unknown. In the past, they were interpreted as 'people', as 'common persons', which names did not matter. Without doubt, it is more difficult (re)discovering their identities, but it is not impossible. The first step is to not settle for the generic description and asking «who could be this people? ». The painting itself offers some clues.
In the royal family's group, behind the Queen, there is the portrait of the police-chief

Children and women of Lisbon city: the black woman's life story
Thus, it is possible to argue that the group painted on the left represents the people who lived in the Real Casa Pia. Among them, Giuseppe Trono privileged women and children.
But, who were these women and children? How did they live in the Real Casa Pia?
The children who lived in the institution were orphaned or abandoned on the streets of the city. Among them, there were also the sons of the women reclused. The children were literate and then they learned manufacturing jobs (Tavares & Pinto, 1990;Beirão, 1944). Among the male, some were instructed in the artistic fields (painting, sculpture, engraving), and the most skilled went to Rome to study at the Academia Portuguesa de Belas Artes (Degortes, 2016).
The assistance to women focused on three categories: prostitutes (mulheres de vida escandalosa); single mothers; and poor girls without dowry for marry. These women lived in the section named "Saint Margaret of Cortona". Margaret was a 13 th century Italian woman who lived more uxorio with a man, had a child with him and was rejected by her family. She entered the convent and lived an extremely devoted life. Only in 1728, that is, more than four hundred years later, she was proclaimed saint by Pope Benedict XIII, as saint patron of the repented prostitutes (Canosa & Colonnello, 2004 was not only to remove these women from the street, but to give them the opportunity to repent and redeem themselves.
In  The black woman and the white woman, who looks at her, hold the rosary in their hands.
Therefore, both dedicate themselves to prayer, and go through a common path of repentance and redemption. But the devoted attitude of the black woman, her clothing similar to that of the nuns, her dominant position within the group give her a special place.

Subjectivities and symbolisms
It is very unusual to paint so many portraits in an altarpiece. This can be explained from women registered, only thirty-two were described as "pretas" or "pardas". Five of them declared to "ser escrava", and two freedwomen. 1 The black woman portraited by Giuseppe Trono was included among these thirty-two, and her exemplary religious life justified her presence in the left group in the altarpiece of the Bemposta chapel.
Even if studies on the subject still lack, it is possible to argue that the welfare strategies of politics of Mary I's government were not primarily aimed at the ex-enslaved people.
Considering them "obedience to Roman Catholicism, to laws and those due to kings" (Beirão, 1944: 247). The education to obey and the alliance between monarchy and church were the milestones to consolidate the power against the revolutionary threats.

Changing the approach
Giving back visibility, subjectivity and narrative to the black people painted in the earlymodern Portuguese artworks allows to rethink the colonial past and the nowadays Portuguese society (Bindman, Gates & Dalton, 2011). It is meaningful that in the in-depth study on the painting The earthquake of 1755, carried out in 2018, has not been underlined the presence of black people (Markl & Bastos, 2018). The large canvas, produced in the second half of the 18 th century, represents the destruction of Lisbon, but it is not a 'photographic' document. The painter, João Glama, staged a representation of the earthquake, including in it the academic repertory of artistic models. The analysis of the painting's composition reveals that each group of people includes blacks. On the upper right corner, the black man who hugs the cross; on the lower right side, the black woman who cries; on the left, behind the academic studies of the naked bodies, the black man who helps to carry a wounded person; on the center, the woman who soothes a little girl. Their presence is not accidental but, until now, it was not detected.  consider the relation with Enlightenment scientific thinking and the 19 th century processes of racialization (Rattansi, 2007).
The plural approach of analysis allows to understand the art painting from multiple perspectives. Mascarada Nupcial is another meaningful study-case. Exist two versions of the same painting, and the comparation clearly demonstrates the ambiguity between scientific and artistic value to represent black people in the 18 th century Portuguese arts.
On one hand, the princess of Brazil Francisca Benedicta of Braganza, who shared with her husband-nephew, the prince Joseph, the interest on scientific knowledge, commissioned a painting in which the black and indigenous dwarfs had to be represented and described exactly as they physically were (height, proportions, skin characteristics and so on).
On the other hand, the version commissioned by Queen Mary I aims more to stage a theatrical scene. The iconography is the same, but the bodies proportion reveals little but significant differences. The taste for the theatrical representation prevails. Indeed, Mary I and her husband-uncle Peter III loved opera music and the court's life was characterized by musical representations of operas and comedies (Raggi, 2018;Braga, 2009). In this painting, the dwarfs 'stage' a theatrical marriage, probably as usually The current study of the personal lives, at the royal palace of Belém, of the black and indigenous portrayed dwarfs is enriching the knowledge on the plural meaning of the early-modern art in Portugal. This on-going research and the change of approach will allow to re-discovery agency and subjectivity of Blacks within Portuguese and European art and society.
Giuseppina Raggi is Art Historian (PhD, 2005), and Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (University of Coimbra). She is expert on quadratura painting and she currently focuses her investigations on the female patronage in 18th century arts and architecture, and on the agency of enslaved, freed and free Africans and Afrodescendants in early-modern Portugal. She is co-