Musical Iconography |
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The Museum has in its collections several examples of  iconographical material in ceramics, drawings, sculpture, photographs, prints, silk-screen prints and paintings.  The paintings include a number of oils from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Among others it can be seen an ‘’Assumption of the Virgin’’ by Gregório Lopes (16th century); a portrait of the composer João Domingos Bomtempo (1814); another one of the mezzo-soprano, LuÃsa Todi, painted by Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigée–Lebrun (1755-1842). It also deserves some attention the canvases of Beethoven and Music by José Malhoa, dating from 1903, and four medallions by the same artist dedicated to Bach, Mozart, Schumann and Brahms.
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Among the sculptures we find musical angels playing the lute (18th century) and a group of biscuit porcelain putti (19th/20th century), playing and dancing. As for photographs, the collection contains portraits of composers and musicians of the second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, such as José Viana da Mota, Guilhermina Suggia and Ferruccio Busoni.
Among the ceramics and drawings, it should be mentioned the ‘ratinho’ plates from Coimbra, picturing players and inscriptions referring to musical practices, and the collection of drawings of great composers and musicians, including one by António Carneiro portraying Bernardo Valentim Moreira de Sá.   The Museum also possesses a collection of roughly two hundred prints and silk-screen prints of figures connected with the world of theatre and music, such as composers (e.g. Marcos Portugal), instrumentalists (e.g. the Liszt lithograph) and singers from the 18th and 19th centuries (e.g. Adelina Patti), produced by outstanding engravers as Henri Thomassin and Francesco Bartolozzi, among others. |