The story
Portugal's national gallery grew out of the convents dissolved in the 1830s, when religious houses were closed and their paintings and gold gathered into state hands. It opened to the public in 1884 in a former palace above the Lisbon riverfront, and is known today as the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga.
Two works pull visitors in. One is the Saint Vincent Panels, painted around 1470 by Nuno Gonçalves, six crowded panels in which some sixty Portuguese faces, from the king to fishermen, gather around the country's patron saint. The other is Hieronymus Bosch's Temptation of Saint Anthony, a triptych swarming with demons and hybrid creatures, which came from one of those suppressed convents.
Because Lisbon traded early with Asia and Africa, the collection also holds Namban screens showing the arrival of Portuguese ships in Japan, painted by Japanese artists who had never seen a European.
