Blue Azulejos and The Portuguese Tile
It is easy to look at the Portuguese word for tile, azulejo, and assume that the word is derived from azul, blue, which is reinforced by the prominence of blue-and-white tiled façades in Portugal. But the word is unconnected to the favoured cobalt glazes of the country and the Portuguese tile has not always been known for its blueness. Through the azulejo, we can trace the history of Portugal, telling the story of a country, its artisans and the colour blue.
The word demonstrates the historical connection between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. Azulejo comes from the Arabic word for ‘polished stone’, or (الزليج) al zulaycha, which was used to describe the polychrome mosaics of North Africa. The alicatado method of tile production was imported by the North African artisans into the region, in the medieval period. This involved the labour-intensive process of glazing each clay tile in one colour and firing before chipping them down into small shapes with which elaborate patterned mosaics are created. This style is no longer popular in Portugal but may still be seen in historic buildings throughout Portugal and southern Spain. The tin-based glaze that is used on these alicatado tiles is thought to have been first developed in the Abbasid Persian Empire. In 800 CE, potters near the port of Basra (modern-day Iraq), first applied tin to their glazes to achieve the opaque white effect to which other colour-producing alloys, like the turquoise and blues of copper and cobalt, were applied. This tin-based enamel quickly spread throughout the Middle East due to its vivid colour technology and eventually reached Portugal.
Figure 1: Alicatado tile produced in the workshop of Fernan Martínez Quijarro and Pedro Herrero for the Cathedral of Coimbra in 1503
Image Credit: Database of Islamic Heritage in Portugal
The 14th-century inheritors of the Islamic tradition of prestige ceramics in the Iberian Peninsula exported vast amounts of tiles and pottery across Europe, particularly to the Lowlands and Italy. These artisans primarily used cobalt blue, manganese purple, and lead antimonate yellow; copper green was much less popular than in Middle Eastern and North African tiling and was restricted to turquoise detailing, largely due to the regional availability of ores. It is thought that most ores were obtained from French and British mines for Portuguese tile production. The shipping of Iberian-produced ceramics to Italy was so commonplace that the name for these wares comes to us from Florence. The medieval Italian name for Majorca was applied to the tiles and pots as Maiolica since the cargo passed through Majorca on its journey to Italy. Until the late 15th century, the Spanish and the Portuguese enjoyed a European monopoly on lusterware. But during the Renaissance, Italian craftsmen developed new styles of ceramics that epitomised the Renaissance with their depicted stories, istoriato, drawing upon themes from Greek and Roman antiquity told with lavish detail and vibrant tin glazes. These Italian works overtook those that they were inspired by.
The ceramics market was forever changed when blue and white chinaware hit Europe and artisans everywhere became obsessed with trying to imitate its clean bright designs. Delftware was particularly successful while French ceramics have been noted for their smudgy, unclarified quality. Inspired by delftware’s Dutch character, Portuguese artisans set about recycling polychrome Portuguese designs in monochrome cobalt blue. All three of these traditions, chinaware, delftware, and the blue and white tiles of Portugal, have become iconic symbols of their own culture’s crafts. This style of monochrome glazing seems to leave room for designers to bring a vernacular spin that can quickly become culturally distinct from that which it initially sought to copy. Polychrome tiles continued to be produced, but monochrome tiles were much more popular by the end of the 17th century. This popularity never truly diminished and the cobalt blue glazes are still seen throughout Portugal. Furthermore, some unique Portuguese colour technologies, like the mixing of lead antimonate yellow with cobalt blue to achieve an olive green, were forgotten by artisans in the blue-and-white period. When polychrome tiles came back into circulation, many colour technologies had been forgotten, this loss of variation may have contributed to the continued preference for monochrome tiling.
The early 17th century marked the start of the Baroque period which would later develop into Rococo. Baroque style has been described by Wolfflin as having ‘painterly’ modes of vision with ‘open form’, ‘unity’ and ‘unclearness’. Looking at the Dutch masters of this period, we see grand naturalistic landscapes and portraits with dramatic high contrast. It was at this time that the taste for polychrome design was lost, and the market was flooded with striking cobalt blue designs that matched perfectly with the high drama of the baroque style. These expensive tiles were largely commissioned by the Church to decorate the interiors of their churches and cathedrals, and the blue-and-white narrative paintings of the tiles were well-suited to catholic religiosity. The medieval tiles of Iberia are often looked back upon as a Moorish art form, but although the craft was introduced to the region by North Africans, many have forgotten the polychromatic roots of Portuguese tiling and labelled pre-17th-century tiles as entirely foreign. The Baroque period firmly established monochrome tiles and limited pallets as a Portuguese and Christian style.
Figure 2: Grande Panorama de Lisboa, c. 1700, National Azulejo Museum
Image Credit: Smithsonian Magazine
In 1755 Lisbon was hit by a catastrophic earthquake that brought with it a tsunami and widespread fire. The city was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. Under the regime of the autocratic Prime Minister, the Marquis of Pombal, the modern city of Lisbon was drawn up in an ‘utterly innovative orthogonal plan’. The need to rebuild and decorate many buildings rapidly meant that simpler, cheaper tile designs came into use, a stark contrast to the baroque and rococo tastes that had preceded them. These diverse decorative patterns came to be known as pombalinos after the Marquis. The works needed to be simple to be mass-produced and so although polychrome designs were slowly coming back into fashion, the pallets of artisans were highly limited and still largely relied upon cobalt blue.
Figure 3: Tiles featuring the simple repeated patterns typical of the pombaline style c. late 18th century
Image Credit: www.bahia.ws
The fashion of tiling the facades of Portuguese buildings in their entirety that makes walking through Lisbon such a colourful experience is a custom adopted from Brazil during the 19th century. The azulejo de fachada, or ‘façade tile’, was developed in Brazil to conserve the façades of churches when traditional building materials were scarce. The glazed tiles would waterproof the buildings and make them more durable against the hot and humid climate. This tradition may have begun out of functionality, but it became a way to elevate and adorn important public buildings and the homes of the wealthy in Brazil. In the Liberal Revolution of 1820, Portugal demanded a constitution to be founded to limit the powers of the king. The people demanded that the king return to Portugal from Rio de Janeiro, give the people universal rights, and free Portugal from English commercial domination. This development allowed a middle class to emerge while forcing the wealthy aristocrats of the court to return to Europe. The style of tiled façades was brought to Portugal from Brazil and the new bourgeois class chose the semi-industrialised tile to adorn their townhouses in elegant, colourful designs.
These tiles have not always met the demands of modern architecture. Residents of the narrow, tiled roads of central Lisbon will often be heard cursing the noisy engine of a motorcyclist who must rev their way up the steep hills. These tiles do nothing to dampen the sounds of urban life and seem to amplify the voices of even the most mindful of tourists. Although these tiles are famed for their beautiful designs, they were never intended for use on multistorey buildings, the façades of which could hardly be admired from the street level. For this reason, larger-scale buildings are rarely tiled and if they are then the tiles are of a single colour with no pattern or design. The cobalt blue tile has become a signature of Portuguese vernacular architecture and so is still the favourite for townhouses and can be seen throughout the centre of Lisbon.
The tiled façade lives on in the old quarters but its meaning and place in Portuguese culture has changed. The azulejos of Portugal are treated as a material cultural heritage that must be preserved and protected for the aesthetics of a country that increasingly relies upon tourism for its economic growth. But there lies an immaterial cultural heritage in the ever-developing production of tiles that grows and changes with the tastes of the nation and each new generation of artisans. The anxiety surrounding rising theft and vandalism of Portugal’s historic tiles reflects the shifting market of Portugal to cater to the needs of tourists and foreign buyers than it does the tastes of Portuguese residents. Portugal has always exported large amounts of tiles and artisans have worked to meet the tastes of buyers they may never meet but in a new global Lisbon, where tourists and remote workers are ever-present the foreign buyer is here, and they will only come and spend their money if the old city of Lisbon continues to look adequately historic and aesthetic for their Instagram posts.
Some of the most innovative and modern tiles today are not found on the streets of Lisbon but under them. The metro stations of Lisbon have each been decorated in unique ways that showcase the designs of Portuguese artisans and reflect important cultural and artistic moments in Portuguese history and the present. The topics and styles of these designs are as numerous as they are varied. One deep blue metro station makes you feel as if you are plunging into the deep blue ocean as it tells the story of Portuguese naval expansion and human rights developments (designed by Françoise Schein and Frederica Matta for Parque metro station), while another cavernous station takes you through the absurd whimsy of Wonderland with ten-foot-tall rabbits a la Lewis Carroll run for their train with you (designed by Pedro Morais based on the sketches of António Dacosta for Cais do Sodré metro station). These tiles transform liminal spaces into art galleries for the everyday commuter. The city has successfully given the spaces over to imaginative works that feel current where it would have been easy to fall upon nostalgia in imitations of past tastes that would not have served its travellers.
Figure 4: Metro de Lisboa
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
It is a testament to the versatility of the medium that Portuguese artisans have ever continued to adapt and rework their tile designs to meet the needs of their changing market. Through that process, blue glazes became the essential feature of those tiles and never lost that title. The azulejo has been developed using styles and technologies from across Europe and Asia but it will continue to be considered a uniquely Portuguese artefact, as a relic of a lost and reconstructed country or as a regenerated, reimagined craft.
Sources
C. Drury E. Fortnum, no. 4 Maiolica, South Kensington Art Handbooks, Scribner, 1875.
Thomas P. Campbell, Director, Maiolica: Italian Renaissance Ceramics, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016.
‘Pombaline Lisbon’, UNESCO World Heritage Convention, https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6226/, Accessed 02/10/2024.
Paulo Henriques, Ana Almeida, and Alex Pais, Museu Nacional Do Azulejo Guidebook, Instituto Portugues De Museus, 2006.
https://www.bahia.ws/en/history-of-the-introduction-of-portuguese-tiles-in-brazil/, Accessed 01/10/2024.
https://dicionario.priberam.org/azulejo, Accessed 25/09/2024.
Ninna Taylor, review of The Liberal Revolution of 1820 (A revolução Liberal de 1820) Bilingual book by José Luís Cardoso, CTT – Clube do Colectionador dos Correos, The British Historical Society of Portugal, 2020.
Images
Figure 1: https://patrimonioislamico.ulusofona.pt/detalhe.php?id=1
Figure 2: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/to-get-to-know-portugal-explore-its-azulejo-tilework-180980999/
Figure 3: https://www.bahia.ws/en/history-and-chronology-of-portuguese-tile-production/
Cover Image
A sample of a commercial cobalt blue pigment, Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_blue
