Age of the Baroque in Portugal

The Age of the Baroque in Portugal, edited by Jay A Levenson, 295 pages

If the seventeenth century witnessed the Spanish Golden Age, it is reasonable to treat the eighteenth - and particularly the reign of John V - as having hosted an analogous, albeit somewhat more modest, Portuguese flourishing.  Certainly, it saw the height of Portugal's colonial empire, and a corresponding attempt to transmute the riches of the world into glory for God, country, and king.  This catalogue of the 1993 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (fittingly, staged a year after the Columbian quincentennial) presents a wide array of beautiful and intriguing objects from the period, from furniture to jewelry to azulejos to a complete custom coach commissioned by the Portuguese ambassador to the Holy See.