The global city - Annemarie Jordan Gschwend

Recently identified by the editors as the Rua Nova dos Mercadores, the principalcommercial and financial street in Renaissance Lisbon, two sixteenth-centurypaintings, acquired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1866, form the starting point forthis portrait of a global city in the early modern period. Focusing on unpublishedobjects, and incorporating newly discovered documents and inventories that allownovel interpretations of the Rua Nova and the goods for sale on it, these essays offera compelling and original study of a metropolis whose reach once spanned fourcontinents.The Rua Nova views painted by an anonymous Flemish artist portray an everydayscene on a recognisable street, with a diverse global population. This thoroughfare wasthe meeting point of all kinds of people, from rich to poor, slave to knight, indigenousPortuguese to Jews and diasporic black Africans.The volume highlights the unique status of Lisbon as an entrept for curiosities,luxury goods and wild animals. As the Portuguese trading empire of the fifteenth andsixteenth century expanded sea-routes and networks from West Africa to India andthe Far East, non-European cargoes were brought back to Renaissance Lisbon. Manyrarities were earmarked for the Portuguese court, but simultaneously exclusive itemswere readily available for sale on the Rua Nova, the Lisbon equivalent of Bond Streetor Fifth Avenue. Specialized shops offered West African and Ceylonese ivories, raffiaand Asian textiles, rock crystals, Ming porcelain, Chinese and Ryukyuan lacquerware,jewellery, precious stones, naturalia and exotic animal by-products. Lisbon was also ahub of distribution for overseas goods to other courts and cities in Europe. The crossculturaland artistic influences between Lisbon and Portuguese Africa and Asia at thisdate will be re-assessed.Lisbon was imagined as the head of empire or caput mundi, while the River Tagusbecame the aquatic gateway to a globally connected world. Lisbon evolved into adynamic Atlantic port city, excelling in shipbuilding, cartography and the manufactureof naval instruments. The historian Damio de Gis bragged of the "Tagus reigningover the world". Lisbon's fame depended on its river, an aquatic avenue that competed with the Rua Nova, providing a means of interaction, trade and communication alongLisbon's coastline. Even for the cosmopolitan Gis, who travelled extensively for thePortuguese crown, Lisbon's chaotic docks were worth describing. Of all the Europeancities he experienced, only Lisbon and her rival Seville could be "rightfully calledLadies and Queens of the Sea". Gis contended that they had opened up the earlymodern world through circumnavigation.Lisbon was destroyed in a devastating earthquake and tsunami in November 1755.These paintings are the only large-scale vistas of Rua Nova dos Mercadores to havesurvived, and together with the new objects and archival sources offer a fresh andoriginal insight into Renaissance Lisbon and its material culture.