Dr. Luis Dias
Due to two visa rejections and only a last-minute reprieve due to an email appeal against them, I didn’t prepare as well for my recent trip to Vienna as I’d have liked.
But aside from the classical music concerts, I knew I wanted to visit Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum (KHM), which I had only cursorily visited on my last and only trip nearly three decades ago.
Sadly, my interest in history, particularly Goan history, was not awakened by my school syllabus (and very little seems to have changed even today) but by my late father Dr. Manuel Dias. Whether pre-Portuguese, colonial or post-colonial Goan history, he taught it to me in ways that no textbook or history teacher ever did.
Apart from living in a heritage building Casa da Moeda, the Royal Mint (1834 -1842), and our own family connection with Goa’s medical and epidemiological history, the road, between our house and the General Post Office is named Avenida Dom João de Castro. I am reminded of history all around me.
When I began leading heritage walks, I read, in addition to so much more, the biography of D. João de Castro (1500 -1548), fourth Viceroy of Portuguese India. His timeline is easy to memorise because his birth year is neatly at the start of the century, and he conveniently died in 1548, two years after the 1546 siege of Diu.
A story, almost certainly apocryphal, regarding de Castro’s emotional appeal to the citizenry of Goa (today Old Goa) to open their purses toward the rebuilding of Diu. He apparently pawned the hairs on his beard, saying he would have offered the bones of his own son [Fernão de Castro, recently killed in battle], instead. The appeal is said to have resulted in a generous response.
What has any of this even remotely got to do with Vienna?
As I read up on Indo-Portuguese history, I would find periodic references to a set of tapestries celebrating D. João de Castro’s ‘deeds and triumphs’, housed, of all places, in the KHM.
There was no clarity on who commissioned the set, and how they ended up in Vienna.
The history enthusiasts among you may already be familiar with a paper ‘Moving Images: The D. João de Castro Tapestries’, by Sérgio Mascarenhas de Almeida who I believe was Director of the Fundação Orient Goa during the early 2000s, when I was away in the UK.
There is also a book in Portuguese, ‘As tapeçarias de D. João de Castro’ (The Tapestries of D. João de Castro, 1928) by Luis Keil that seems to be more of a reference book than one to be procured online.
Almeida mentions another similarly titled book ‘As tapeçarias de D. João de Castro” (Paulino), the catalogue of a 1995 exhibition of tapestries in Portugal, got him interested in them, but this is also inaccessible, at least to me.
Almeida’s paper is intriguing, despite the clumsy English in place (he was obviously translating from the Portuguese, or someone else translated it). He argues that the ten tapestries are mislabeled in the KHM, arguing for example that Tapestry 6 (Landing in Dabhol [seaport town in modern-day Ratnagiri Maharashtra] and destruction of the city) is historically and geographically inaccurate, and incompatible with contemporaneous sources.
But as a Brazilian researcher with the interesting name of Mikael Jackson de Oliveira da Silva points out in his YouTube video ‘Tapeçarias de D. João de Castro, buscandoaproximações à pesquisahistórica’ (Tapestries by D. João de Castro, seeking approaches to historical research), and he admits it is pure conjecture, as one cannot verify or refute it, the artist(s) who conceived the tapestries almost certainly never set foot on Indian soil. It would therefore be unrealistic to expect geographic or even chronological accuracy. Indeed, the Latin caption over one tapestry confuses the 1538 and 1546 sieges of Diu.
Furthermore, Silva speculates that de Castro’s other son Álvaro de Castro might have been responsible for the commissioning of at least some of the tapestries, decades later. As the tapestries (woven in Brussels) are expensive, using silk, gold and silver, very likely oner patron would have been the Queen of Portugal Catherine of Austria It would explain how the tapestries got to Austria, first with the Hapsburgs, and then bequeathed to KHM after the end of the First World War.
But like so many remote researchers, Silva confuses the old city of Goa with Panjim.
Almeida “re-orders” the tapestry sequence in several ways, trying to make sense of geographic and other details, breaking them into ‘subsets’, even ‘splitting’ some individual tapestries into half ‘stitching’ one half to another tapestry’s half; and imagining how they would have been hung spatially as a set. He may be right. But equally, maybe not.
At least one tapestry in Almedia’s paper (the Dabhol tapestry KHM 6 that he discusses in so much length) is depicted as the mirror image of that on the KHM website.
I was able to access only five tapestries on the KHM website, but could zoom in at high resolution. I wanted to see them for myself on my forthcoming Vienna trip. Unfortunately, the website said all the João de Castro tapestries were “in storage”, not on display.
I emailed their staff well in advance with a request for a private viewing, but got no reply.
When I got there, I was told that it was physically impossible to comply with my request, as the storage areas were not at the KHM or even in Vienna, but at remote locations due to space constraints! (I learnt later that even Almeida’s paper was based on KHM website images, not the actual tapestries.)
Like so many large museums, KHM has only a fraction of its artefacts on display; the majority are in storage, rarely seen.
Here’s the irony: I’ve learnt that the tapestries suffer from the Orientalist gaze. It is a Western ‘triumphalist’ saga about a Westerner, commissioned by a Westerner for Western consumption, then as now. But it concerns “my” part of the world: Goa, specifically Ponda; Diu; Dabhol and Salcette island.
But I’m not able to access them, and even the sparse literature about it is behind the ‘academia’ stonewall, off-limits to non-academicians but with legitimate interest. In 1995, the tapestries were exhibited in Portugal. Will they ever make it here?
The other thing I learnt: apart from West-over-East ‘triumphalism’, some imagery disturbingly (at least for me) also smacks of religious supremacy, Christendom over Islam. Historian Maria Antónia Gentil Quina refers to the “moralising ideology path in the Indies, stemming from Orientalist productions that took over the Portuguese imagination and infiltrated other works throughout the 16th century. But the decline came not long after.
If history has taught us anything, it should be that mixing state and religion is a lytic cocktail, that eventually brings down the state. But then, as now, it never really was about religion, was it? Then as now, religion is just a false flag for land-grab, expansionism, power, money, and for murdering innocents in untold thousands in cold blood, in its (un)holy (un)just (im)moral name.
