National Museum of Ancient Art

Museum · EstrelaLisbon,Portugal

Portugal's national collection, from a Bosch triptych to Japanese screens of the first Portuguese ships, around six panels of sixty unidentified faces.

The National Museum of Ancient Art holds six panels with sixty faces that nobody can name. The Saint Vincent Panels are attributed to Nuno Gonçalves and painted around 1470. Every one of the sixty figures is a portrait of a real person: a king, a queen, monks, fishermen, an archbishop, a man in mourning, a Jewish scholar, soldiers. Everyone is looking at the same point, and almost nobody has been identified with certainty. Portuguese scholars have argued about who these people are for more than a century, and the labels set out the competing answers rather than choosing one. The rest is Portugal's national collection: painting and sculpture from the twelfth century onward, together with what came into the country by trade and empire. Bosch's Temptations of St Anthony and a Dürer hang here, along with Japanese screens painted when the first Portuguese ships reached Japan. The collection includes Chinese porcelain made for Lisbon families, African ivories carved for European buyers, and a monstrance of 1506 made from gold brought back from East Africa.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Leave the panels until last — the ivories, the screens and the goldwork explain what the men painted in them were paying for, and the six panels land harder afterwards.
Three floors and a big collection — decide beforehand whether you want the Portuguese painting, the Asian and African material, or both; seeing it all in one visit means seeing it badly.
The museum closed in September 2025 for roof and gallery works — it is due back during 2026 with the Saint Vincent Panels restored, so check that it has reopened before you go.

Things to do

1
Pick one face in the panels and stay with it
In front of the Saint Vincent Panels, choose a single figure — the fisherman, the man in black, the kneeling knight — and look only at him. Work out what he does from what he is wearing and holding, because rank and trade are what the painter gave you instead of names. Then step back and find him again in the group.
2
Look at the Japanese screens from close up
Find the Namban screens and get close enough to read them. Count the ships, then look at what is coming off them and who is carrying it, because the painters recorded the cargo and the crews with the same care they gave the merchants. This is the meeting drawn by the side being visited, not by the visitors.
3
Sit on the garden terrace above the docks
Go out to the museum garden, which is open without a ticket. It sits above the working riverside, with the bridge downstream. This is the port the ships sailed from and returned to, and much of what is in the galleries came into the country through it.