ATRIUM
[…] the best document has always been on public view in the only surviving element of the whole work, the six boards.
[…] an author in conveying a message (as is the case with the author of the polyptych) cannot but "care" about the right way of making it communicate.
ALMADA NEGREIROS
It is the purpose of this exhibition to reassess one of the most fascinating and controversial themes in the nation's history and culture since its rescue from oblivion, at the hands of Monsignor Alfredo Elviro dos Santos, in the Patriarchal Palace of São Vicente de Fora, in the year 1882.
This is, of course, what Jaime Cortesão christened, in the 1950s, the Polyptych of the Investiture of the Nation in the Mission of the Holy Spirit, commonly known as the Polyptych of the Janelas Verdes.
Such a reassessment is deliberately irreverent, perhaps even "ill-behaved", inasmuch as it holds that the official theses are no less absurd, fanciful and incongruous than the generality of those that have been set aside.
News of the Polyptych's discovery spread swiftly, immediately arousing boundless fascination and curiosity, notably by virtue of the fact that, in so unusual an assembly, a supposed portrait of Prince Henry the Navigator (Infante D. Henrique) had been recognised.
Henceforth, a legion of enquirers (most of them devoid both of any true critical sense and of the discernment capable of intuiting the heart of the matter), taking their desires for reality and lacking plausible clues with which to contextualise it, gave rise to the most prodigious speculations and unheard-of theories, fuelling controversies, falsifications and proclamations, surrounding not only the origin and meaning of the work, but more particularly the identity of the dual, haloed figure of the "Saint".
Despite everything, the thesis that continues to attract the broadest consensus favours the assumption that the Polyptych is an evocation of Saint Vincent, transfigured into the figure of the Saintly Prince, after his martyrdom in Fez, or into that of Prince Afonso, son of King João II, born in 1475 and deceased on 13 July 1491 (aged 16) as a result of a fall from his horse on the Ribeira de Santarém.
In all truth, it should be admitted that if, before, the designation "Panels of Saint Vincent" was already implausible, then in the light of the new documents and forensic evidence that emerged between 2010 and 2019, one would expect the "official thesis" to acknowledge the definitive collapse of its arguments.
Nevertheless, nothing dissuaded its followers. The conviction that the Polyptych was conceived and executed concurrently with the Altarpiece of Saint Vincent, for the high altar of Lisbon Cathedral, remained unshakeable, despite the fact that the assumptions and irremediable inconsistencies on which the "Vincentists" rely in order to affirm this contain within themselves the inevitable seed of the negation of that presumption.
Nor, indeed, is it any longer possible to attribute the execution of the work to the painter Nuno Gonçalves with any certainty.
What greater secret might be re-vealed in the Polyptych?
Whatever it may be, it would have constituted clear and eloquent evidence for fifteenth-century observers, yet no longer for most present-day ones. From these, the designs and the semantic fecundity of the Polyptych's ostensive syntax wholly escape, by virtue of their having relinquished knowledge of the symbolic references that the work's promoters possessed to a high degree, and forgone the figurae and the sources and lore that peopled their imagination.
It should further be added that the legibility of the symbols present, however elaborate and expeditious the respective discursive stratagems and hermeneutic devices may be, cannot be circumscribed, nor competently scrutinised, by conventional theological-dogmatic, aesthetic, cultural, ideological or historicist categories.
And what if the Polyptych were no more than a heterodox, perhaps heretical, indictment, whose message became obsolete and incomprehensible to the collective memory from the sixteenth century onward?
And what if it enclosed a prophecy realisable in the future and referred to no past event (Alfarrobeira, the captivity and martyrdom of the Saintly Prince, etc.)?