Pyx

For reasons relating to the vicissitudes of setting up the collection, and perhaps because of the many periods of isolation to which the city has been condemned by its geography, the “exotic” objects that arrived in Portugal from the first years of the 16th century onwards, originating above all from Africa and Asia, and now found in various European collections, are relatively scarce in the collections of this museum.
However, the ivory pyx – a piece of great importance, produced in Sierra Leone in the first third of the 16th century – would in itself justify including in the tour of the exhibition an approach to the theme of the diaspora.
Originating from the church of São Francisco das Chagas, Orgens, Viseu, the Sapi-Portuguese pyx is one of the most notable Afro-Portuguese pieces in national collections.
Although the consumers of African products had a particular preference for oliphants and the useful and valuable forks, spoons and salt-cellars, made of the same material, also acquired in Sierra Leone, where “very subtle and ingenious men make works of ivory that are very wonderful to see of all the things that they are asked to make”, there is no doubt that the presence of the Christian iconography in a narrative structure that directly denounces its European origin means that some of these objects were used in Christian worship.
In this circular pyx, composed of a single spherical volume topped by a frustoconical lid, the narrative scenes, depicted in relief and certainly inspired by engravings, recount the cycle of the Nativity of Jesus, namely the Tree of Jesse, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Angels and the Shepherds, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple and the Flight into Egypt.
Although the image that served as the handle for the lid is now fragmented, there is no doubt that it represents the Virgin and Child, possibly flanked by two angels. The missing elements of these figurations, arising from the poor state of conservation
in which this piece survived into the present, are completed through its comparison with another very similar one, how housed in a private collection. The inscription “Ave Grasia P” (Ave Gracia Plena) on the lid, an invocation of the Virgin Mary, is also mixed with the Manueline emblems, namely with the arms of Portugal and the cross of the Order of Christ, of which Dom Manuel I was the governor, whilst the feet have the shape of heraldic lions.
The pyx that is housed at the Museum is part of a remnant group of three ivory host boxes, all of which seem to have survived from the general production of ivory pieces intended for liturgical use, with the second one now being housed at the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore), and the third in a private collection.