Portugal’s Enduring Love of Making Tiles

Portuguese tiles, locally called azulejos, a word stemming from the Arabic word al-zilli for small, polished stone, are considered in the top tier of the country’s artistic heritage.

From tiles with solid vibrant colors to ones with ornate depictions of cherubs and flowers, boutique and commercial producers have adorned apartments, churches, subway stations, theaters and just about every other kind of surface in the country.

And yet Moura is a standout among his peers because he employs a rarely used method from a bygone era—one that harks back to the beginning of Portugal’s love affair with producing tiles that began during a royal trip to Seville, Spain, in 1498.

Museum in Lisbon Highlights History of Tiles

Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors wander down a darkly lit hall in Lisbon’s Museu Nacional do Azulejo (National Tile Museum). Unbeknownst to many, if not most, of them, they pass through one of the most impactful half centuries of Portuguese art history.

It takes the museum’s lead curator, Constança Lima, about 50 paces to walk through the entire chronology that begins with a nearly 10-foot-tall Moorish-style mosaic of geometric patterns that is devoid of any portrayal of people and ends with a wall display of Christian iconography.

Pointing to the start of the exhibition, Lima says, “This is one of the earliest examples we have of the Islamic era of tilemaking in Portugal, which began when King Manuel I went to Seville and Alhambra Palace in the late 15th century,” shortly after nearly eight centuries of Arab rule of the Iberian Peninsula ended in 1492.

The Portuguese king had become enamored with the Moorish esthetic of ceramic tiles, which were produced in part by what Spaniards call the alicatado technique. Lima says the method saw clay tiles that had already been painted and baked be painstakingly cut into pieces and pressed into mortar to form shapes such as spindles, petals, leaves and bone.

Upon his return to Portugal, King Manuel I commissioned the Moriscos—Moors who had been forced to convert to Christianity or face exile from Spain—to make tiles that would cover the walls of his palace in the city of Sintra, just outside Lisbon.

Oddly enough, while the Moors shipped their ceramic tiles from Spain to Portugal at the behest of King Manuel I, there’s no evidence to show they previously produced the tiles in the country during their approximately 500-year rule of the region that effectively ended in 1249. That’s according to Rafaela Xavier, a researcher at the University of Lisbon who specializes in 15^th- and 16^th-century tilemaking.

“There are no traces of tile production at the time of the [Moorish] occupation in Portugal,” she wrote via email. “But there are traces of ceramic production in various parts of the country, such as in Mértola,” referring to the thousands of pieces of Moorish-era pottery that have been excavated in the village.

Instead, tilemaking, inspired by Islamic architecture, flourished in Portugal under a Christian king. However, Lima says, “these tiles were not considered religious [by the Portuguese].” She says it’s a major reason their popularity exploded among the country’s aristocracy.

Even the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, which was built in 1509 as a Catholic convent called the Madre de Deus, boasts Moorish tiles on the walls leading up to its church.

The repetitive floral patterns of the red, green and blue ceramic pieces are almost muted against the house of worship’s lavish baroque interior with its gilded wood carvings. In a more literary take on history, this juxtaposition could be used to foreshadow what would become Portugal’s relatively quick turn from the Moors’ artistic sensibilities.

Moors’ and Other Tiles

While the importance of Moorish tilemaking to the past 500 years of Portuguese culture cannot be overstated, the motifs instantly clashed with the conventional tastes of Europeans at the time of their introduction.

From the 1490s to 1527, Europe was experiencing the golden age of the Italian Renaissance. The legendary works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rafael were in vogue as the continent moved away from the abstract art of the Gothic era for more hyperrealistic imagery of people in dynamic poses. Not only that, but King Manuel I died in 1521. “Around this period, you can see the Portuguese commissions began including flowers, vegetables, animals and people,” says Lima.

Reflecting this assertion, she takes a few steps down the timeline of the Moorish exhibition to reveal tiles that are markedly different from what the Portuguese monarch saw during his trip to Seville. While geometric shapes are still present, the focus is clearly on caricatures of animate objects.

The tilemaking process had also changed dramatically.

Gone was the labor- and time-intensive alicatado technique, replaced by the Hispano-Moresque arista (Spanish for “ridges”) method of pushing soft clay into square molds. And while working with an intact tile was much more efficient than making a mosaic out of tiny pieces, it was no match for what was about to come out of Florence. 

“In the middle of the 16th century, the Italians developed the maiolica technique, which is a much faster and cheaper methodology of making tiles,” says Lima. Instead of filling in cavities with glaze, ceramicists could paint directly on top of the clay, treating it like a canvas. It not only enabled the mass production of tiles but also allowed the Portuguese to turn to other manufacturers in Europe.

In the years that followed, Portuguese tiles were produced by Flemish artists who leaned heavily on the white-and-cobalt-blue coloring made popular in Chinese porcelain. It marked a complete departure from the Moorish esthetic and remains popular today.

Legacy of Tiles as Islamic Art

Xavier says the first national production of tiles in Portugal hadn’t begun until a few decades after the creation of the maiolica technique—and hardly with the motifs used by the Moors.

“Some tile factories [today], such as Viuva Lamego, produce tiles that evoke Moorish tiles,” says Xavier, adding that “in the artistic field, Moorish tiles are not so present.”

Meanwhile, on Moura’s worktable, copper and manganese oxides, cobalt and metals such as pewter and iron produce the kaleidoscope of paints.

Having already fired the clay negative of his mold in a kiln set to nearly 980 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), he now fills the resulting polygonal shape—one that is prominent in the Nasrid Palaces, the Islamic arts and culture complex of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain—with green, blue, black and honey colors.

“They’re just my favorite tiles. They’re fun,” Moura says. “I have to work my hands. … I really like the influence from the 15th century. And this is something that there’s not a lot of people doing.”

Moura says he’s been producing this kind of tile since he was a child. “I’m a third-generation tilemaker; I don’t think I really had a choice,” says Moura as his mother, 72-year-old Cristina Pina, looks on from her easel where she attends to a sketch of a floral motif. 

For him, replicating this centuries-old Moorish method is not just a form of art but a small form of rebellion that began 10 years ago. “I went to Spain for a few months where my friend had a studio near Seville. I wanted to learn something different than my mother’s traditional blue-and-white style from the 18th century.”

Having such a rare specialty has led to his collaboration with companies in the southern Algarve region of Portugal, which are restoring old palaces that are covered in Moorish tiles. However, in a nod to his mother, Moura admits that the 18^th-century style of tilemaking is what keeps his family’s business profitable. 

But as an artist, he says profitability won’t motivate him to come to work for the next 30 years. “Sure, this is not the core business. However, I don’t want to feel like I work in a factory that produces millions of identical tiles. I want to create something unique, something special. This is something I’m doing to keep this tradition alive.”