At the Sackler, Art That Meant the World to Portugal

Take, for example, a remarkable ivory saltcellar from 16th-century Nigeria. Probably made as a trade item for European collectors, it's a beautiful, intricately carved piece that shows a group of Portuguese sailors (who would have been involved in the slave trade) supporting a ship. The sailors' faces are carved almost like African masks, and the ship's captain holds an African spear in one hand. The effect is charming -- until you notice the small, wide-eyed face peering out from inside the ship, and the objet d'art suddenly takes on a disturbing edge.

The complex relationships between the Portuguese and the cultures they encountered becomes even more apparent in the art from Asia, or "Estado da India," as the network of Portuguese enclaves throughout the region came to be known. Most of the outposts were small trading centers, designed to manage the lucrative spice trade. But Lisbon also held substantial territories, including Bombay and Goa, and where the Portuguese held physical control, they held cultural and religious dominance as well -- driven in part by Jesuit missionaries seeking converts.

"Goa in the 16th century was a territory of some hundreds of square miles, with maybe a million people," says Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a professor at UCLA and author of "The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700." "And there you're talking about forcible conversion, the destruction of Hindu temples, the elimination of the Muslim population."

It wasn't all conversion by force, but even so, the degree of Christian influence is striking in the exhibit's Indian artworks. Many are stunning; a 17th-century communion table from Gujarat mixes European and Indian styles with effortless grace, and an elaborate ivory carving with Christ as a lute-strumming shepherd draws deeply on Indian sculptural traditions; at first glance it could be taken for a work of Buddhist art.

But a far more revealing work may be the ivory plaque that depicts the infant Jesus sailing one of the Portuguese trading ships. It's called "Young Christ as the Mariner on the Ship of Salvation," but the obvious ingratiation goes deeper than the title. The masterful Sri Lankan artist who carved it purged all traces of his culture from the work; it looks like something out of an Italian Renaissance workshop. As art, it's lovely. As an exercise in cultural self-abnegation, it's somewhat chilling.

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Other imperial tensions simmer throughout the exhibit, in remarkably different ways. In China, the Portuguese impact was so weak as to be almost undetectable; Beijing adopted Lisbon's superior astronomical knowledge but kept the rest at a studied distance.

In Japan, however, things turned disastrous. There the Portuguese initially met with success, winning some 150,000 converts to Christianity. But it quickly became their undoing; the ruling shoguns outlawed the religion, expelling missionaries and forcing suspected Japanese Christians to stamp their feet on bronze plaques bearing the face of Jesus -- known as fumi-e -- to prove their indifference.

It was only in Brazil, in fact (discovered virtually by accident by Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500), that the Portuguese were able to build a large-scale colony as opposed to smaller outposts. Easily overcoming the indigenous Tupi people, Lisbon eventually set up huge sugar plantations, bringing hundreds of thousands of slaves over from Africa and, over the next few centuries, becoming the leader of the transatlantic slave trade.

Although that disturbing side of the empire is touched on only lightly, several paintings of Africans and Tupi by the 17th-century Dutch painter Albert Eckhout offer a gripping insight. Scaled to heroic size, the paintings were commissioned as "promotional literature" to encourage investment in the plantations, says the Sackler's Raby -- designed to show Europeans how native peoples benefited from the civilizing aspects of colonization.

And for all its multicultural aspirations, it's hard not to hear faint echoes of a similar spin in "Encompassing the Globe." Ever since its discoveries were celebrated by Luís Vaz de Camoes in his epic 16th-century poem "The Lusiads," Portugal's empire has been at the heart of its national identity, the rough edges softened and the myths massaged. Financed largely by Portugal's Ministry of Culture and dozens of Portuguese banks and corporations, "Encompassing" could be read as a paean to Portuguese imperialism, sheltering from hard questions in its own sheer vastness. But in the end, the artworks reveal a deeper and infinitely more satisfying story -- the tense, difficult and sometimes brutal birth of the modern world.