National Museum of Ancient Art

This guide to the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon centers on six wooden panels found by chance in a monastery storeroom in the 1880s, crowded with fifty-eight individual faces gathered around Saint Vincent, patron of the city. You'll hear how the museum's director traced the painter to Nuno Gonçalves, court painter to King Afonso V, using a manuscript and a hidden signature uncovered only after cleaning. The guide lingers longest on one face in the crowd, a man in a plain black hat that many believe is Prince Henry the Navigator, and asks you to look closely and judge for yourself.