PORTUGUESE IMPORTS OF CHINESE PORCELAIN

From c 1500 to c 1800 Portugal was one of the major European markets for Chinese export porcelain, both as final consumer and as (re-)exporter to other regions in Europe and the Atlantic world. Indeed, porcelain was a mainstream commodity of the India Run’s cargo (Carreira da Índia) and large quantities were landed annually in Lisbon after Vasco da Gama inaugurated the Cape Route in 1497–9.Footnote ³ The arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean coincided with the reopening of Chinese maritime trade in the late fifteen century that had increased the availability of Chinese porcelain in the main hubs of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁴ The subsequent establishment of the Portuguese in Malacca, in 1511, and Macau, in 1557, gave a major impulse to Portuguese Euro-Asian maritime trade, not only increasing the volume of porcelain imports but also promoting the production of personalised porcelains depicting Portuguese heraldry, Christian iconography and alphabetic inscriptions in Portuguese and Latin.Footnote ⁵ Archaeological sites, particularly in Lisbon and its surroundings, reveal a progressive increase of porcelain sherds in sixteenth-century deposits, some of them showing signs of intensive wear on the interior bottom glaze.Footnote ⁶ These deposits also reveal the gradual disappearance of other types of lavish ceramics during the third quarter of the sixteenth century, namely lusterware, maiolica, cuerda seca and stoneware produced in Europe.Footnote ⁷ Inventories conducted in elite households in the second half of the sixteenth century reveal impressive quantities of porcelain objects amassed both for decoration and eating purposes, reaching three hundred or even five hundred pieces in some cases.Footnote ⁸

When the Dutch and English began to import Chinese porcelain through the Cape Route in the early seventeenth century, some segments of the Portuguese population were already using these ceramics on a daily basis. In spite of the dominant Anglo-Dutch narrative, which tends to minimise the role played by the Portuguese in Euro-Asian trade, Asian imports were clearly dominated by Portugal up to the late 1620s.Footnote ⁹ According to a reliable early seventeenth-century source, each Portuguese carrack doing the India Run was able to carry between 40,000 to 60,000 porcelain pieces, meaning that some 120,000 to 180,000 items could be disembarked in Lisbon every year during that period, an adequate quantity to supply the seventeen porcelain shops established in the city by then.Footnote ¹⁰ In addition of feeding foreign markets, namely in Spain and Brazil, this huge quantity of wares was consumed by Portuguese families and institutions, particularly major female religious convents such as the Convento de Santa Clara-a-Velha in Coimbra and the Santana convent in Lisbon.Footnote ¹¹

THE SANTANA BOWL

Nearly 1,600 porcelain fragments or nearly intact porcelains from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties were recovered during archaeological excavations conducted at the former Santana convent in 2002–3 and 2009–10 under the supervision of Mário and Rosa Varela Gomes.Footnote ¹² The blue and white porcelain bowl with explicit sexual imagery was found in an unfinished well converted into a cesspit during the seventeenth century, being registered as item CS/P3 265 (fig 1). The rim measures 16.5cm in diameter and 7.2cm in height. This fragmented vessel was produced with a homogeneous and compact white colour paste and presents a bright bluish glaze. It shows a very thin rounded cavetto and a flared rim, while its underglaze decoration was painted in dark cobalt blue. Judging from its typology, this bowl is similar to other blue and white porcelains produced in Jingdezhen, in the Jiangxi province, during the mid-seventeenth century, therefore corresponding to what porcelain experts classify as ‘Transitional’ period; that is, porcelain produced from the early 1620s, when Ming emperors ceased to place large orders to Jingdezhen kilns, and the early 1680s, when resistance to Qing rule finally ceased along China’s coast.Footnote ¹³

Fig 1.

Santana convent bowl (CS P3-265). Drawing and several views. Images: authors.

The bowl was found in a well, identified as Well 3. Left unfinished, the well was converted into a cesspit at an unknown date. Broken or discarded objects, along with domestic garbage, were commonly thrown into this type of cesspit, particularly during the seventeen century. Well 3 revealed a large number of sherds comprising more than 250 fragmented or nearly intact porcelain objects, some of which could be identified by their markings to have been produced in the reigns of the emperors Jiajing (1521–67) and Wanli (1572–1620).Footnote ¹⁴ In addition to porcelain sherds, the well also contained a large quantity of other ceramics, such as Italian maiolica, mainly from Liguria, small red fine ware mugs, mostly produced in Lisbon, glazed and unglazed coarse ware, white Portuguese tin glaze wares and other types. The dates of these ceramics extend from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeen centuries.Footnote ¹⁵ Many of the ceramic vessels were found intact or complete, even when broken, suggesting that all – or most – of them, were discarded nearly at the same time. Such large-scale disposal might be explained by mandatory hygiene and prophylactic measures, at a time when contagious diseases were rife. Notably, between 1645 and 1650 the Algarve Plague killed thousands of people, particularly in Lisbon.Footnote ¹⁶

The bowl’s interior base (fig 2, top left) presents a roundel delimited by a double blue circle in the centre, which is occupied with a scene of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. The man is entirely naked, except for a hat over his head, while the woman is only partly naked from the waist down and at breast level. The man sits on the edge of a bed with the woman on his lap with her legs apart. The woman embraces her lover by the neck while he holds her legs and back, with their faces close to one another. The bed and curtains are perfectly painted, but some details of the drawing are quite clumsy, particularly the representation of the woman’s right leg, suggesting that the painter was more used to depicting standard domestic interior scenes than human anatomy in action. In this type of paintings, Chinese women are invariably represented wearing bandages on their feet or even miniature shoes while performing sexual activities. Contrasting with the lewdness of this image, the interior rim is decorated with a chaste frieze of flowers and leaves.

Fig. 2

Santana convent bowl (CS P3-265). Details of the five erotic medallions. Photographs: authors.

The bowl’s exterior is also painted in underglaze blue. It presents four lobbed oval medallions depicting sexual encounters separated by decorative geometric motifs and clouds. These four scenes suggest a narrative sequence due to the similarity of the male and female protagonists in each scene, although the sequence is not entirely clear and the background of each medallion varies considerably. If these images have a narrative dimension, then the first scene would be the one representing the pair half-naked from the waist down. The man leans back on a pillowed stand with both legs extended over a mat and points to his erected penis while the woman sits over his legs with her own legs bent while extending a cup to him. The only visible foot of the woman is banded, a visual reference to Chinese fetishism towards women with miniature feet, a feature that is represented again in the third and fourth scenes. The medallion to the left seems to present the same two characters copulating. The woman is reclined on a pillowed stand placed over a lower bed while the man grabs her legs and stands in front of her. She is supporting her weight with her right arm and extends her left arm to her lover’s neck. The man is still wearing his boots, while the woman’s feet are unbound. A large screen behind the bed closes the background and two curtains are represented in the foreground. Once again the painter is clearly at odds in terms of anatomic representation, particularly in the case of the woman’s arms and right leg, while he is perfectly at ease with the representation of that room’s furniture. The next scene presents a couple having sex over a carpet. The woman lies on the floor with her back supported by a rectangular pillow while the man stands over her on his knees using his right arm to support his weight. The woman is entirely naked and enlaces her legs around the man, who is only naked from the waist down. Again, the anatomical representations are clumsy, particularly in the case of the legs. In spite of being broken and incomplete, the fourth medallion presents a man entirely naked, reclined over what seems to be a lower bed or a carpet, while the woman, who is only partly visible, rides him in reverse.

In China and Japan this type of imagery depicting explicit sexual intercourse was known as ‘spring pictures’ (Chinese: chun hua; Japanese: shunga) or as ‘spring palace paintings’ (Chinese: chun gong hua). These images were produced in large quantities as woodblock prints aimed at wider audiences or in lower numbers as album and scroll paintings for elite consumption. In Japan some types of shunga were also known as ‘laughing pictures’ (warai-e), namely those images depicting hyperbolic genitalia close-up at the moment of penetration, suggesting that hilarity was one of the expected reactions from the viewers. Up to the establishment of the Meiji regime in 1868, this type of imagery was also part of elite gift culture in Japan, being considered as appropriate to offer to foreign male visitors.Footnote ¹⁷

The lewdness of these images could not have been ignored by Portuguese sailors and merchants living in East Asia during the sixteen and seventeen centuries, where this peculiar type of visual culture was much more developed, widespread and tolerated by political authorities than in Europe. By comparison, it is relevant to recall the fate of Giulio Romano’s influential set of sixteen drawings of copulating couples, each taking a different acrobatic position, engraved and published by Marcantonio Raimondi in 1524 in Rome.Footnote ¹⁸ The public scandal generated by these prints, popularly known in Renaissance Italy as I Modi (that is, The positions), led Pope Clement vii to order both the destruction of the entire edition and the imprisonment of Raimondi, making clear the consequences to be expected for those who dared to distribute this type of obscene imagery. Nevertheless, some copies survived and were used as sources by other engravers and printers, particularly in Venice, guaranteeing the fame and longevity of I Modi in European visual culture and imagination for the next two centuries, particularly through Pietro Aretino’s illustrated I Sonnetti Lussuriosi: a collection of sixteen obscene sonnets each dealing with a different sexual position.Footnote ¹⁹ The original drawings by Giulio Romano seem to have been inspired by ancient Roman spintriae; that is, small bronze medals eventually used in brothels in place of coins which depicted a Roman numeral from i to xvi on one side (hence the number of sexual positions) and an image of sexual content on the other. This fact not only suggests a renewed interest in the production and consumption of erotic imagery among Renaissance artists, humanists and their patrons, but also highlights early modern Europe iconographic dependence on classical models to develop this new type of erotic imagery.Footnote ²⁰

CHINESE SEXUALITY AND EROTICA IN THE LATE MING PERIOD

The production of porcelains painted with images of explicit sexual activity, such as the Santana bowl, must be understood in the context both of Chinese attitudes towards sexuality and the rise of erotic and pornographic imagery during the final decades of the Ming dynasty. Beneath a formal Confucian puritanical moralism, with its emphasis on the values of restraint, order and public decorum, the Chinese also developed a hedonistic approach to life, including the pursuit of sexual pleasure as a legitimate and valuable human activity.Footnote ²¹ In contrast to Christian Europe of the Ancien Régime, sexual activity was never perceived as a necessary sin justified only for procreation. This attitude towards sexuality was particularly strong during the Late Ming period, extending from c 1560 to c 1640, which several scholars consider ‘the golden age of Chinese erotica’.Footnote ²² It was during this period that Chinese erotic novels reached their classical form, with books such as The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (Ruyi jun zhuan), The Golden Lotus (Jing ping mei) or The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou pu tuan).Footnote ²³ Likewise, the business of sex also reached higher levels of sophistication, with elegant prostitution and pederasty exclusive luxury commodities being showcased in guidebooks for refined consumption.Footnote ²⁴ At that time, elite males competed for status by patronising highly educated young female courtesans who – in addition to sexual skills – were able to perform well in calligraphy, music, poetry and painting, or by hiring ‘singing boys’ to entertain their guests at banquets.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, in comparison to Europe, Chinese society was much more tolerant both towards homosexuality and to refined prostitution in fashionable luxury brothels, which had a high social cachet. In fact, nocturnal entertainment in the company of courtesans was considered an elegant pastime among the elites, with many men finding their secondary wives and concubines in these classy brothels, where sophisticated cooking, drinking and performative arts were also part of the package.Footnote ²⁶ Consequently, polygamy was a common practice among Chinese elites, even if it implied a much more complex family system.

This self-indulgent approach towards life and sexuality included a peculiar, widespread fetishism regarding women with miniature feet – the golden lotus – which required binding the feet of women at a very young age in order to heighten their sexual appeal and ideal beauty. This custom caused physical suffering to girls and women, including broken bones, and provoked crippling long-term effects. Chinese males were also avid consumers of sexual stimulants, mainly prepared with herbs, roots, ambergris and other exotic ingredients, as well as erotic novels, sex toys and visual erotica. These included both illustrated printed books and sets of woodblock prints, either coloured or monochrome, which were directed at a wider public, as well as lavish painted albums and hand scrolls with the same type of sexual imagery, which were consumed by a more limited and exclusive audience.Footnote ²⁷ Early seventeenth-century Chinese coloured woodblock-printed erotica seems to have been the source for erotic ukiyo-e and shunga prints in Japan, matching Japanese fondness for erotic art in general and accompanying the swift growth of Japanese commercial publishing in the second half of the seventeenth century, precisely when the new Qing dynasty imposed a ban on this type of printed imagery and texts in China.Footnote ²⁸ Notwithstanding some sporadic nominal bans, issued as early as 1722, these woodblock prints were much appreciated by different social classes in Japan and were continuously produced from the late seventeenth century up to the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁹ Only the combined effect of new visual media technologies (photography, lithography) and Meiji modernisation policies, implying ‘reforms in conformity with Western standards of morality and censorship’, put an end to this type of prints.Footnote ³⁰

Chinese fondness for sex, aphrodisiacs and erotica is related to a deep rooted cultural and medical tradition documented since the Han dynasty that heralds the benefits of sex as a therapeutic and health-giving practice, a belief associated with immortality cults and widely disseminated in sexology treatises.Footnote ³¹ These ‘nourishing life’ (yangsheng) practices involved magical beliefs and elaborated alchemic rationalisations around the interplay of two opposites, yin (mostly female) and yang (mostly male), and their fluids on a logic of constant cosmic change and renewal, re-enacting on a microcosmic scale the primeval creation of the universe.Footnote ³² In its most extreme versions, those of Daoist alchemy and Tantrism, it conceived coitus interruptus or coitus reservatus as a way to extend a man’s span of life, namely by enabling him to extract the yin essence from a woman (vaginal secretions produced during female orgasm) without losing his yang essence (semen), a way of thinking that van Gulik suggestively classified as a sort of ‘sexual vampirism’.Footnote ³³

Western scholars tend to rationalise Chinese erotica in didactical terms, frequently considering that this type of imagery was made to instruct young brides in matters of sexuality, particularly in the case of porcelain statuettes that were supposedly included in the bride’s trousseaux as models to be imitated.Footnote ³⁴ However, this didactical explanation is insufficient to encompass the span and variety of Chinese erotica, particularly in the case of woodblock prints and paintings, the so-called ‘spring pictures’ (chung hua) which were mainly consumed by male audiences. In fact, this type of imagery could be consumed for amusement and entertainment purposes, as well as a stimulant to set the right atmosphere for sexual practices in brothels or among lovers, namely to suggest a wider variety of sexual experiences and more creative sexual positions. Moreover, due to its intimate and private nature, most of the time these painted albums and scrolls were certainly used individually to induce male sexual relief. Still, in what concerns painting, this type of lowly subject matter was supposedly practiced by some celebrated Chinese painters such as Zhou Fang (c 730–c 800), Tang Yin (1470–1523) and Qiu Ying (1493–1560), which in part derived from genre painting and human figure painting.Footnote ³⁵ However, as suggested by Craig Clunas, these references to earlier masters might be merely an antiquarian topos used by Late Ming literates to overcome the lascivious content of these images.Footnote ³⁶

The earliest known examples of Chinese ceramics with sexual imagery date from the Han dynasty; that is, contemporary with the earliest known Chinese erotic literature and bricks used in funerary chambers to ward off evil forces.Footnote ³⁷ In porcelain, the earliest known representations depicting erotic scenes appeared in the early Ming period.Footnote ³⁸ These consist of small early fifteenth-century wine cups with paintings that are poorly executed, suggesting a unfamiliarity in depicting human anatomy. By the late sixteenth century these early experiments had matured, and the period between 1570 and 1620 is considered as the golden age of erotic porcelain, although few pieces survive to today.Footnote ³⁹ Besides being produced in much lower quantities than other types of porcelain, these objects have a poor survival rate as a result to their unorthodox nature, on the one hand, being unsuited for public display, and, on the other, being curated from one generation to the next.Footnote ⁴⁰ Unsurprisingly, nearly half of the few remaining seventeenth-century porcelain objects with pornographic imagery have been found in archaeological contexts. Besides the Santana bowl, only the following objects of this type are known to us:

• Three blue and white porcelain cups measuring 7cm in height, salvaged from the so-called ‘Hatcher Junk’. Each cup depicts in underglaze blue a different scene of sexual content, eventually intended to represent different stages of love-making by the same couple (fig 3).Footnote ⁴¹ This Chinese junk was shipwrecked on a reef in the South China Sea between 1643 and 1646, probably while on route to Bantam, Batavia or, less likely, Malacca; that is, at a time when the Ming dynasty was collapsing. Nearly 25,000 intact (or almost intact) porcelain objects were salvaged from the wreckage site, most of them corresponding to blue and white porcelain of the kraak and Transitional types. The cargo also included large groups of celadon, blanc de chine, coloured monochromes and provincial ceramics. Nearly 7,800 porcelain cups of different shapes and decorations were recovered from this wreckage, confirming that the sexual imagery painted on these three cups was applied to an extremely small number of objects.

  Fig 3.

  Three blue and white porcelain cups from the so-called ‘Hatcher Junk’, shipwrecked in 1643–6. Photograph: Sheaf and Kilburn Reference Sheaf and Kilburn1988, p 67, fig 100; reproduced with permission.

  

• Six saucer dishes measuring 21.6cm in diameter that were produced during the Kangxi reign (1661–1722), most likely c 1700, depicting different erotic encounters between a pair of lovers discretely watched by a voyeur maiden.Footnote ⁴² In spite of the pair’s nakedness and actions, the painter was always able to avoid the exposure of genitalia. All these scenes are depicted inside eight-lobed panels surrounded by different Buddhist symbols. This group of dishes belonged to the collection of Leo and Doris Hodroff, most of which was auctioned off by Christie’s between 2007 and 2019.

• One cup from the Kangxi reign, c 1700, showing lovers face to face in an open-air encounter, with the woman reclined (fig 4). This vessel was formerly at the C T Loo collection (Paris).Footnote ⁴³

  Fig 4.

  Cup. Kangxi period (1662–1722). C T Loo Collection, Paris. Photograph: Beurdeley et al Reference Beurdeley, Schipper, Fu-Jui and Pimpaneau1969, 115; reproduced with permission.

  

Naturally, we are excluding from this meagre inventory a much higher number of Chinese ‘amorous’ porcelain objects, most of them from this period or slightly later, that do not depict explicit sexual content and whose existence and meaning have been overlooked by most experts on Chinese export porcelains, both in Europe and China. We are referring to vessels depicting different episodes of the famous West Chamber Romance, a love story particularly popular among female consumers in China and overflowing with seductive and amorous plots, to statuettes of young lovers who seem to be performing entirely innocent activities such as pedicure treatments/massages or music lessons, but which actually express initial stages of amorous seduction, and finally some vessels depicting licentious imagery, namely nude females who lift their skirts to reveal their genitalia.Footnote ⁴⁴

Wenjie Su has strongly emphasised the relevance of all these types of wares (particularly in the eighteenth century), which needs to be addressed as an important subcategory of Chinese export porcelain, even if the erotic or amorous undertones were not always correctly understood by European consumers.Footnote ⁴⁵ In many cases the eroticism is disguised, implying an active effort by the viewer to uncover the sexual insinuations surrounding the image, precisely as in the two cases mentioned above: the pedicure treatment/massage and the music lesson. The former seems to be a trivial household scene showing a woman seated on a low stool while taking care of a man’s bare foot, who is seated in front of her at a higher level. In this case the composition’s eroticism is disclosed by a series of details, namely the fact that she holds/rubs the man’s bare foot against her bare knee, the partial exhibition of her bare leg and bound foot under her garment and finally the wrapped queue hairstyle around the man’s head.Footnote ⁴⁶ The latter is much clearer in terms of its amorous tone, even to European eyes. In fact, the man is seated on the floor behind the woman embracing her with his legs and arms, while holding a flute for her to blow. He is teaching the young woman how to play a transverse flute (di), which is used only by males; women play the vertical flute (xiao). The joyful expression on the man’s face and the overall tone of the composition, with the strong snakelike embrace between the two, make it easy to catch the sexual connotations of the composition.Footnote ⁴⁷

The erotic play of veiling and unveiling is particularly explored in many eighteenth-century porcelain sets of dishes, saucers, cups and boxes. In the first instance these objects seem to represent a perfectly normal and decent image, such as a peasant woman carrying a basket in the open air or a woman taking a nap in her bed. However, when one lifts the cover and opens the box, or raises the cup to see the painting on the saucer base, or flips the dish over, the image becomes a more indecent one: such as the same peasant invitingly lifting her skirt to reveal her genitalia, or the same woman lying half-naked on a bed and revealing her bounded feet.Footnote ⁴⁸

SANTANA’S REPUTATION AMONG OTHER PORTUGUESE ‘HEAVENLY SERAGLIOS’

The Convento de Santana originated in 1543 when a black woman named Violante da Conceição established a humble community of lay women near Lisbon castle with the support of Friar João Soares, confessor of King João iii (r. 1521–57).Footnote ⁴⁹ The community was assisted and maintained by the brotherhood of the Passion of Christ, while its spiritual and ritual life was ruled by three nuns sent from the Augustinian Convento de Santa Maria de Chelas, in Lisbon’s vicinity. In 1562, with the support of the widowed Queen Catherine of Austria (1507–78), the women moved to the Santa Ana neighbourhood and were reorganised and restructured formally as a Franciscan female community of the Third Order Regular.Footnote ⁵⁰ Their convent was designed by the architect Miguel de Arruda, who converted the former Ermida de Santa Ana into a nunnery church. It was in the graveyard of this church that the great poet LuÍs Vaz de Camões was buried in 1580, at a time when the temple also functioned as the head of the new parish of Pena. The convent grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century to become one of the largest in Lisbon.

By 1700 the Santana convent comprised nearly 300 persons, of which 120 were regular nuns. The rest of the community consisted of novices, lay sisters (or convert nuns), recolhidas (women received temporarily in the convent), female servants, slaves and girls from four to fourteen years old, known as educandas (internship girls).Footnote ⁵¹ The presence of children in monasteries might be considered unusual by present standards, but is widely documented both in written sources and material evidence.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, among the archaeological finds recovered from the site, there was a large collection of miniature vessels, particularly red ware bowls, cooking pots and chaffing dishes, as well as finer miniature vessels, some of them decorated with quartz inlaid stones, white ware and tin-glazed objects that could have been used as toys. Along with these miniature vessels, a curious green lead-glazed anthropomorphic whistle was found as well as two terracotta female figures possibly used as dolls and a small zoomorphic image resembling a dog. All these ceramic remains suggest the presence of children inside the convent.Footnote ⁵³

Portuguese church moralists, such as Father Amador Arrais (1530–1600), Father António Vieira (1608–97), Father Manuel Bernardes (1644–1710) and Father Manuel Guilherme, also known as Father Manuel Velho (1658–1730), wrote extensively on the flaws of monastic life during the Baroque period, particularly in what concerned female convents.Footnote ⁵⁴ Some of the critiques levelled at nuns are explained by the highly misogynistic patriarchal ideology of the epoch and the insurmountable hierarchical dependence of women in relation to men in the structures of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, it would be an error to dismiss these critiques merely as an artificial construct of a pervasive patriarchal society, lacking any relation to reality. In fact, in contrast to what happened to men, women from the privileged classes were frequently forced to adhere to monastic life by their families, irrespective of their own wishes or religious inclinations. Daughters, mothers, cousins, nieces or even granddaughters from the higher social classes were often forced to become nuns to prevent them from marrying or remarrying. The logic of this harsh behaviour was the need to secure the preservation of a lineage’s morgadio; that is, the legal institution according to which the manorial domains, assets and income of a given aristocratic family were considered inalienable and indivisible, being transmitted under the same condition, on the death of their holder, exclusively to the first-born male descendant or the following male heir in case of the former’s death.Footnote ⁵⁵ For most families of the privileged classes, it was difficult to provide all their descendants with sufficient capital to ensure their independence and social status, particularly in the case of women, who needed to have a substantial dowry to secure a good marriage. Paradoxically, the obligation to become a nun could also be a sort of punishment for young women who had lost their virginity before marriage or who had rebelled against the (male) authority of their family, often by refusing to marry their parents’ choice (frequently an older man of the same kin).Footnote ⁵⁶

Consequently, Portuguese female convents were filled with women from the privileged classes who had no vocation for monastic life. Such women often had no propensity to follow a stiff communitarian sociability, namely the repetitive rhythms and strict obligations associated with the canonical hours. Many were used to living a life of comfort and luxury prior to their (forced) entrance into the convent, and arguably needed tenderness and affection – particularly when still young – rather than the rigid discipline of monastic life.Footnote ⁵⁷ Under these conditions, it is easy to imagine that they had even more difficulty than men to adhere to the religious values of poverty, austerity, obedience and chastity. In addition to several references to homosexual relations among nuns and heterosexual relations with men inside the convent (usually their own confessors, which are always difficult to document properly), the most common accusations against nuns by church moralists was the use of lay clothes, silk habits, luxury shoes, jewellery, cosmetics and perfumes, as well as the use of snuff tobacco, the possession of pet animals (dogs, cats, small monkeys such as marmosets and birds such as parrots) and even the organisation of profane plays, serenades and bullfights inside the convent walls, cloisters included.Footnote ⁵⁸

In fact, archaeology confirms the richer material life of female monastic institutions in comparison to their male counterparts. For instance, archaeological excavations have revealed unexpected, high volumes of Chinese porcelain sherds, along with Italian faience and Venetian glass in several Portuguese nunneries, including those of Santa Clara-a-Velha and Celas, both in Coimbra, Santana in Leiria and Convento de Jesus in Setúbal, as well as the Convento de Santana in Lisbon.Footnote ⁵⁹ Likewise, in monastic archival records it is more frequent to find the use of profane titles in the language of nuns than among monks. The latter reserved Dom (‘Sir’) exclusively for the abbot of a monastery, while many nuns identified themselves as, and were called by the others, Dona (‘Lady’), thereby perpetuating the same marks of social hierarchy that were used outside the convent.Footnote ⁶⁰

Female congregations of the Franciscan Third Order Regular, such as the Convento de Santana, were not the most popular among high aristocracy. Unable to get additional funds, many of these institutions relied entirely on the heavy dowries paid by a novice’s family at the time of taking her vows. Deeply dependent on this form of capital entrance, most of these convents accepted more candidates than they could keep, resulting in institutions that were overburdened. Combined with the aforementioned lack of religious vocation, which was most acute during the first years nuns spent inside the convent walls, this chronic underfunding contributed to the development of a peculiar culture of monastic gallantry and seduction during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This monastic courtship culture involved young cloistered nuns and their impassioned admirers, usually young bachelors from the same privileged social classes as these women – derogatorily identified as freiráticos; that is, those who had an exaggerated familiarity with freiras (nuns). Paradoxically, these youngsters had more freedom to conduct these infatuated conversations and courtship in the context of the convent than if they were living outside the convent with their parents.

In most cases, these ‘parlour lovers’ were not even able to feel each other’s touch through the double iron grilles – sometime adorned with spikes – that separated them at the parlour. Doubtlessly, these lovers fantasised about embraces, kisses and physical love, but for the overwhelming majority it remained unrequited. Indeed, these concealed and suppressed erotic relationships rarely involved sexual intercourse due to the physical barrier between them and the extreme difficulties of entering or leaving the convent. But precisely because of this hindrance, the liaison between ‘lovers’ could be considered extremely tempting. Some clerics complained that parlour conversations sometimes turned into dirty talk, leading some nuns to undress themselves and perform actions that decorum prevented them to describe.Footnote ⁶¹ These expressions of affection, tenderness and sexual arousal were frequently supplemented with gifts sent by nuns’ admirers, who were certainly excited by this type of teasing and erotic desire, often fed by the exchange of passionate love letters.

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Convento de Santana was particularly noted in Lisbon for promoting these types of flirtation. In 1709 a satirical list identified no less than fifteen freiráticos from the convent, and in the 1730s the scandal grew enough to force authorities to conduct some arrests in order to diminish the scale of the phenomenon.Footnote ⁶² From time to time, of course, some of these youths attempted to overcome the barriers between them and their object of desire. Some climbed the convent walls during the night with ropes or ladders, others occupied adjacent houses where they would open up holes large enough to pass into the convent and others disguised themselves as delivery boys during the day to gain access to the convent. In the 1720s a corregedor – that is, crime magistrate – was arrested for one-and-a-half years for having opened a hole in the wall of a neighbouring house to get regular access to this convent, and in 1723–4 another man was caught trying to enter the convent disguised as a waterman.Footnote ⁶³ However, the real danger of breaking chastity was not from these men, but by those who were supposed to be the spiritual guides of the nuns. A case in point refers to Friar Alexandre de Múrcia (1658–1730), a well-known preacher, who used his ability as confessor to seduce three nuns from the convent.Footnote ⁶⁴

Considering the extreme difficulty in overcoming physical barriers and establishing carnal relations, most of these nuns’ sexual life, as well as that of their profane lovers, was dependent on their imagination. As much as words, written or spoken, visual images could be important stimulants for these nuns, or at least their male lovers might consider that they would be. Paper was certainly the best medium to provide cloistered nuns with appropriate imagery, but these rarely survive. The porcelain bowl depicted with five scenes of explicit heterosexual sex recovered from this convent was certainly a rarity among the belongings of Portuguese nuns. However, the overall environment we have described, namely the prevalence of a culture of monastic gallantry and seduction in nunneries such as this one, which rarely involved sexual intercourse, provides a plausible context for the circulation and consumption of erotica.

There is other evidence that the visual culture of this object was more widespread among Catholic nunneries of the Baroque period than might be expected. A case in point refers to a fragmented late sixteenth-century maiolica soup tureen, probably produced in Modena, depicting a nude female touching the genital area of a dressed man while he kisses and embraces her from behind in an outdoor scene. Currently preserved in the Museo Civico del Comune di Finale Emilia, Modena, this piece was found during archaeological excavations conducted in 1987 at the former Convento Santa Chiara in Finale Emilia, Italy; a religious institution founded in 1603 and extinguished in 1798. Exactly as the Santana convent in Lisbon, this piece was found in an abandoned well converted into a cesspit, in this case located at the convent’s first courtyard. The deposit contained many other glass and ceramic sherds, mostly dated from the first half of the seventeen century, including the fragment of an Italian biscuit-fired sgraffito ware depicting two nude figures touching each other, also suggesting an erotic encounter.Footnote ⁶⁵