With the inauguration, in 1981, of the Visigoth Nucleus of Queen Leonor Museum in the Church of Santo Amaro, a 40-year aspiration materialised and shared by several specialists, scholars and inhabitants from the city of Beja, among it is worth highlighting the name of Abel Viana who, as early as 1949, argued that the Church of Santo Amaro should house the Visigothic Museum of the city.
The museum project of this nucleus aimed at recovering the inner rooms of the Church of Santo Amaro, one of the most significant in Beja from the historical and architectural point of view, and displaying the Museum's Visigoth collection in a systematized way, establishing an integration between the items and the remains of the old paleochristian basilica.
The items now on display were collected mainly around the municipality of Beja. Some architectural elements stand out for both their number and decorative richness, particularly those which may be classified as coming from religious buildings. A first set established the necessary connection to the late-Roman world of the fourth and fifth centuries and some characteristics that persisted and stood out in later centuries were already there; this discourse continues with the formal and decorative mutations that originated the definition “Visigothic” referring to a period (sixth and seventh centuries) when architectural evolution occurred without major breaks.
The sword of a warrior found at the beginning of the twentieth century in a grave in the city of Beja (together with jewels which were acquired by the National Museum of Archaeology, in Lisbon and whose photographs are reproduced here) is a testimony of an art form – goldsmithing – which lived its glorious days at that time.
The final leg of the exhibition seeks to establish a possible framework for the exhibited items, both in the restricted context of southern Portugal and the wider field of the Mediterranean world, where the Visigothic flourished and was implemented until the eighth century after losing to Islamisation in the Iberian Peninsula.
