Lisbon After 1755: Six Historical Prints of a City in Ruins

Le Bas presents the ruined opera house as a vast interior exposed by destruction. Small figures give the broken architecture a human scale. Published in 1757, this print belongs to the aftermath of the November 1755 disaster. It is a composed engraving, not a photograph or an eyewitness snapshot of the collapse.

The Church of Saint Nicholas appears as a damaged landmark within a city that still had to be crossed, inhabited and supplied. Le Bas’s 1757 view lets the eye move between broken masonry and the people placed around it. Those figures are part of the artist’s composition; they cannot be identified as documented survivors.

A colored impression of Le Bas’s Saint Paul’s view records the church as a ruin. Churches had been crowded for All Saints’ Day when the earthquake struck, giving their destruction particular emotional force. The print was issued two years later and should be read as an artistic response to the aftermath, rather than a minute-by-minute account.

The Patriarchal Church Square had belonged to the capital’s ceremonial landscape. In this 1757 print, damaged buildings change the meaning of the open space. Le Bas shifts attention from a single fallen structure to the relationships among streets, monuments and people. Reconstruction would alter those relationships again as new plans replaced much of the old lower city.

Lisbon Cathedral remains recognizable in Le Bas’s view, but its surroundings bear the earthquake’s damage. A surviving landmark can make a disaster seem legible without making it complete: the frame excludes most homes, workplaces and lives affected. This image is one view from a six-print series, published in 1757.

The Tower of Saint Roch, also called the Patriarch’s Tower in the print’s title, closes the series with another broken marker of the old city. Le Bas made ruins available to viewers far from Lisbon. His engravings helped preserve an image of the disaster while rebuilding was already transforming the places they represented.