Maria João Neto and Teresa Neto
This study examines the largely overlooked contribution of the American art historian Georgiana Goddard King, a woman scholar in the early professionalization of art history in the United States, to the study of Portuguese medieval architecture, focusing on the unfinished research project she developed following her journey to Portugal in 1935. Conceived initially as a comprehensive book on Portuguese art, this project was interrupted by severe illness and King’s death, leaving instead an unpublished body of manuscript notes—the Portuguese Notebook – Architecture—and a single article, “Little Romanesque Churches in Portugal”, published posthumously in 1939.
Drawing on these sources, the paper reconstructs King’s interpretative approach to Portuguese Romanesque architecture within her scholarly career and the “Golden Age” of American art history. Despite its incomplete form, her work articulated a coherent and innovative framework that challenged prevailing Franco-centric models and repositioned Portuguese Romanesque within wider European, Mediterranean, and Atlantic networks of artistic exchange. King’s methodology combined architectural and stylistic analysis with historical context, monastic history, pilgrimage routes, and the long-distance circulation of forms.
Placed in dialogue with both her earlier studies of medieval Spain and contemporary Portuguese scholarship of the early twentieth century, King’s Portuguese research reveals the historiographical value of comparative and cross-cultural approaches in redefining how local architectural traditions are integrated into broader art-historical narratives. This reassessment demonstrates how an unfinished scholarly project nonetheless exerted a lasting influence on the historiography of Portuguese Romanesque architecture, highlighting the productive tension between national artistic canons and methodologies that operate beyond them.
