In March, the Soares dos Reis National Museum and the Abel Salazar Biomedical Sciences Institute of the University of Porto will begin a new partnership programme entitled “Views in Dialogue at the Soares dos Reis National Museum. Cycle of Visits with Two Voices”.
The initiative, in this first phase, is aimed at students and professionals from the Institute, offering themed visits that will explore the links between medicine, the life and health sciences and art, placing side by side the visions and perspectives of the Museum’s collection managers and university lecturers.
The aim is also to encourage students’ knowledge of and interest in various artistic and cultural expressions; to illustrate different visions of art and culture on themes of medicine and the life and health sciences and to promote new and diversified readings of the collections of the Soares dos Reis National Museum.
For the Director of the Soares dos Reis National Museum, António Ponte, this initiative “reinforces the institutional partnership with the Institute of Porto University, following on from the activity carried out in 2021/2022. As part of the “Other Places” programme, based on the Four Seasons allegory, the Soares dos Reis National Museum brought a series of four 17th century paintings to the Abel Salazar Biomedical Sciences Institute, which establishes a relationship with the different stages of the human being’s life. We are now opening the doors of the Museum to welcome the entire community for a cycle of visits that will certainly open up new horizons.”
Allowing cross-fertilisation between art and medicine, the cycle of visits now on offer will make it possible to see how art and science, two areas of knowledge often seen as distinct, can be allied and contribute to a better quality of life.
For the Director of Abel Salazar Biomedical Sciences Institute, Henrique Cyrne Carvalho, this is a proposal that “seeks to give continuity to a project that began in 2021, when we opened the doors to the Museum for the ‘Cycle of Life’ painting exhibition, but it is also the reaffirmation of our vision for an integrated and broad training of our students, where art plays a fundamental role in their development as professionals and as people”.
‘Fountains and Fountains – water and the city’, ‘Man, Animals and the Environment – from work, companionship to subsistence’; ‘Soares dos Reis and the Relation to Human Anatomy’, ‘Between Journeys, Portuguese and Genes’ are the themes of the visits to be made during the months of March and April.